“After January 1 next year, no one shall drive a vehicle along the streets of Rome or along those streets in the suburbs where there is continuous housing, between sunrise and late afternoon.” Translated from the Lex Julia Municipalis, the body of law that among other things addressed Roman traffic regulations. Enacted in 44 BC.
The photo shows a modern traffic jam, and the quote implies an ancient one, since Julius Caesar felt compelled to ban chariots from the streets of Rome two millennia ago, to relieve the constant congestion The Eternal City labored under (and still does).1
So we’ve always had urban traffic congestion with us. And Lord knows we complain about it endlessly2, and endlessly bemoan its cost: in the USA the Texas Transportation Institute is famous for its annual calculation of the total economic cost of road congestion, running close to $200 billion annually (pre-pandemic).3 In economic terms, the time spent commuting is deemed a deadweight loss to the individual, to be reduced to zero if possible. The demand for commuting is termed “derived:” we don’t want it in itself, in any way: we only do it because we want something else (presumably, to remain employed!).
I’m not here to debate the costs of traffic congestion, as these have been very widely researched and discussed. They are very very real. There is the cost of lost hours of productive work wasted on traffic delays, the cost to the environment of vast quantities of exhaust fumes, the esthetic cost of replacing landscapes with multi-lane roadscapes, and so much more. And I’m not here to discuss the underlying causes of congestion, such as the American propensity to shun mass transit4, or our propensity to not build enough mass transit, or the desire of many Americans to dwell in the single-family houses with large lawns that drive urban sprawl, or whether it is the evil Auto-and-Oil conspiracy that has brainwashed into living this way. The amount of research devoted to these topics, if printed out, would probably paper over I-5 from Mexico to Canada.
No, I’m here to talk about a traffic topic that is so politically incorrect that it is never mentioned in polite society, and is almost never studied by any academic who wants to have a shot at tenure. A topic that one speaks aloud with the absolute certainty of being ridiculed. But hey, I’m 67 and semi-retired, so I’ll risk it. And the topic is:
Many Americans actually like driving to work.
I already hear you spraying your coffee across the desk in disgust, or your fingers racing to the keyboard to type an instant rebuttal (sorry, I don’t Do Comments, on the advice of my doctor). But sorry, this is true, and we have the chart to prove it. Actually I have more than one, but let’s focus on this beauty:
What is this saying? First, that in the sampled area (metro SF) the average actual one-way commute time (black line) was 31 minutes (longer if commuting by mass transit, shorter if by car5): no surprise there, as the national average was 25 minutes, and we all know the Bay Area has bad traffic. But it is also saying that the average desired commute time (red line) is 19 minutes. Meaning that if a worker could wave a magic wand, his time to work would not be reduced to zero (which the economists have concluded is optimal), but would remain at over three hours a week — of supposedly wasted, useless, annoying time.
(And by the way, this result doesn’t vary much by income level. I always thought the proverbial brain surgeon, valuing her time at $1,000/hour, would see commuting as much more of a loss than would a minimum-wage worker. This seems not to be true: Barrero et al. showed that recent one-way commute times averaged 25 minutes for workers earning $50,000 annually, and 40 minutes for those in the $200,000 club.6 The longer drive is part of the price one pays for the bigger lawn and the nicer country club, I guess.)
And no, this is not just one flakey outlier study: we have similar results in New Zealand and the Netherlands, to name just two (contact me if you want those papers): in general, the desired, ideal commute time everywhere is not zero minutes, but in the range of 15-20 minutes. Given that the current average actual commute time in America is now about 27 minutes (up all of 2-3 minutes or so in the last 15 years, according to the Census Bureau, despite much public moaning about increasing traffic), we don’t seem to be suffering under too massive a burden.
How can this be? Who wouldn’t want to just teleport from home to work in an instant, avoiding all the honking, merging, and coffee-spilling? Apparently the average American wouldn’t7. Why? We don’t have solid detailed information, only survey data: i.e., we asked people. And when researchers asked “Why do you value your commuting time?” there were several answers that repeatedly cropped up (here paraphrased by yours truly):
What was I going to do with a few minutes more at home?
It’s chaos at my house, I am happy to escape!
I really need this time to clear my mind and prepare for my work day.
I need transition time, from home mindset to office mindset.
Once you’re used to it, it is a soothing routine: I listen to music, the news, etc. (From one respondent: “I sing along to the classic rock station that my spouse hates and won’t let me listen to when we are in the car together!”)
It’s the only private time I have left in the day: every other waking hour I owe to the family, to friends, to the job.
In short, the average commuter sees this activity as having some value, not just cost.
Why is this never discussed? Well, if we’re getting conspiratorial, any admission that time lost in traffic is other than a deadweight loss undermines a whole bunch of embedded assumptions and powerful interests. If you want to sell or rent autonomous vehicles you want people to be eager to give up driving themselves. If you want to make a pitch about your connected car company, you need bored drivers to crave playing with their phones (or dashboard screens) in the car rather than paying attention to the road. If you’re a municipal department of transportation you only get to build more roads if citizens are raging about traffic. In sum, just how much will drivers be willing to pay to relieve the tedium of commuting, if they actually don’t see it as that tedious?8
But leaving conspiracies aside, it may just be a matter of habit and inertia. Since everyone has always complained about traffic, everyone always does. Revisiting long-held, inherited beliefs is not something people easily do. (I for one am sure I saw Elvis at the mall last week, he looked fine.) So while life in America today in almost no way resembles life in ancient Rome, in terms of lifespan, medical care, education, sports, and all the rest — we share with our forebears an urge to queri et querantur about our daily drive.
Are there any practical implications we can draw from all this, or is this post just a possibly amusing but ultimately useless rant? It’s probably the latter, but if I can extract one lesson from this it is: Never Assume. Always revisit your priors when thinking about how industries and customers work. I don’t know if our industry is more plagued by adherence to conventional wisdom than others, but all of you can think of at least one Absolutely Certain assumption that has failed us badly. Japanese build quality is poor. Safety doesn’t sell. Peak Oil is here. You can come up with many more.
Meanwhile, I gotta get in my car — I’m late for work.
Next time: is the mass market for new cars over?
For more detail on this, see https://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/showthread.php?tid=30501
More than one survey shows Americans naming commuting to/from work as one of their very least favorite things to do. See for example Kahneman et al., “A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: the day reconstruction method”:
See mobility.tamu.edu for much more, for example their annual Urban Mobility Report. I don’t like their methodology, which in my view comes up with unreasonably high costs of congestion by assuming as a base case almost impossibly free-flowing roadways.
See www.theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-favor-public-trans-1819565837
It’s important to remember that all the longest commutes are by mass transit, not by car. The average one-way commute time in pre-pandemic 2019 America was 26 minutes if by car, 47 minutes by bus, and 49 minutes by subway (Census Bureau ACS data). We are used the image of enraged commuters stuck in highway traffic, but it’s the poor souls on the bus who are really suffering (and who often do not have the means to afford any other mode of travel).
See “Why Working from Home Will Stick,” by Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, 2021.
And yes, this study even uncovered a few brave souls who confessed that they would like a longer commute than they currently had! Must be really rough at home….
Obviously, I am discussing averages. Even if the average driver is pretty happy with the commute, there are certainly many, many millions of drivers who would be eager to ditch it, and there’s your market!