"Nudging is particularly effective at shaping one-off behaviors, such as getting flu shots, but it hasn’t yet been shown to be as reliably effective at changing decisions that require daily actions,"
Makes sense: daily actions have emerged from extensive exposure to competing nudges that continue and have culminated in producing the current behavior. When you add your one nudge, it may get some attention as something novel, but then it will be overwhelmed.
One proposal from the authors is to “Make driving harder, and make other forms of commuting easier”. Is sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a highway convenient or a cost of convenience (e.g. direct transport to your destination)? I would say that traffic makes driving much harder, physically (extending the time seated) and emotionally (stress, “road rage”).
But yes, creating a new habit like better commuting is hard and hard to do with just a 1-week intervention.
The authors missed some important causes about why commuters prefer to drive personal vehicles. If they were going straight from home to work and back again then carpooling or public transit would often be fine. But real workers often need to make extra stops at schools, child care, stores, gyms, club meetings, etc. Making driving harder and more expensive for those workers only serves to punish them without offering any practical alternatives.
Even better, it's alone time that's not constrained to keeping your eyes on the road. You could read a book, play a handheld console, browse your phone, etc.
Or you could spend that hour holding on to the railing because the car is so full there's no seat, there's no personal space to hold your Kindle, and there's no consistent network connection that would allow you to consume anything but the smallest content.
(I would say that's a reasonable capsule summary of my commute from Bowling Green to UES via the 4/5/6 unless I decided to stay at work for an extra 90-120 minutes to allow the rush hour crowd to clear out. Naturally all bets are off if the Yankees are playing.)
Granted, the 4/5/6 is an outlier; due to being the only subway line running the full length of Manhattan's East Side, it carries (or carried) more people than DC's entire metro, and more than Boston's, Chicago's, and San Francisco's combined, which would round out the top 5 rail systems in the US in terms of passengers carried.
The vast majority of rail lines that exist or would be reasonable to build in the US would not have this problem.
This would explain how so many people on public transit find it acceptable to play cellphone speaker music, eat stinky food, cough, sneeze, have loud phone conversations, etc.
And if you feel alone on the train or at the bus stop, you probably are not an attractive woman. Empirically speaking, most of us under the age of menopause are attractive :(
Cycling also can go directly to specific locations, yet cycling is rare. For the particular case you described, the extra time (in most cases), the lack of cargo capacity, and the inability to take more than one person might explain this. And I don't underestimate the stigma against cyclists or how much work people believe cycling is.
In recent years electric bikes have become cheaper and more common and are definitely a way to solve this problem.
The only reason I don‘t own one is because outside of house and work there are few good secure locations to park a bike, and the area has a high rate of property crime.
Bikes generally fail pretty miserably at trucking children around.
You're pretty much stuck going right to one of the giant dutch cargo bikes to carry kids and all their paraphernalia, and once you drop off your kid now you're riding a very slow very heavy bike that will take much longer to ride to your office and leave you much sweatier, especially since there's no flat easy bike infrastructure like the Netherlands.
I'm a long time cyclist and I've done stuff like take my kid to daycare in a Burley trailer and lock the trailer at the day care and then ride the bike to my office, then go and bike to the daycare and hook the Burley back up but this stuff takes a tremendous amount of time. It's a LOT harder than bike commuting as a single person with a more flexible schedule. Day cares/schools put a lot of requirements on when you drop off and when you pick up which make it much harder to shift your schedule around to make bike commuting work as well.
I live in New England and ride to work pretty much every day. I've had to make some adjustments--for instance, it factors into shopping for clothes, having all-weather gear, and so on. Fortunately my ride is only about 3 miles each way, so it's not a hard ride. In fact, traffic around here is bad enough that driving takes the same amount of time. And being on the bike so much less stressful than being in the car.
Yes, I've pointed out to people that cycling doesn't necessarily take longer. At my previous apartment cycling and driving were comparable mainly because cyclists can park closer than drivers. Many drivers seem to think that counting the time spent parking is cheating, but as far as I'm concerned door-to-door time is what matters.
One of my old jobs was the next town over, fifteen minutes by highway. It was impossible to bicycle. If I were to work in the industrial park in my city it would take an hour or so. We have a lot of distribution centers and factories on the outskirts of town because no one wants to live next to a mushroom farm or distribution center, yet they provide a lot of jobs.
A lot of you guys don't understand that not everyone is a wealthy 24 year old knowledge worker and can just live in the downtown and bicycle everywhere. People have cars because they enable you to even find work.
The easiest way to make cycling work is to pick where you live based on where you work. The default is to pick jobs or where you live that are convenient for driving. That won't lead to a good bike commute, as you've found.
> A lot of you guys don't understand that not everyone is a wealthy 24 year old knowledge worker and can just live in the downtown and bicycle everywhere. People have cars because they enable you to even find work.
I think most cyclists get that. For me specifically: I'm in my 30s and currently a PhD student. While I am rich from a global perspective, few people in the US would consider me wealthy. I usually live a few miles from where I work in a relatively cheap neighborhood.
And, as I pointed out elsewhere here, in my case cycling definitely saves me money. In fact, that's a major reason why I'm a cyclist.
There's also a big problem of having to share the road with fast moving steel boxes, or perhaps having your own unprotected section of painted gutter littered with stationary steel boxes.
Cycling is rare because Americans live too far away from things to cycle anywhere. I’m about to do some last minute Christmas shopping. It’ll take me 1:10 minutes to get to Target by bus. It’ll take me 8 minutes driving. Cycling would be 18 minutes, but that’s just the first stop. (Also, I’d have to carry a bunch of stuff back on a bike, and it’s very cold and icy outside.) Biking to work or even the closest train station would be a multi-hour trip.
Biking is for childless yuppies and people in third world countries. It’s inconvenient, inflexible, and uncomfortable. We have cars in the first world and they make life immeasurably better. To the extent pollution is a problem, we can and already are addressing those problems with electric vehicles.
You have the option not to do all your errands on 1 day.
You choose to live in communities where car travel seems necessary.
Your city has failed you by not providing alternatives to driving such as properly maintained bike infrastructure year round.
To be honest the discomfort from the cold when cycling is not a big deal. Wear appropriate clothing and take off a layer if you get hot.
I've spent multiple summers in Texas cycling and I'd say that was much worse, though still manageable.
If you have frequent winter precipitation that is more of a safety issue. Studded bike tires work well from what I've heard from someone who lives in Minnesota.
I have a dedicated winter bike with studded tires, and dress warm. I don't realistically expect very many people to bike year-round, at least when they're just getting into it. But the bike paths are certainly not empty during the winter in Madison WI.
Cycling takes some planning, but so does driving (think parking, maintenance, and fueling). As a cyclist you'd change your habits to consolidate and avoid trips. And for more difficult (and rarer) trips, there's nothing wrong with taking a car.
As for the comfort, I find the short discomfort spent in cold weather is well worth the more long term comfort of being in better shape. But to each their own.
And I'm not convinced that electric vehicles alone will necessarily solve the pollution problem. I find most people are blind to the issues with the chemicals involved in the production of batteries and solar panels, but I'm hopeful those issues will be resolved with future technologies. (Until recently I worked in a lab that does fire safety tests on batteries, though I was not involved in that project. But it became much harder for me to ignore those problems even only on the sidelines.)
Electric personal cars also have exactly the same problems as gasoline cars when it comes to congestion, they are just as deadly to pedestrians, they also spend 98% of their time unused, etc.
I agree with the first paragraph, not with the second, specially this:
>Biking is for childless yuppies and people in third world countries
In well maintained cities you have metro everywhere. There are many european places where biking is not only the fastest way to work but the most comfortable. Also, lot's of trains allow you to put you bike in. In my dailly commute I see plenty of people doing just that, biking to train and then to work. A monthly pass that costs 30€ usually it's equivalent of 200€ expenses with cars (tolls and parking and fuel), not to mention the stress of dealing with the chaotic traffic that you can avoid with the train.
Children are not a big factor when your area has transport for children.
I don't know about you, but reserving space for a car is way more expensive than reserving space for a bicycle where I live, simply because one is so much bigger than the other.
It's not about space for the bike, it's bicycle theft. I'd ride my bike to work sometimes because I could park the bike next to my desk. I never rode it elsewhere because of the theft problem.
Taking three consecutive car parking spaces and building a roofed cage for secure bicycle parking on them would allow like 15 people to park their bike. That would cost 3 - 15 = -12 parking spaces. Yes, negative cost. Once you start seeing the solutions rather than focus on how bad things are, you'll see that bicycling is ridiculously efficient in almost any metric.
You can hem and haw about how efficient it is, but for most commuters the theory of efficiency doesn't matter; the actual implementation does.
When my local supermarket, the retail stores, restaurants, etc. have bike parking that is secure enough that I don't have to worry about a $1500 e-bike getting stolen, I'll get one. But they don't offer it, so I don't.
Licensing bikes is hugely contentious, but in the case of expensive electric bikes, I do wonder if those benefits would start to out weigh the downsides for some people.
As an aside, in my opinion, electric bikes are probably the most practical form of transportation available right now for most urban communities. They climb hills, go pretty fast, can offset the rolling resistance of fat confidence inspiring tires, are smaller and easier to park than a motorcycle, are easy to charge, and have a manual backup in case of battery depletion. I love two-wheeled transportation in all its forms and think the electric bikes that are on the market now are an awesome middle ground between motorcycle and push bike.
I think the key word is "option". In no way should we make registration of bikes compulsory. But at the very least I would like to insure something worth over $500-1k.
I lock my bike with both a strong U-lock and a thick cable lock. Never had it stolen, even when I spent a summer in Baltimore. (Though I would take the bike in at night.) You don't need to have impenetrable security, just better security than the bike next to yours.
I park it in my office. The boss bought us a 4-bike storage rack. Nearby this rack my colleagues and I maintain a small collection of repair needs: Tubes, patch kit, tools, and a decent pump.
I've participated in bike related web forums, and talked to a lot of people about cycling. I'm trying to be somewhat of a bike evangelist without being too annoying. What I've learned is that like unhappy families, cycling stories are all widely different, and each person has to figure out a way of adapting to their own circumstances. For some, it's bike parking / theft, like you say. For others, it's arriving at work, drenched with sweat. Weather is an issue. Even specific routes have their own peculiarities. Traffic is a huge deal.
Making driving harder and more expensive for those workers only serves to punish them without offering any practical alternatives.
There's nothing wrong with this, with the understanding that drivers' daily commutes are already subsidized and the article talks about making this salient to commuters. I wouldn't describe taking away a subsidy as a punishment or penalty, though. Also, the article talks about the possibility of giving alternative commuters the carrot rather than lone drivers the stick anyway.
This type of elitist, out-of-touch proposal is how you get populist movements like the "Yellow Vest" protests recently in France. In a democracy it's tough to get people to vote for politicians who make their daily lives worse, regardless of the potential long-term benefits.
Sure from an idealized economics standpoint we ought to eliminate subsidies and price in externalities. But it's challenging to eliminate them once they exist.
It’s absolutely elitist to privilege a mode of transportation that requires upfront personal costs of tens of thousands of dollars, and running costs of hundreds of dollars on a daily basis, over modes of transportation that can be achieved for a few dollars a day...
/sarcasm
And that’s before we even look at the negative externalities of cars, around the tens of thousands of deaths caused directly in car accidents, the tens of billions of dollars of GDP wasted in people idling in cars during traffic, the many lives and billions of dollars in GDP due to worse health outcomes due to pollution, and the increasingly apparent climate change related costs.
Plenty of people get by with a $2000 used Toyota that might cost another $8/day in fuel, maintenance, and insurance. If mass transit is $5-6/day, that's not a crazy personal choice to make.
Even if that's the case, it isn't elitist to suggest we privilege cheaper modes of transport.
Your scenario cannot scale by definition (used)
Your scenario has no answer for the externalities.
Essentially, the only reason the scenario has any sort of standing is because it's based on the idea that commuting by personal vehicle is inherently better than public transport. Which is true for most of the US but is not true for most of the places which actually don't a priori assume personal vehicles are inherently significantly better for transport.
You're describing a great answer if we were designing the system from scratch. But, as many of us engineers know, dealing with legacy requirements can change the clearest path to a solution. I know very few people who correctly calculate the the cost of the externalities you listed against the convenience of having a car, yet their votes count for the same amount as ours.
If my employer offered a bonus for not parking there, my wife would gladly drive me to work, drive back home, and then come back to get me at quitting time to collect the bonus - doubling our environmental impact.
You can do all of those things by walking or transit if your community is built for it.
It just so happens that Americans have placed everything to require driving, so all these places need massive surface lots, spreading things out even further and then requiring even more driving and disadvantaging non-driving modes in a vicious cycle.
Surface lots might not be so bad if people could camp in their cars, it would probably put a lot of downward pressure on the housing market and help homeless people. Those ideas tend to not be popular though.
Surface lots mostly only exist because of arbitrary government regulation requiring a minimum amount of parking. It's clearly too high, since the vast majority of developers will only ever build the absolute minimum number of parking required, and even during the busiest shopping days of the year American parking lots aren't really full.
It would be a lot better to just free up the parking lots as actual developable land.
If you put everything in your house up on 20-ft-high shelves, then you'll need a ladder to reach anything. I don't need a ladder to reach anything in my house, because I don't keep things up on 20-ft-high-shelves.
We used to design cities so that your school, child care, stores, gyms, club meetings, and everything else, were in one neighborhood. Why would you want them anywhere else? Now we build cities so that these things are far from one another.
It's like putting everything up on 20-ft-high-shelves and insisting every house needs a series of ladders.
In cities in many other countries, people do those things using public transit and walking and biking and it works fine.
Admittedly, it works not so fine in US cities...because they were built to favor driving over every other mode. Drop an American in Munich or Tokyo and suddenly you'll find them driving a whole lot less, even if they still own a car.
It’s not meant to be dishonest. I take for granted that the existence of a setting is implied, insofar as people are discussing non-hypothetical commuting.
And also an airport works extended hours if not 24/7 so for those starting early or finishing late public transport my not be as practicable as a strict 9-5 job
>>>> The nudges that we tried would likely have been more successful if employees had to bear the full costs of their commuting decisions.
Employees already voluntarily increase those costs if they can, by buying more expensive and less efficient vehicles.
The only thing I've read that makes sense is for people to live closer to things, and that's hard to make happen overnight. For instance, as a bicycle commuter, I'm aware that many if not most of my colleagues live many miles from work. Thus the debate about transportation mode is practically moot.
> For instance, as a bicycle commuter, I'm aware that many if not most of my colleagues live many miles from work. Thus the debate about transportation mode is practically moot.
Yes, as a cyclist myself I've had people tell me "Cycling is impossible in my case because of the distance." But what they've actually done is optimize for driving, which makes cycling inconvenient. If they optimized for cycling then driving might be inconvenient! If someone wants to make an intervention here they need to catch people at a particular time (i.e., moving) rather than random times.
No, people are optimizing for things like family over work (which is good and should be strongly encouraged as part of work-life balance). It just so happens that driving is the most flexible way to get to work, so it looks like they're optimizing for driving.
> But what they've actually done is optimize for driving, which makes cycling inconvenient
Did they optimize for driving, or optimize for affordability?
At every place I've ever worked, "optimize for cycling" has actually meant "optimize for being a millionaire". The housing near work is literally 250% more expensive than regular housing, and most people can't afford that.
And even if you do optimize for cycling, at some point you'll have to get a new job that wrecks this plan. Do you force your family to move every 2-3 years, everytime you get a new job, so you can continue to live cycling-distance to it? If you have a spouse, which of the two of you gets to live cycling-distance to work?
> at some point you'll have to get a new job that wrecks this plan. Do you force your family to move every 2-3 years, everytime you get a new job, so you can continue to live cycling-distance to it?
you could give preference to jobs that don't require moving
That can be hard. Very few people have all that many realistic options, especially when they have to wrestle with things like health benefits, age discrimination, and so forth. There are relatively few places in the country where a person can find multiple jobs within cycling distance of affordable housing.
You'd think this would work in the bay area yet it hasn't. I've changed jobs four times since 2006 and none has ever been within thirty miles of the next.
In my experience going car-free and moving closer can easily be cheaper. At my previous apartment (Austin, TX) I paid maybe $200 more per month in rent to live within a few miles of my work. The savings from not having a car definitely exceeded that in my case.
As for the remainder, you're making a number of assumptions that don't apply in many cases. I'm not arguing that cycling is good for everyone, just that often optimizing for driving means making cycling more difficult.
First off, not everyone has a family. I don't, so this criticism doesn't apply to me at all.
I know one cyclist who has moved his family for every job he gets. When he gets a new job, so far they've been so far away that moving was necessary even if he drove, though. (Not actually sure he cycled before he moved to Austin, now that I think about it, but still.)
I also know at least two cyclists who have lived in the same place for long periods of time. In one case I don't believe their spouse works, and in the other case I believe their spouse might drive.
The point remains that driving provides the most flexibility and choice for families and everything else is a downgrade. As you yourself pointed out, for one spouse to bike the other one may have to drive.
Bike advocates tend to be disproportionately single, white and male, and for those reasons they tend to underweight that flexibility.
Anecdata, in my area housing next door to work is no more expensive in absolute terms, but you get somewhat less for your money, so people who desire 4,500sqft, a three car garage, and fancy interiors buy outside of town in exchange for a forty minute commute.
(The growing problem is that quite a lot of people have had this idea, and now the county roads are overburdened)
The biggest issue I've seen with public transportation is it almost always works on some varient of a hub and spoke system. If you don't
a) Live downtown and commute to a suburb, or
b) Live in a suburb and commute downtown
it's basically useless.
I live SE from downtown and work due south of downtown. To bus to work, I'd have to take a 30 minute bus downtown, then a 45 minute bus back out to work. My drive is only 25 minutes.
Until they dramatically expand the bus lines, my only option is to either move or pursue a job that matches our transportation system.
The only thing that's going to change things is the freedom of being able to travel directly from point A to point B without having to go to other points in between. Right your at your house "A" and you need to go your job "B", but to take public transportation you have to go to bus stop "C" and take it to bus stop "D", and then on to "B" (and that's best case scenario). Where I'm from (Long Island, NY) most of the public transport goes either east to west or north to south, with more going east to west (including trains). So if you want to go North East, forget about it.
The only way to solve this is through more automation - not just self driving automation, but even just the automation of a matching system. Sometimes I wonder if someone like Uber came out with an "Uber-Commute" service, if it would take off. You could pay a monthly fee, so you pay even when you don't use it.
We could have self-driving now, if we started with the infrastructure for it, but unfortunately that's not easy. At the very least we could have "self driving" lanes everywhere for single person "pod" vehicles - that would be neat.
More metro areas should have mass transit along the ring highways connecting the edge cities and close in suburbs. Airports and commuter rail stations are also often along the ring highways or on short stubs off them.
There is no reason to focus business in the urban core, rather than in office parks and industrial areas around the periphery. People who want to live in the urban core can reverse commute to jobs on the ring.
> There is no reason to focus business in the urban core,
Given your example, effective land use via parking is one.
In a spoke and hub transit model; if people go to the hub, they can use central transit to get there; If they go to the outer wheel, unless the place is on the spoke itself, then additional last mile transportation is required.
France now has blablalines, a carpooling service extension of blablacar.
Basically it's designed to carpool small distances where the driver can pick up passengers on his way to work. It might be a little bit difficult to set up for users, but there is a lot of potential to save money with this.
“Make the full cost of driving salient for employees”
Give them the stick!!
Seriously, why don’t we simply improve mass transit so more people want to take it?
Even in NYC where it’s the best in America, it can still be painful. Try commuting from Brooklyn to NJ, or 4 miles to the east side of Manhattan from NJ.
25 years ago I lived 50 miles from Manhattan and the best an express train could do was 65 minutes to the city. I even wrote a letter to MetroNorth.
We’re about to enter the third decade of the 21st Century. How about trains that go 125 mph?
> Even in NYC where it’s the best in America, it can still be painful. Try commuting from Brooklyn to NJ, or 4 miles to the east side of Manhattan from NJ.
Or east-west in Chicago via train or North/South without hitting the red line.
RANT
Everytime the circle line is mentioned in Chicago you always get the crap that "it's too expensive". It's always going to be "too expensive." sigh.
To answer your first question: why can't we improve it. We don't know how to do that. A lot of money has been spent building "better" transit systems that nobody took. We would be equally as effective if we just paid the people building those systems to dig a hole and fill it back in, if we had them dig in their backyard we could have saved all the pollution of their commute to the job site.
NYC is hurt because their costs to build something are typically 7 times what it would cost to build the same thing in Spain. (health care, cost of living, and harder soils should make NYC 1.25x harder than Spain, every other explanation of why this is I've seen doesn't stand when examined closer) Until NYC can get their costs under control they it doesn't make sense to build much more mass transit, roads are a better value.
As for maglevs: they are a cute boondoggle, but not worth the expense. China isn't building them anymore because the cost isn't worth it. You can build 150mph trains without it for much less. This will probably change, but the reality is it isn't worth spending your own city/countries' money on it. The US could build maglev if we wanted, but it is a much better idea to just update and fix what we have already (Amtrak is historically incompetent, there are hopeful signs that might change but I'll wait to pass judgement on those signs for 20 years - there were signs 20 years ago that didn't amount to anything)
Even if we solve the above, inertia is a hard problem. I have a car, the roads take me where I want to go, when I want to go, very quickly (except in congestion cases). It is very hard for mass transit to compete with that.
Transit often doesn't get people where they want to go - political issues (like your NJ to Brooklyn) mean transit doesn't cross borders the road does. Often even if it does your costs go up even though the trip was short (that is your 4 mile trip is twice as much as a 20 mile trip if you hadn't crossed that border).
Cars go when you want to go. Many transit systems run so rarely that you have to check the bus schedule before going anywhere. People who drive don't realize how critical this is because it never occurs to them that running late isn't arriving 2 minutes after the meeting starts, but a full hour.
Quick is important. I'm trying to get someplace, not take a tour of the neighborhood (that was neat the first time, after that it is boring). Every time the bus stops to let someone else on/off that is robbing me of a couple minutes of my time, this can be acceptable if it is a quick stop - but if the bus has to spend several minutes going down a cul-de-sac it is unacceptable (note that a cul-de-sac where the end is still walking distance to the stop isn't bad, it is only when it is long enough that the bus would need to turn down it to get people that it is bad).
This last is why transit advocates spend more time talking about zoning than transit - most suburbs in the US are dense enough that transit could be useful for not much cost (that is less than the cost of all the freeways we build). However the street design means there is no way to run useful buses.
Problem is it doesn't seem to be a tech problem. The tech side in NYC seems to be similar costs. Something is eating the money, but everything someone has suggested doesn't seem to be it.
I live in NYC and have had so much frustration with the MTA being constantly delayed, very dirty, and with beggars abound. I'm talking a 40 minute commute just to get from Williamsburg to Midtown. Being stopped in tunnels due to trains broken down ahead. Homeless urinating in the trains and defecating off the side of the platform during rush hour.
I ended up moving within a short walking distance to work and it has been the best decision I've made while living there. I appreciate Andy Byford's ambitious turnaround plan but for now I just use the MTA when absolutely necessary, like for sporting events. I don't expect to use MTA for my commute for at least the next several years, there is just so much improvement needed for train and signal reliability, and general maintenance.
Byford has mentioned a potential "death spiral" of NYC public transit where if enough people forgo taking the bus or train, there will be revenue shortfalls causing further dilapidation. I guess this is possible given how "farebox revenue" makes a large portion of total revenues and MTA is required to adopt a balanced budget [1].
It all comes down to money in the end. Because of the cheap prices of gasoline and parking, there is usually no financial incentive to take public transit. Even in NYC, which probably has the cheapest, widest coverage of transit, you still have to pay about $3 each way. But you can drive and park for less than that for most commute distances. (Not counting car maintenance, insurance, and other "fixed costs" of driving of course.)
Cycling is a good exception to this, but there is almost no culture supporting the use of bikes (or scooters etc.) and very little planned infrastructure, which leads to extreme hostility from drivers and ultimately to injury and death (just about 30 cyclists this year alone in NYC). City governments are at fault and should be brought to account for this. However, most media attention uses language that implicitly (or sometimes even explicitly) blames the actions of pedestrians and cyclists when they are victims of car violence, rather than the drivers or the design of the city. Even when drivers are themselves blamed, it is assumed that tragic events are only caused by rare incidents involving "bad" drivers, rather than a pervasive culture and systemic organisation that allows for these tragic events to continue unhindered.
There needs to be a strong social backlash against almost any form of personal use of heavy machinery equipped with combustion engines, that is not absolutely necessary, within regions where there are many unprotected people on foot/bike/etc. And this must be directed at governments and other institutions that have the power to but are currently unwilling to create such necessary change. Blaming individuals will not get us there and will only lead to further entrenched "culture war". This is the strategy that was used in the Netherlands which, prior to the 80s, had a very similar commuting landscape to the US but now has massive bicycle and public transit use.
Not fully on topic but one commuting behavior I changed about eighteen months ago has been resoundingly helpful.
I stopped driving like a jackass.
I used to accelerate rapidly at every green light and decelerate rapidly at every red light.
I stopped doing both of these things. I went from an average of getting 267 miles per tank of gas to 322, an over 20% increase.
Instead of wondering why my tires and brakes lasted half as long as everyone else they now last longer than average.
The amazing thing is I get to my destinations just as quickly. I always used to wonder how the ETA was still accurate on Waze even when I drove at full speed. All I was doing was racing to the next red light.
I’m embarrassed writing this because I drove so stupidly for so long. If it helps anyone else, here is my stupidity for all to see.
I did something similar about 10 years ago after getting a speeding ticket - drive within the speed limit and don't be aggressive. I found it made a huge difference: less fuel used, less wear and tear on car and far less stressful. I also noticed that I didn't seem to get anywhere that much slower...
I went through a similar change from my sparkier first years of driving as a teen and early twenty something to now.
The motivation incidentally wasn't to improve economy or avoid citations. It was mostly to reduce the frustration of feeling like I was constantly being impeded by others who weren't interested in driving as aggressively as I had been, and partially an increased interest in safety.
It worked. Driving is much less stressful with cruise control.
Rather than try to put in barriers for driving, make it faster and easier to drive. Build bigger highways and make more parking available to employees. The biggest polluters are not the cars but the petroleum companies who pollute the atmosphere. Want to save the environment then stop with daft plastic straws banning as that might be the low hanging fruit but it ain't the core problem.
Increasing throughput on the highways often only lets more people get to the same bottleneck in the same time. To actually alleviate that problem, the throughput of any bottlenecks would need to increase as well. Usually, that's in a highly desirable and expensive area.
Destroying much of the highly desirable and expensive area and covering it with highways and parking lots is one way to solve the problem, but is obviously a terrible idea.
Vancouver added a train service from downtown to the Airport and Richmond that was ready for the 2010 Winter Olympics. It was almost instantly running close to capacity (and still is). Along with a reasonably good choice of where the line would run, and where the stops would be, the city embarked on a rezoning project that would allow the space near the line to become medium (or in one case) high density. I am not saying it is a perfect system, but all it took to change peoples commuting behaviour was the availability of a good alternative to cars.
There is more than just initial design, however: there are many design elements that add to its drawing power. These include accessibility, good "way finding" signs, frequency of trains (every 3 minutes in busy times), safety on platforms, and (for me anyway), signs that accurately show arrival times of the next three trains.
Of course, there is still the problem of making the system useful for people who are not close enough to walk to a stop, the answer being good feeder bus service and car parks. In this respect, Vancouver has been less successful. For example, only a few bus stops have electronic signs showing the arrival times of the next bus, and bus frequency on all but the major routes is too low.
My point is that good overall design is the almost certainly the most effective way to change people's commuting behaviour.
That's because Vancouver is a relatively small, and dense city, and has a lot of people with countries where people think of good public transport as something taken.
It's important to make public transport good enough for people to use it. When public transport is an inferior option to owning a car, people would not use it.
I think what urban planners in the West miss is that public transport scales non-linearly.
The bigger the city, the more you gain from owning a car. For a public transport to be viable in a megacity, the network needs to be like much, much, better than in a smaller city.
When planners miss that, you get both terrible car traffic, and terrible public transport
I live near Salt Lake City and the train infrastructure that exists is well used and pretty well thought out, and we have a pretty big car culture here. Salt Lake City isn't a very big city in terms of population, and it spans a pretty big, flat area, yet the transit system is popular.
My extended family lives near Seattle, which has more dense population and higher motivation to use public transport (lots of environmentally conscious people), yet I think most would agree that the train system is inferior to Utah's. I think this is because:
- commuter rail doesn't link up very well with the light rail line (airport)
- commuter rail only runs morning and afternoon
The Trax (light rail) and Frontrunner (commuter) lines, however, are very well connected and both run all day. My main frustration is that the Frontrunner line doesn't run on Sundays, but it has a far more flexible schedule than the Seattle line. If you live anywhere along the Frontrunner/Trax system, you can rely on it to get you to the airport, work, or shopping, provided you don't need to travel late at night.
That being said, I think Seattle's total transit system is better than SLC's, but I think that's because there's less of a stigma against riding the bus in Seattle as well as a higher budget (Utahns are very fiscally conservative).
I think SLC has done a fantastic job of building a transit system that works for tourists and locals alike. Seattle built two separate systems that works okay for each, but doesn't work together very well. Drivers like flexibility, but the Seattle train system isn't flexible.
So, in order to convince people to commute differently, that system needs to be useful for far more than just commuting. I don't want to rely on a commuter rail line of I'll occasionally need to stay late, which would cause me to miss the last train. I also don't want to rely on a system that's inconvenient to work into other plans, like going to the airport at lunch time or doing some shopping on the way home.
The main issue with the Seattle commuter rail, Sounder, is that the host railroad is not keen on giving more slots to run trains, so the schedule isn't very useful.
The issue with the station is that the Union Station office complex and historical building are in the way of proper wayfinding, so that the path between the commuter rail and the light rail looks more like an out-of-the-way alley than an actual path you're supposed to take.
Hmm, folks in my family commute from Burquitlam to the city all the time. I don't think you're right that it's small. The Millennium line runs to Lafarge Lake.
Boise has the problem of poor routes that pretty much serve nobody.
The daily commute for a large portion of the population is from west to east. Driving, that commute takes ~15 minutes to 30 minutes depending on traffic. However, taking the bus takes anywhere from 1:30 to 2 hours!
Why? Because every route ends up stopping at a mall that nobody really wants to go to for an extended period of time.
That's because Boise is not investing enough in transit.
If you have bus routes every 10-15 minutes, you can operate them in straight routes forming a grid without major timed transfer centers, because a bus will more or less show up in the next 5-8 minutes in the average case and that's not the worst thing in the world.
At lower frequencies, like half-hourly or hourly, agencies run something called a "pulse", where every half hour or hour all the buses meet in one location so that people can make their transfers, and it looks like that mall is a pulse location.
The real challenge, as my nearby metro consistently forgets, is to factor in whether the train occupants are former car drivers or bus riders. Unfortunately for us, its mostly the latter.
This is real, but not the worst thing. Seattle is building out light rail to replace existing commuter buses because
- there are not enough buses or drivers to fill demand
- training more drivers is hard in a tight labor market
- buying more buses would require an additional storage depot, and for various reasons people don't like being neighbors to a bus parking lot
- buses are lower capacity per driver
- buses suffer from traffic congestion as well even in dedicated lanes or streets, and the congestion requires allocating more hours to provide an equivalent amount of service
So Seattle is railstituting to more efficiently provide transport service in the core, and redeploying saved resources to feeders of the rail in less congested suburbs.
> all it took to change peoples commuting behaviour was the availability of a good alternative to cars.
No, I think that's a fair conclusion to draw. The only data point you have is that the train is being used. But that can be explained by some combination of:
1. Users who changed jobs and taking the train as their new commute. In other words, they never changed their existing commute to the train.
2. Users who had a commute even worse than the train, like walking or taking bus service.
The article is about getting people to change their commute for environmental reasons, which really means getting people to accept a less convenient commute because it's better for the world. As the article shows, it is really really hard to get people to do that. It's not enough to just give them an alternative and wait for the magic happen.
Adding train service is good, of course, in large part because it offers a better commute for many people. But if you've already got free parking and are used to driving a single-occupancy vehicle every day, simply having a train become available is not very compelling.
I took the bus in LA for a few years. Mostly as parking was insanely expensive. So costs do affect behavior. Also, it was a wash in terms of time. But taking the bus was hell. I'm a larger than average human and was fairly fit at the time, but I still would not board a lot of those busses. There were a lot of not-so-savory people on LA busses. Also, it was never on time in the evenings and I had to do all my weekly out-of-house chores on the weekends, as busses would not cut it. But if I were an average-sized woman, there is no way in hell I would have taken those busses, they were just plain unsafe.
This is par for the course on almost all bussing systems I've seen in America. They are designed with the assumption that the people using them have no choice, are poor, and have ample free time to take inefficient routes.
Busses are just too cumbersome. Once self driving actually is feasible through software and/or convergent infrastructure, bussing should be almost on demand with basically the equivalent of minivans self-driving groups of people between locations. Uber and Lyft are (currently) just dead end variants of this ideal.
I mean, this is true of most public transport even in places like London.
Why is sitting on a bus not as comfortable as being a passenger in a mid range car? It totally could be, but that would cost more than the bare minimum.
So we have broken AC and uncomfortable seats. So it goes.
It's not awful. It's actually quite good. But I really wish sometimes that public transport could be _nice_ rather than tolerable.
Because that would take up more space letting fewer people fit on the bus. Most are designed to have half the people standing at peak times. Long distance train seats used to be really comfortable, but newer designs opt instead to fit more seats in each carriage.
I've found buses in London to be better optimized for people trying to get somewhere than in San Francisco. There are far more bus lanes, no waiting for people paying a cash fare, and wheelchair transport tends to use black cabs. People often take buses by choice as the alternative can mean being packed in like sardines on the Tube at rush hour. (Driving isn't really practical anywhere in central London.)
>Make the full cost of driving salient for employees
The problem that I usually see when someone brings up this idea is that the employee's "cost" is ignored. I used to live in the Washington, D.C. area, where I could walk or take the bus to the subway. One way, the total time was 30 minutes longer than driving. Between the cost of the subway and my time, it was cheaper to drive.
For 18 years, I commuted year-round by bike, rather than drive. It took as long as the bus-subway combination from my last apartment. While it took more time, I did not have to pay for gas and my maintenance costs were minimal.
To some reasonable limit, it's appropriate to budget time on a bike as 'free'.
Most people don't get as much exercise as they should; time spent biking should be considered as saving free time one would otherwise spend getting exercise.
You could even call it a negative cost for the potential savings on health care from getting regular cardio exercise! Give employees a discount on health insurance costs if they bike or walk to work.
Cold and hot conditions in certain climates makes this even more challenging. An on premise shower and storage area for clothing would make it a bit more feasible.
There's also the inherent risks of cycling around careless drivers. With a car, in out money in an accident. On a bicycle I can be out things money cant replace.
- They sent direct mail and pamphlets, each of which has terrible conversion rates in general. Why not email or SMS?
- What was the signup/enrollment like? Was it easy and something that could be done from a phone without a login/password setup, or did it involve mailing forms to some random office with an unclear timeline?
- Did they assess why people didn’t enroll?
If you want people to engage in something new, make it ridiculously easy.
The send many letters, got 100 people to sign up, and 3 were car pooling a month latter. That 3 out of 100 number is the most important thing. 100 people who self selected as willing to car pool but only 3 were actually able to pull it off. Understanding the reason of those other 97 is completely missing: they should have abandoned all efforts increase car pooling until they got about 60 more people who self selected into a car pool. (60 is a somewhat random number, the point for some who are interested it is impossible to fix whatever reason there can't, but for many it should be). If you can't get people interested in something to do it you need to figure our why first.
Yeah what percent of that 24 percent is actually commuters? I have no idea but I'd wager single digits. I honestly stopped right at the start of the article because reading this told me this was an agenda piece likely the outcome of a risk management firm's press stash.
The individual person changing their commute doesn't capture the benefits of the change. If I take the bus, it takes one car off the road for everyone else, but it also makes my commute longer.
Additionally, human beings aren't perfectly rational. Driving a car individually is like fast food, even if it were bad for you in real terms, people would still use it because it's easy and convenient. This is also behind the success of ride-sharing and food delivery apps. They put convenience front and center.
IMHO, the way to change commuting behavior is to place an extreme bias on the right of way of mass transit methods. People will take the bus, if the bus doesn't have to wait in traffic. Then improve convenience with an app like interface that maps out transfers. Make it so taking a bus is as easy as taking an Uber/lyft.
Then don't bother trying to change the habits of people who have already been commuting for a decade, instead try to accommodate the growing non-driving younger segment of the population. Make it so the college student doesn't have to buy that car to begin with, and their habits will stay with them as an adult.
> Make it so the college student doesn't have to buy that car to begin with, and their habits will stay with them as an adult.
This would also help revitalise small shops, which have been decimated by the combination of malls and internet shopping. Two birds with one stone. Sadly, all the moneyed interests are aligned against this model.
> People will take the bus, if the bus doesn't have to wait in traffic.
And if it's easy to hop on and off, and pay fees that are not extortionate. In the UK, just the other day, I took a bus to travel a path that I often do in a minicab or uber; it cost £ 2.90, where a minicab would have charged me £ 4.50. The difference in annoyance (walking to the stop, waiting in the cold, fumbling with wallet and cash, enduring nausea-inducing vibrations, figuring out the right time to call for the right stop, walking again in the cold...) was simply not worth the saving. I was actually annoyed by how such a basic service could be so expensive for casual use... yeah, I know the answer: casuals actually subsidize regulars, who get discounted fares and RFID cards. But that raises the barrier to adoption, which is Bad.
>walking to the stop, waiting in the cold, fumbling with wallet and cash, enduring nausea-inducing vibrations, figuring out the right time to call for the right stop, walking again in the cold...
Wait: does the weather never get cold again if there's no fare, or are you actually implying that taking a bus isn't as comfortable as driving your own car, even if "transit" is done "right"? I could swear that's not the usual message to see in "transit" related HN threads.
Anyway, I have to admit that were I asked how to reduce airport-related emissions, I might not have turned my eyes on employees cars first. Or perhaps even second.
Some of those are just because the bus is badly designed.
There's no reason you shouldn't be able to buy your ticket online, or through a Oyster-like card.
Also, it's something that really surprised me when I was in the UK, there's absolutely no maps anywhere. Especially inside the bus. I was on GPS the whole time just to make sure I stopped at the correct place.
I can understand not wanting to have a paper/hard coded map inside the bus if it does not run a regular line, but I'm sure they could devise something electronically...
The individual person changing their commute doesn't capture the benefits of the change.
FTA: "Car commuters report higher levels of stress and lower job satisfaction compared to train commuters — in large part because car commuting can involve driving in traffic and navigating tense road situations."
Lowering stress and higher job satisfaction is a benefit.
The amount of immaturity, and inexperience in carrying out this activism is incredibly irritating and insulting towards those who were subjected to it.
In the article they claimed that they either tried to survey the employees and tried to influence their behavior.
Problem I have with the survey: They're trying to collect data, but try to influence them at the same time towards an outcome that they're looking for.
Additionally: They tried to push their policy about how they feel towards cars and completely ignored the needs and reasons why the people behaved as they did. It sounds like the wants of the "participants" of the change were in agreement. But it sounds like the implementation was a complete disaster. (Yet it never explains how they went from
100 participants to 3 in 3 months) They came up with excuses about why it was the employees fault for not changing how they wanted them to.
If that's your goal, you instead "convince them" to live in different places and work at different jobs. The commute follows from that.
People don't 'choose' to get the train in to their office block in London. They use it because they deliberately chose their home and job within those constraints.
If they live a few miles from the station, they might cycle or drive to the station and go from there. This is again dictated by their home situation, it's not a choice in the immediate sense.
Next time I end up in London I'm thinking of renting a flat within walking (or 10 minute cycle) distance of wherever I end up working. The commute was essentially dictated when I made that decision.
If I sign a 12 month lease or buy a place further out then I'd have decided a different commute for myself, at that time, for the next ~year.
I think the approach of blaming the individuals is wrong. It's society's fault that it is preferable to take your car. In places where there is successful public transit( NYC, Paris) you see high-density residential building within a walkable distance to a mass transit station. All the ground floors in the buildings around the station are retail business or offices. This makes it easy and convenient for people to use public transit and shop for food. Contrast this with your average american city where there is nothing interesting around mass transit within walking distance and very few residential options.
To fix public transit in America we need to build high density residential building around existing stations with shops on the ground floor. Then it will be rational to use public transit.
Having commuted by car and by train, I think train commuting is more stressful. First is the stress of getting ready on time, driving to the station, finding a parking spot and getting on board the right train. Second, arriving at the station and then making the connection to light rail (my case) or to subway or bus (your mileage may vary) and then walking to your destination. This compares unfavorably with leaving your garage and driving to the company parking lot.
I have also carpooled. This is also a hassle depending on your regularity and the regularity of those in the carpool. Missing turns due to travel, sickness, vacations, etc. means setting up swaps with other drivers. It also is a hassle if you need to work late or get in early. Not all carpool members are agreeable. I once carpooled with a person who held conversations with people in the back seat - the problem was that he couldn't talk to them without looking back at them - fairly hair-raising.
I realize that the entire world is not like London, but the idea of driving to a train, and trying to get a specific train is alien to me. If you want a train just take the first one to your destination? And why drive to the train when you can bus/cycle/walk? Where are you going to park your car anyway?
Because sometimes people need to get places at specific times. One obviously doesn’t want to be late, and, being very early can be a colossal waste of time. Taking the specific train that gets to the destination a little early (but not too early), or on time, solves that problem.
Everything you have mentioned here happens to people who work in London.
There are people who, say, live in Welwyn, or Dorking, or any number of commuter towns. They might drive to the station, park their car, and get a specific train in, because the next one is in half an hour.
I have luck, commuting by train takes exactly 1 hour door to door, 8 mins walking to and from the train. Train goe every 30 mins and I havr flexible hours.
If I want to go by car it's at least 1,5 hours,longer during rush hour, for the 80km. And it's also much more expensive, especially parking in the city center.
"First, employees didn’t have to bear the full financial cost of car commuting"
They don't bear the full financial cost of transit commuting either, since transit is heavily subsidized.
Here is where someone will say "but roads are subsidized." Of course they are. However, those who drive their own vehicles bear the full cost of the capital asset they use (that is, the car). Transit systems recover only a portion of their operating cost - and NONE of their capital cost - from fares.
Despite the big operating cost, capital cost, and opportunity cost of driving (that is, while driving one has to drive, but while commuting on transit, someone can sometimes do something else like read) people still like to drive. The reason is that for many people driving is a far superior mode of transportation. You couldn't pay them to take transit.
For the past seven years, I've lived 1.6 miles from work. My route to work almost perfectly follows a bike trail. Despite that, I drove almost every single day. Largely because it meant another ten minutes of free time in the morning, and getting home a little earlier every evening.
Then where I work enacted a plan where we pay any day that we park at the office, and get a bonus any day we take alternate transit. The plan is designed to be revenue neutral for the company while incentivizing people to not drive and park.
I bike every single day now. In fact, I'd probably keep biking if they stopped the plan because I'm used to it now and really like it. But it was so hard to change my commuting habit.
I feel like the drive to work is a point in the day where humans have absolute minimal executive function and willpower. By the time I'm heading out the door, I don't want to be thinking strategically or trying to make the world better or anything. I just want to get the fuck to work and use my brainpower there.
I’m glad you’re enjoying your switch! It seems like 1.6 miles at a moderate pace is a 6 minute ride though... Of course I’m assuming no hills and a lack of extreme heat which might be wrong on my end.
It's completely flat and weather here in Seattle is cool. It's really an optimal environment for riding.
It takes me about ten minutes with another five to park. I could push faster, but (1) I have a pretty cheap bike and (2) I don't want to get to the office sweaty. For comparison, my drive was about six minutes.
I was living less than 5 miles away from work for years, it made it very easy to commute by bike (although winter really sucked at times).
This year, that got bumped up to about 12 miles (work moved, not me). At that sort of mileage, it takes much longer to bike, and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy. Not to mention, bike infrastructure to that location is much worse, mostly because the only option runs along a 6-lane road, and resulted in me crashing due to road debris in the dark. Bills from that incident could have bought me a car.
Other options are mainly limited to public transport (buses). Typically takes me about 2 hours one-way, including wasted time at the start of a shift.
Then there are cars. Guaranteed to save me a minimum of an hour a day, with much lower chances of personal injury.
> and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy.
I don't think we should be trying to convince people to ride to work every single day. This is much harder to do than just riding some of the time, and it would still make a big difference. Getting people to ride on average even one day a week to work would have huge benefits: reduced pollution, reduced traffic, reduced CO2 emissions, improved health.
I think daily (or nearly) is much easier than you think, mainly because it's so much harder to form a habit like that when you have to make a conscious daily choice between "easy" and "hard".
Context-dependence like "not raining or icy" does make sense.
> At that sort of mileage, it takes much longer to bike, and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy.
Would an electric bike have helped? As car batteries get cheaper and better e-bikes are following suit, and many models get 40+ mile ranges and provide assist to 20-25 MPH even with hills.
Most laws don’t allow over 19-20mph on bicycles before its classified as a moped. That doesn’t mean you can’t provide the extra speed (I see up to 28mph on mine when I go hard), it’s just that the speed is limited but range increases (I’ve traveled over 30mi on a single charge so far)
I came here to tell this exact tale. Our stories were so similar I checked your profile: we work in the exactly same office. I have to say our employer’s strategy worked.
I lived 3 miles away (typically a 13 min bike ride for me plus probably 15 min of parking/showering), but I still almost always drove.
To fix my commute I just moved, and my life is a lot nicer with this newfound 10min walking commute.
Even with the new fee ($12 to park vs $7 of benefit), I would still drive before I moved. I have after work hobbies that require me to drive. Biking 45min in the rain/dark to the climbing gym would have just killed that for me.
A lot of people were quite angry about the new system. But I think that it was necessary to fix the parking constraints we were running into (frequent stock outs for parking at like 9am). I have a “there is no free lunch” view for commuting policy.
Same here, same employer, but in Kirkland. The $7 cash incentive was enough to get me to ride my bike most days. Since we never run out of parking now, it seems to have been effective.
The car is an extension of your home, and driving to work (or to run some errand) is sometimes the only moment you have for yourself, alone, where you can listen your favorite music in high volume and "thinking loudly". If you are married with kids and work at home these moments are necessary.
I wish I had a cottage in the woods to have these "alone" moments with more quality, but didn't get there yet.
I don’t like the headphones because of safety / perception of safety, but back when I commuted by bike, I joked about doing “bike therapy.” The experience of being alone with myself, my thoughts, my breath, and my pedal cadence was a very calming thing.
If bike wearing headphones that prevent you from hearing the world around you, this could be quite dangerous -- not only to you, but to pedestrians too. Please be careful.
I listen to music at high volume on the bicycle or in the car, either way. I use a favorite playlist to time rides, instead of a stopwatch. It's fun: you know if you hit a certain landmark before a certain guitar solo (or whatever), then you're hitting a good time.
Before I moved closer to work, I used to have a long 40+ minute drive to the office. I hated it, but it did serve as a very nice loud music + personal karaoke time, and I miss that aspect more than I expected.
I bike to work now, which means no music or headphones for safety. At the office, I listen to music, but only non-vocal stuff since I can't code and hear lyrics at the same time. So now it's really rare that I get to listen to entire genres of music that I otherwise love, just because the opportunity isn't there as much.
May I ask you, how much it costs to buy a place within 2 miles from your office? I bet, it's a solid seven figure number and at that point your argument is like complaining about how hard it's to switch from Bentley to RR.
I live in Seattle. We bought about seven years ago and it was around $500k. I like our house a lot, but most of our friends that also work in tech have nicer homes — bigger, more amenities, etc. My wife and I prioritized living closer to my work over having more space because time is the ultimate commodity.
How was this policy enforced? I run a small business that has parking issues and we'd love to incentivize people to take mass transit or bike in. I don't know about charging people to park, though...
You have to badge in to get to the parking garage, so they treat that as you having parked unless you provide information otherwise. There's a separate app/site you use to log your commute type. You could probably cheat by driving solo and then claiming you carpooled, but the company culture is pretty high trust.
For over eight years, I've been cycling it for nearly eight miles each way. For the first seven o those, I didn't have a car. I hit a really good time one day last year, possibly the best time, of 20:09. Then the next day I tried to beat it by car. I was not able to; it took 24:35 by car (in fairly low traffic, late morning). That doesn't include another few minutes of circling around to find a free parking spot, which was far from the building, due to it being late morning.
I've cycled in all weather: rain, fog, and snow. (I've run it too, and tried that a few times in the snow, which is very good exercise.)
I commute 80 miles every day by a combination of train and bike. When I get into my suburban office I have to lock my bike up in the far end of the parking garage. It’s the part that’s always empty, or has someone paranoid about their car getting scratched. There’s really easy things we could be doing to encourage sustainable transportation, like putting the bike racks near the front door.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadBut yes, creating a new habit like better commuting is hard and hard to do with just a 1-week intervention.
(I would say that's a reasonable capsule summary of my commute from Bowling Green to UES via the 4/5/6 unless I decided to stay at work for an extra 90-120 minutes to allow the rush hour crowd to clear out. Naturally all bets are off if the Yankees are playing.)
The vast majority of rail lines that exist or would be reasonable to build in the US would not have this problem.
Listen to music with your phone in your pocket. You don't have to stare at a screen 24/7.
And if you feel alone on the train or at the bus stop, you probably are not an attractive woman. Empirically speaking, most of us under the age of menopause are attractive :(
The only reason I don‘t own one is because outside of house and work there are few good secure locations to park a bike, and the area has a high rate of property crime.
You're pretty much stuck going right to one of the giant dutch cargo bikes to carry kids and all their paraphernalia, and once you drop off your kid now you're riding a very slow very heavy bike that will take much longer to ride to your office and leave you much sweatier, especially since there's no flat easy bike infrastructure like the Netherlands.
I'm a long time cyclist and I've done stuff like take my kid to daycare in a Burley trailer and lock the trailer at the day care and then ride the bike to my office, then go and bike to the daycare and hook the Burley back up but this stuff takes a tremendous amount of time. It's a LOT harder than bike commuting as a single person with a more flexible schedule. Day cares/schools put a lot of requirements on when you drop off and when you pick up which make it much harder to shift your schedule around to make bike commuting work as well.
At what point is it just an electric motorcycle and should move to the road.
There's a wide range of electric bikes from just pedal assist, to some you can just cruise, no pedaling.
Speed difference between the normal bike rider and the electric bike rider introduces risks to using that bike infrastructure.
I've personally had electric bikes fly past me on mixed use trails, and I'm not a slow cyclist. I think it may be too easy to reach unsafe speeds.
It's odd to me that on trails where motorized vehicles aren't permitted, somehow electric bikes get a pass.
A lot of you guys don't understand that not everyone is a wealthy 24 year old knowledge worker and can just live in the downtown and bicycle everywhere. People have cars because they enable you to even find work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21872976
The easiest way to make cycling work is to pick where you live based on where you work. The default is to pick jobs or where you live that are convenient for driving. That won't lead to a good bike commute, as you've found.
> A lot of you guys don't understand that not everyone is a wealthy 24 year old knowledge worker and can just live in the downtown and bicycle everywhere. People have cars because they enable you to even find work.
I think most cyclists get that. For me specifically: I'm in my 30s and currently a PhD student. While I am rich from a global perspective, few people in the US would consider me wealthy. I usually live a few miles from where I work in a relatively cheap neighborhood.
And, as I pointed out elsewhere here, in my case cycling definitely saves me money. In fact, that's a major reason why I'm a cyclist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874175
Biking is for childless yuppies and people in third world countries. It’s inconvenient, inflexible, and uncomfortable. We have cars in the first world and they make life immeasurably better. To the extent pollution is a problem, we can and already are addressing those problems with electric vehicles.
https://peopleforbikes.org/blog/best-kept-secret-dutch-bikin...
I've spent multiple summers in Texas cycling and I'd say that was much worse, though still manageable.
If you have frequent winter precipitation that is more of a safety issue. Studded bike tires work well from what I've heard from someone who lives in Minnesota.
As for the comfort, I find the short discomfort spent in cold weather is well worth the more long term comfort of being in better shape. But to each their own.
And I'm not convinced that electric vehicles alone will necessarily solve the pollution problem. I find most people are blind to the issues with the chemicals involved in the production of batteries and solar panels, but I'm hopeful those issues will be resolved with future technologies. (Until recently I worked in a lab that does fire safety tests on batteries, though I was not involved in that project. But it became much harder for me to ignore those problems even only on the sidelines.)
>Biking is for childless yuppies and people in third world countries
In well maintained cities you have metro everywhere. There are many european places where biking is not only the fastest way to work but the most comfortable. Also, lot's of trains allow you to put you bike in. In my dailly commute I see plenty of people doing just that, biking to train and then to work. A monthly pass that costs 30€ usually it's equivalent of 200€ expenses with cars (tolls and parking and fuel), not to mention the stress of dealing with the chaotic traffic that you can avoid with the train.
Children are not a big factor when your area has transport for children.
When my local supermarket, the retail stores, restaurants, etc. have bike parking that is secure enough that I don't have to worry about a $1500 e-bike getting stolen, I'll get one. But they don't offer it, so I don't.
As an aside, in my opinion, electric bikes are probably the most practical form of transportation available right now for most urban communities. They climb hills, go pretty fast, can offset the rolling resistance of fat confidence inspiring tires, are smaller and easier to park than a motorcycle, are easy to charge, and have a manual backup in case of battery depletion. I love two-wheeled transportation in all its forms and think the electric bikes that are on the market now are an awesome middle ground between motorcycle and push bike.
I've participated in bike related web forums, and talked to a lot of people about cycling. I'm trying to be somewhat of a bike evangelist without being too annoying. What I've learned is that like unhappy families, cycling stories are all widely different, and each person has to figure out a way of adapting to their own circumstances. For some, it's bike parking / theft, like you say. For others, it's arriving at work, drenched with sweat. Weather is an issue. Even specific routes have their own peculiarities. Traffic is a huge deal.
I'm seeing a lot more e-bikes.
For a commute: zoning often requires parking for cars. It should be updated to require parking for bikes.
There's nothing wrong with this, with the understanding that drivers' daily commutes are already subsidized and the article talks about making this salient to commuters. I wouldn't describe taking away a subsidy as a punishment or penalty, though. Also, the article talks about the possibility of giving alternative commuters the carrot rather than lone drivers the stick anyway.
Sure from an idealized economics standpoint we ought to eliminate subsidies and price in externalities. But it's challenging to eliminate them once they exist.
/sarcasm
And that’s before we even look at the negative externalities of cars, around the tens of thousands of deaths caused directly in car accidents, the tens of billions of dollars of GDP wasted in people idling in cars during traffic, the many lives and billions of dollars in GDP due to worse health outcomes due to pollution, and the increasingly apparent climate change related costs.
Your scenario cannot scale by definition (used)
Your scenario has no answer for the externalities.
Essentially, the only reason the scenario has any sort of standing is because it's based on the idea that commuting by personal vehicle is inherently better than public transport. Which is true for most of the US but is not true for most of the places which actually don't a priori assume personal vehicles are inherently significantly better for transport.
It just so happens that Americans have placed everything to require driving, so all these places need massive surface lots, spreading things out even further and then requiring even more driving and disadvantaging non-driving modes in a vicious cycle.
It would be a lot better to just free up the parking lots as actual developable land.
We used to design cities so that your school, child care, stores, gyms, club meetings, and everything else, were in one neighborhood. Why would you want them anywhere else? Now we build cities so that these things are far from one another.
It's like putting everything up on 20-ft-high-shelves and insisting every house needs a series of ladders.
Admittedly, it works not so fine in US cities...because they were built to favor driving over every other mode. Drop an American in Munich or Tokyo and suddenly you'll find them driving a whole lot less, even if they still own a car.
You: “well in other settings it works. Of course, those settings have other infrastructure.”
You can see why that doesn’t really add much.
In fact you both seem to ignore the setting from the article, which is major European City
Employees already voluntarily increase those costs if they can, by buying more expensive and less efficient vehicles.
The only thing I've read that makes sense is for people to live closer to things, and that's hard to make happen overnight. For instance, as a bicycle commuter, I'm aware that many if not most of my colleagues live many miles from work. Thus the debate about transportation mode is practically moot.
Yes, as a cyclist myself I've had people tell me "Cycling is impossible in my case because of the distance." But what they've actually done is optimize for driving, which makes cycling inconvenient. If they optimized for cycling then driving might be inconvenient! If someone wants to make an intervention here they need to catch people at a particular time (i.e., moving) rather than random times.
Did they optimize for driving, or optimize for affordability?
At every place I've ever worked, "optimize for cycling" has actually meant "optimize for being a millionaire". The housing near work is literally 250% more expensive than regular housing, and most people can't afford that.
And even if you do optimize for cycling, at some point you'll have to get a new job that wrecks this plan. Do you force your family to move every 2-3 years, everytime you get a new job, so you can continue to live cycling-distance to it? If you have a spouse, which of the two of you gets to live cycling-distance to work?
you could give preference to jobs that don't require moving
As for the remainder, you're making a number of assumptions that don't apply in many cases. I'm not arguing that cycling is good for everyone, just that often optimizing for driving means making cycling more difficult.
First off, not everyone has a family. I don't, so this criticism doesn't apply to me at all.
I know one cyclist who has moved his family for every job he gets. When he gets a new job, so far they've been so far away that moving was necessary even if he drove, though. (Not actually sure he cycled before he moved to Austin, now that I think about it, but still.)
I also know at least two cyclists who have lived in the same place for long periods of time. In one case I don't believe their spouse works, and in the other case I believe their spouse might drive.
Bike advocates tend to be disproportionately single, white and male, and for those reasons they tend to underweight that flexibility.
(The growing problem is that quite a lot of people have had this idea, and now the county roads are overburdened)
a) Live downtown and commute to a suburb, or
b) Live in a suburb and commute downtown
it's basically useless.
I live SE from downtown and work due south of downtown. To bus to work, I'd have to take a 30 minute bus downtown, then a 45 minute bus back out to work. My drive is only 25 minutes.
Until they dramatically expand the bus lines, my only option is to either move or pursue a job that matches our transportation system.
The only way to solve this is through more automation - not just self driving automation, but even just the automation of a matching system. Sometimes I wonder if someone like Uber came out with an "Uber-Commute" service, if it would take off. You could pay a monthly fee, so you pay even when you don't use it.
We could have self-driving now, if we started with the infrastructure for it, but unfortunately that's not easy. At the very least we could have "self driving" lanes everywhere for single person "pod" vehicles - that would be neat.
There is no reason to focus business in the urban core, rather than in office parks and industrial areas around the periphery. People who want to live in the urban core can reverse commute to jobs on the ring.
Given your example, effective land use via parking is one.
In a spoke and hub transit model; if people go to the hub, they can use central transit to get there; If they go to the outer wheel, unless the place is on the spoke itself, then additional last mile transportation is required.
Basically it's designed to carpool small distances where the driver can pick up passengers on his way to work. It might be a little bit difficult to set up for users, but there is a lot of potential to save money with this.
Give them the stick!!
Seriously, why don’t we simply improve mass transit so more people want to take it?
Even in NYC where it’s the best in America, it can still be painful. Try commuting from Brooklyn to NJ, or 4 miles to the east side of Manhattan from NJ.
25 years ago I lived 50 miles from Manhattan and the best an express train could do was 65 minutes to the city. I even wrote a letter to MetroNorth.
We’re about to enter the third decade of the 21st Century. How about trains that go 125 mph?
Where are the maglevs?
China, of course:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-t...
Or east-west in Chicago via train or North/South without hitting the red line.
RANT
Everytime the circle line is mentioned in Chicago you always get the crap that "it's too expensive". It's always going to be "too expensive." sigh.
NYC is hurt because their costs to build something are typically 7 times what it would cost to build the same thing in Spain. (health care, cost of living, and harder soils should make NYC 1.25x harder than Spain, every other explanation of why this is I've seen doesn't stand when examined closer) Until NYC can get their costs under control they it doesn't make sense to build much more mass transit, roads are a better value.
As for maglevs: they are a cute boondoggle, but not worth the expense. China isn't building them anymore because the cost isn't worth it. You can build 150mph trains without it for much less. This will probably change, but the reality is it isn't worth spending your own city/countries' money on it. The US could build maglev if we wanted, but it is a much better idea to just update and fix what we have already (Amtrak is historically incompetent, there are hopeful signs that might change but I'll wait to pass judgement on those signs for 20 years - there were signs 20 years ago that didn't amount to anything)
Even if we solve the above, inertia is a hard problem. I have a car, the roads take me where I want to go, when I want to go, very quickly (except in congestion cases). It is very hard for mass transit to compete with that.
Transit often doesn't get people where they want to go - political issues (like your NJ to Brooklyn) mean transit doesn't cross borders the road does. Often even if it does your costs go up even though the trip was short (that is your 4 mile trip is twice as much as a 20 mile trip if you hadn't crossed that border).
Cars go when you want to go. Many transit systems run so rarely that you have to check the bus schedule before going anywhere. People who drive don't realize how critical this is because it never occurs to them that running late isn't arriving 2 minutes after the meeting starts, but a full hour.
Quick is important. I'm trying to get someplace, not take a tour of the neighborhood (that was neat the first time, after that it is boring). Every time the bus stops to let someone else on/off that is robbing me of a couple minutes of my time, this can be acceptable if it is a quick stop - but if the bus has to spend several minutes going down a cul-de-sac it is unacceptable (note that a cul-de-sac where the end is still walking distance to the stop isn't bad, it is only when it is long enough that the bus would need to turn down it to get people that it is bad).
This last is why transit advocates spend more time talking about zoning than transit - most suburbs in the US are dense enough that transit could be useful for not much cost (that is less than the cost of all the freeways we build). However the street design means there is no way to run useful buses.
I mentioned that they are building them and provided a link.
They are focusing on the cheaper low-medium speed maglevs. You don’t need 150 mph trains to travel within a city, or metropolitan area.
120 mph is sufficiently fast.
Newark airport to JFK, for example, is only about 35 miles. Park at Newark and fly out of JFK.
Manhattan is 20 miles long. How about an express, with a few stops, that covers it in 20 minutes?
We need a tech battle to drive down the cost of infrastructure projects. Just like Amazon did with e-commerce... ruthless efficiency.
I ended up moving within a short walking distance to work and it has been the best decision I've made while living there. I appreciate Andy Byford's ambitious turnaround plan but for now I just use the MTA when absolutely necessary, like for sporting events. I don't expect to use MTA for my commute for at least the next several years, there is just so much improvement needed for train and signal reliability, and general maintenance.
Byford has mentioned a potential "death spiral" of NYC public transit where if enough people forgo taking the bus or train, there will be revenue shortfalls causing further dilapidation. I guess this is possible given how "farebox revenue" makes a large portion of total revenues and MTA is required to adopt a balanced budget [1].
[1] https://new.mta.info/document/12481
I'm in China now and it is great the rail stations are high speed. Sadly it takes an hour to get there by any means if transportation.
Cycling is a good exception to this, but there is almost no culture supporting the use of bikes (or scooters etc.) and very little planned infrastructure, which leads to extreme hostility from drivers and ultimately to injury and death (just about 30 cyclists this year alone in NYC). City governments are at fault and should be brought to account for this. However, most media attention uses language that implicitly (or sometimes even explicitly) blames the actions of pedestrians and cyclists when they are victims of car violence, rather than the drivers or the design of the city. Even when drivers are themselves blamed, it is assumed that tragic events are only caused by rare incidents involving "bad" drivers, rather than a pervasive culture and systemic organisation that allows for these tragic events to continue unhindered.
There needs to be a strong social backlash against almost any form of personal use of heavy machinery equipped with combustion engines, that is not absolutely necessary, within regions where there are many unprotected people on foot/bike/etc. And this must be directed at governments and other institutions that have the power to but are currently unwilling to create such necessary change. Blaming individuals will not get us there and will only lead to further entrenched "culture war". This is the strategy that was used in the Netherlands which, prior to the 80s, had a very similar commuting landscape to the US but now has massive bicycle and public transit use.
Uh no. Parking in Manhattan is like $500 a month.
I stopped driving like a jackass.
I used to accelerate rapidly at every green light and decelerate rapidly at every red light.
I stopped doing both of these things. I went from an average of getting 267 miles per tank of gas to 322, an over 20% increase.
Instead of wondering why my tires and brakes lasted half as long as everyone else they now last longer than average.
The amazing thing is I get to my destinations just as quickly. I always used to wonder how the ETA was still accurate on Waze even when I drove at full speed. All I was doing was racing to the next red light.
I’m embarrassed writing this because I drove so stupidly for so long. If it helps anyone else, here is my stupidity for all to see.
The motivation incidentally wasn't to improve economy or avoid citations. It was mostly to reduce the frustration of feeling like I was constantly being impeded by others who weren't interested in driving as aggressively as I had been, and partially an increased interest in safety.
It worked. Driving is much less stressful with cruise control.
I do not want to pay for other users' parking and highways.
End all subsidies to all transportation modes, or being transparent about the political goals.
See also "one more lane will fix it" : https://mobile.twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/1191295205...
What do you consider to be the core problem?
I think the root cause is expensive housing.
Increasing throughput on the highways often only lets more people get to the same bottleneck in the same time. To actually alleviate that problem, the throughput of any bottlenecks would need to increase as well. Usually, that's in a highly desirable and expensive area.
Destroying much of the highly desirable and expensive area and covering it with highways and parking lots is one way to solve the problem, but is obviously a terrible idea.
There is more than just initial design, however: there are many design elements that add to its drawing power. These include accessibility, good "way finding" signs, frequency of trains (every 3 minutes in busy times), safety on platforms, and (for me anyway), signs that accurately show arrival times of the next three trains.
Of course, there is still the problem of making the system useful for people who are not close enough to walk to a stop, the answer being good feeder bus service and car parks. In this respect, Vancouver has been less successful. For example, only a few bus stops have electronic signs showing the arrival times of the next bus, and bus frequency on all but the major routes is too low.
My point is that good overall design is the almost certainly the most effective way to change people's commuting behaviour.
It's important to make public transport good enough for people to use it. When public transport is an inferior option to owning a car, people would not use it.
I think what urban planners in the West miss is that public transport scales non-linearly.
The bigger the city, the more you gain from owning a car. For a public transport to be viable in a megacity, the network needs to be like much, much, better than in a smaller city.
When planners miss that, you get both terrible car traffic, and terrible public transport
In the smallest town driving was ok cause there wasn't as much traffic.
In the largest driving anywhere central would usually mean getting stuck in traffic and parking was expensive and hard to find.
And wouldn't the alternative be transit? No one is walking all the way across Vancouver.
My extended family lives near Seattle, which has more dense population and higher motivation to use public transport (lots of environmentally conscious people), yet I think most would agree that the train system is inferior to Utah's. I think this is because:
- commuter rail doesn't link up very well with the light rail line (airport) - commuter rail only runs morning and afternoon
The Trax (light rail) and Frontrunner (commuter) lines, however, are very well connected and both run all day. My main frustration is that the Frontrunner line doesn't run on Sundays, but it has a far more flexible schedule than the Seattle line. If you live anywhere along the Frontrunner/Trax system, you can rely on it to get you to the airport, work, or shopping, provided you don't need to travel late at night.
That being said, I think Seattle's total transit system is better than SLC's, but I think that's because there's less of a stigma against riding the bus in Seattle as well as a higher budget (Utahns are very fiscally conservative).
I think SLC has done a fantastic job of building a transit system that works for tourists and locals alike. Seattle built two separate systems that works okay for each, but doesn't work together very well. Drivers like flexibility, but the Seattle train system isn't flexible.
So, in order to convince people to commute differently, that system needs to be useful for far more than just commuting. I don't want to rely on a commuter rail line of I'll occasionally need to stay late, which would cause me to miss the last train. I also don't want to rely on a system that's inconvenient to work into other plans, like going to the airport at lunch time or doing some shopping on the way home.
Isn't this the biggest problem with Trax? I'd love to take it downtown at night, but it stops running well before 1am.
The issue with the station is that the Union Station office complex and historical building are in the way of proper wayfinding, so that the path between the commuter rail and the light rail looks more like an out-of-the-way alley than an actual path you're supposed to take.
The daily commute for a large portion of the population is from west to east. Driving, that commute takes ~15 minutes to 30 minutes depending on traffic. However, taking the bus takes anywhere from 1:30 to 2 hours!
Why? Because every route ends up stopping at a mall that nobody really wants to go to for an extended period of time.
https://goo.gl/maps/S4pdMvHzmQgZqJvk9 <- See here
It's simply unreasonable to want to commute by public transit for a huge portion of the population.
If you have bus routes every 10-15 minutes, you can operate them in straight routes forming a grid without major timed transfer centers, because a bus will more or less show up in the next 5-8 minutes in the average case and that's not the worst thing in the world.
At lower frequencies, like half-hourly or hourly, agencies run something called a "pulse", where every half hour or hour all the buses meet in one location so that people can make their transfers, and it looks like that mall is a pulse location.
- there are not enough buses or drivers to fill demand
- training more drivers is hard in a tight labor market
- buying more buses would require an additional storage depot, and for various reasons people don't like being neighbors to a bus parking lot
- buses are lower capacity per driver
- buses suffer from traffic congestion as well even in dedicated lanes or streets, and the congestion requires allocating more hours to provide an equivalent amount of service
So Seattle is railstituting to more efficiently provide transport service in the core, and redeploying saved resources to feeders of the rail in less congested suburbs.
No, I think that's a fair conclusion to draw. The only data point you have is that the train is being used. But that can be explained by some combination of:
1. Users who changed jobs and taking the train as their new commute. In other words, they never changed their existing commute to the train.
2. Users who had a commute even worse than the train, like walking or taking bus service.
The article is about getting people to change their commute for environmental reasons, which really means getting people to accept a less convenient commute because it's better for the world. As the article shows, it is really really hard to get people to do that. It's not enough to just give them an alternative and wait for the magic happen.
Adding train service is good, of course, in large part because it offers a better commute for many people. But if you've already got free parking and are used to driving a single-occupancy vehicle every day, simply having a train become available is not very compelling.
Busses are just too cumbersome. Once self driving actually is feasible through software and/or convergent infrastructure, bussing should be almost on demand with basically the equivalent of minivans self-driving groups of people between locations. Uber and Lyft are (currently) just dead end variants of this ideal.
Why is sitting on a bus not as comfortable as being a passenger in a mid range car? It totally could be, but that would cost more than the bare minimum.
So we have broken AC and uncomfortable seats. So it goes.
It's not awful. It's actually quite good. But I really wish sometimes that public transport could be _nice_ rather than tolerable.
I've found buses in London to be better optimized for people trying to get somewhere than in San Francisco. There are far more bus lanes, no waiting for people paying a cash fare, and wheelchair transport tends to use black cabs. People often take buses by choice as the alternative can mean being packed in like sardines on the Tube at rush hour. (Driving isn't really practical anywhere in central London.)
There's no reason we couldn't have twice as many buses, there's more than enough space on the road.
It'd just cost more than having everyone standing at peak time, so it's impossible.
By contrast, an individual (who's not deathly poor) can choose to buy a shitbox for a few hundred quid or a comfortable car for a few thousand.
It's a big failing of public transport in my view.
That is extremely important and awesome.
The problem that I usually see when someone brings up this idea is that the employee's "cost" is ignored. I used to live in the Washington, D.C. area, where I could walk or take the bus to the subway. One way, the total time was 30 minutes longer than driving. Between the cost of the subway and my time, it was cheaper to drive.
For 18 years, I commuted year-round by bike, rather than drive. It took as long as the bus-subway combination from my last apartment. While it took more time, I did not have to pay for gas and my maintenance costs were minimal.
Most people don't get as much exercise as they should; time spent biking should be considered as saving free time one would otherwise spend getting exercise.
There's also the inherent risks of cycling around careless drivers. With a car, in out money in an accident. On a bicycle I can be out things money cant replace.
- They sent direct mail and pamphlets, each of which has terrible conversion rates in general. Why not email or SMS?
- What was the signup/enrollment like? Was it easy and something that could be done from a phone without a login/password setup, or did it involve mailing forms to some random office with an unclear timeline?
- Did they assess why people didn’t enroll?
If you want people to engage in something new, make it ridiculously easy.
I'm all for doing what's right for the environment, but I can't stand tricky uses of statistics.
That statistic has almost nothing to do with the proceeding statement.
This is also a great of example of trying to blame environmental issues on individuals (see: recycling).
Additionally, human beings aren't perfectly rational. Driving a car individually is like fast food, even if it were bad for you in real terms, people would still use it because it's easy and convenient. This is also behind the success of ride-sharing and food delivery apps. They put convenience front and center.
IMHO, the way to change commuting behavior is to place an extreme bias on the right of way of mass transit methods. People will take the bus, if the bus doesn't have to wait in traffic. Then improve convenience with an app like interface that maps out transfers. Make it so taking a bus is as easy as taking an Uber/lyft.
Then don't bother trying to change the habits of people who have already been commuting for a decade, instead try to accommodate the growing non-driving younger segment of the population. Make it so the college student doesn't have to buy that car to begin with, and their habits will stay with them as an adult.
This would also help revitalise small shops, which have been decimated by the combination of malls and internet shopping. Two birds with one stone. Sadly, all the moneyed interests are aligned against this model.
> People will take the bus, if the bus doesn't have to wait in traffic.
And if it's easy to hop on and off, and pay fees that are not extortionate. In the UK, just the other day, I took a bus to travel a path that I often do in a minicab or uber; it cost £ 2.90, where a minicab would have charged me £ 4.50. The difference in annoyance (walking to the stop, waiting in the cold, fumbling with wallet and cash, enduring nausea-inducing vibrations, figuring out the right time to call for the right stop, walking again in the cold...) was simply not worth the saving. I was actually annoyed by how such a basic service could be so expensive for casual use... yeah, I know the answer: casuals actually subsidize regulars, who get discounted fares and RFID cards. But that raises the barrier to adoption, which is Bad.
Wait: does the weather never get cold again if there's no fare, or are you actually implying that taking a bus isn't as comfortable as driving your own car, even if "transit" is done "right"? I could swear that's not the usual message to see in "transit" related HN threads.
Anyway, I have to admit that were I asked how to reduce airport-related emissions, I might not have turned my eyes on employees cars first. Or perhaps even second.
Also, it's something that really surprised me when I was in the UK, there's absolutely no maps anywhere. Especially inside the bus. I was on GPS the whole time just to make sure I stopped at the correct place. I can understand not wanting to have a paper/hard coded map inside the bus if it does not run a regular line, but I'm sure they could devise something electronically...
FTA: "Car commuters report higher levels of stress and lower job satisfaction compared to train commuters — in large part because car commuting can involve driving in traffic and navigating tense road situations."
Lowering stress and higher job satisfaction is a benefit.
In the article they claimed that they either tried to survey the employees and tried to influence their behavior.
Problem I have with the survey: They're trying to collect data, but try to influence them at the same time towards an outcome that they're looking for.
Additionally: They tried to push their policy about how they feel towards cars and completely ignored the needs and reasons why the people behaved as they did. It sounds like the wants of the "participants" of the change were in agreement. But it sounds like the implementation was a complete disaster. (Yet it never explains how they went from 100 participants to 3 in 3 months) They came up with excuses about why it was the employees fault for not changing how they wanted them to.
If that's your goal, you instead "convince them" to live in different places and work at different jobs. The commute follows from that.
People don't 'choose' to get the train in to their office block in London. They use it because they deliberately chose their home and job within those constraints.
If they live a few miles from the station, they might cycle or drive to the station and go from there. This is again dictated by their home situation, it's not a choice in the immediate sense.
Next time I end up in London I'm thinking of renting a flat within walking (or 10 minute cycle) distance of wherever I end up working. The commute was essentially dictated when I made that decision.
If I sign a 12 month lease or buy a place further out then I'd have decided a different commute for myself, at that time, for the next ~year.
As I pointed out in another comment: End all subsidies to all transportation modes.
Simple, all roads need tolls, all parking should reflect land values usage, end fuel and public transportation subsidies, taxes pollution.
Then people will find the economical and ecological to travel.
To fix public transit in America we need to build high density residential building around existing stations with shops on the ground floor. Then it will be rational to use public transit.
I have also carpooled. This is also a hassle depending on your regularity and the regularity of those in the carpool. Missing turns due to travel, sickness, vacations, etc. means setting up swaps with other drivers. It also is a hassle if you need to work late or get in early. Not all carpool members are agreeable. I once carpooled with a person who held conversations with people in the back seat - the problem was that he couldn't talk to them without looking back at them - fairly hair-raising.
There are people who, say, live in Welwyn, or Dorking, or any number of commuter towns. They might drive to the station, park their car, and get a specific train in, because the next one is in half an hour.
I think most of us don't have time for 2 hour (both ways) daily bike rides while carrying a laptop.
If I want to go by car it's at least 1,5 hours,longer during rush hour, for the 80km. And it's also much more expensive, especially parking in the city center.
They don't bear the full financial cost of transit commuting either, since transit is heavily subsidized.
Here is where someone will say "but roads are subsidized." Of course they are. However, those who drive their own vehicles bear the full cost of the capital asset they use (that is, the car). Transit systems recover only a portion of their operating cost - and NONE of their capital cost - from fares.
Despite the big operating cost, capital cost, and opportunity cost of driving (that is, while driving one has to drive, but while commuting on transit, someone can sometimes do something else like read) people still like to drive. The reason is that for many people driving is a far superior mode of transportation. You couldn't pay them to take transit.
Then where I work enacted a plan where we pay any day that we park at the office, and get a bonus any day we take alternate transit. The plan is designed to be revenue neutral for the company while incentivizing people to not drive and park.
I bike every single day now. In fact, I'd probably keep biking if they stopped the plan because I'm used to it now and really like it. But it was so hard to change my commuting habit.
I feel like the drive to work is a point in the day where humans have absolute minimal executive function and willpower. By the time I'm heading out the door, I don't want to be thinking strategically or trying to make the world better or anything. I just want to get the fuck to work and use my brainpower there.
My 3 km bike commute averages 11 minutes on account of all the lights and traffic congestion :/ bike commute
It takes me about ten minutes with another five to park. I could push faster, but (1) I have a pretty cheap bike and (2) I don't want to get to the office sweaty. For comparison, my drive was about six minutes.
This year, that got bumped up to about 12 miles (work moved, not me). At that sort of mileage, it takes much longer to bike, and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy. Not to mention, bike infrastructure to that location is much worse, mostly because the only option runs along a 6-lane road, and resulted in me crashing due to road debris in the dark. Bills from that incident could have bought me a car.
Other options are mainly limited to public transport (buses). Typically takes me about 2 hours one-way, including wasted time at the start of a shift.
Then there are cars. Guaranteed to save me a minimum of an hour a day, with much lower chances of personal injury.
> and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy.
I don't think we should be trying to convince people to ride to work every single day. This is much harder to do than just riding some of the time, and it would still make a big difference. Getting people to ride on average even one day a week to work would have huge benefits: reduced pollution, reduced traffic, reduced CO2 emissions, improved health.
Context-dependence like "not raining or icy" does make sense.
Would an electric bike have helped? As car batteries get cheaper and better e-bikes are following suit, and many models get 40+ mile ranges and provide assist to 20-25 MPH even with hills.
45 km/h, so your trip would probably take 30 minutes.
I lived 3 miles away (typically a 13 min bike ride for me plus probably 15 min of parking/showering), but I still almost always drove.
To fix my commute I just moved, and my life is a lot nicer with this newfound 10min walking commute.
Even with the new fee ($12 to park vs $7 of benefit), I would still drive before I moved. I have after work hobbies that require me to drive. Biking 45min in the rain/dark to the climbing gym would have just killed that for me.
A lot of people were quite angry about the new system. But I think that it was necessary to fix the parking constraints we were running into (frequent stock outs for parking at like 9am). I have a “there is no free lunch” view for commuting policy.
It's a dream of mine....
I find that I have more brainpower if I ride my bike to work, because it gets my circulation going.
I actually miss my ride to work when I'm on vacation.
In my case I wanted to sell my family's second car. I established the habit by taking a month to "prove" to myself that I could live without it.
I wish I had a cottage in the woods to have these "alone" moments with more quality, but didn't get there yet.
In many jurisdictions, this is also illegal.
For driving too, of course, but on a bicycle you're not in a tank.
Before I moved closer to work, I used to have a long 40+ minute drive to the office. I hated it, but it did serve as a very nice loud music + personal karaoke time, and I miss that aspect more than I expected.
I bike to work now, which means no music or headphones for safety. At the office, I listen to music, but only non-vocal stuff since I can't code and hear lyrics at the same time. So now it's really rare that I get to listen to entire genres of music that I otherwise love, just because the opportunity isn't there as much.
You have to badge in to get to the parking garage, so they treat that as you having parked unless you provide information otherwise. There's a separate app/site you use to log your commute type. You could probably cheat by driving solo and then claiming you carpooled, but the company culture is pretty high trust.
I've cycled in all weather: rain, fog, and snow. (I've run it too, and tried that a few times in the snow, which is very good exercise.)