There Are No Excessive Commutes
29th November 2015
The Antiplanner tried to demolish this myth fourteen years ago in The Vanishing Automobile, but now Daniel Schleith, a geographer from the University of Cincinnati, is bringing it back. Schleith calculated the “minimum commute” that would be required in the nation’s 25 largest urban areas if jobs and housing in those areas were “balanced,” and compared that with the actual average commutes in those areas. The difference between the two is the “excess commute.”
This method makes two related and equally fallacious assumptions: First, that the only purpose of transportation is to get to and from work, and second that the only factor that should be involved in choosing a home location is proximity to work. In fact, commuting makes up only less than 20 percent of our travel, and the other travel we do is only one of the many factors that might lead us to choose a home location that isn’t as close as possible to work.
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“In urban planning,” observed Yale political scientist James Scott in his book, Seeing Like a State, “it is a short step from parsimonious assumptions to the practice of shaping the environment so that it satisfies the simplifications required by the formula.” Unfortunately, too many cities have taken that short step and greatly interfered in peoples’ lives to try to shorten commutes.