Authors: Tom Vanderbilt
Parents’ chauffeuring duties hardly end there, however, as the increasingly hyperscheduled “free time” of children, with its scores of games, lessons, and playdates, requires route planning and logistics that would turn a La Guardia air-traffic controller’s hair gray. It’s estimated that from 1981 to 1997, the amount of time children spent in organized sports in America
doubled.
All those games and all those practices, in increasingly far-flung suburbs, required rides. A new demographic entity, the so-called soccer mom, started hitting the roads big-time. “In the entire time I played baseball, my parents didn’t watch me play ball once,” recalls Pisarski, who is in his sixties. “I didn’t feel slighted, because no other kid’s parents were there either. Today you go to a game, and there’s a hundred and fifty people and everybody gets a trophy.”
Traffic, Pisarski emphasizes, is the expression of human purpose. Another huge way in which those purposes have changed is due to rising affluence. It’s not just that American households have more cars, it is that they are finding new places to take them. And once you have shelled out for a car, the comparatively marginal cost of another trip is barely noticeable—in other words, there is little incentive
not
to drive.
Given that Americans increasingly spend much of what they make, it should come as little surprise that much of our increase in driving seems to stem from trips to the mall. From 1983 to 2001, the number of annual shopping trips per household almost
doubled
—and those trips are getting longer. Each year, the amount of driving we do for shopping would take us across the country once and almost all the way back again. Statistics now show that more people travel on Saturday at one p.m. than during the typical rush hours. The more money one has, the more choices one has, and so it’s not surprising that nearly half of trips families make to supermarkets are not to those closest to their home. Pisarski notes that he, like many Americans, does not suffer for choice when it comes to food shopping, and his driving reflects this. “I go to Trader Joe’s because I like their string beans. I go to Harris Teeter because their seafood is better than Giant. In effect, we are just more selective.” Studies confirm that people shop at more grocery stores than they did a few decades ago.
You might think that the rise of larger, consolidated stores like Costco or Wal-Mart Supercenters, which offer one-stop shopping, might have actually helped cut down on the amount of shopping trips. But larger stores need to serve more people, which means, in effect, that they’re farther away from more people. (A similar trend has also occurred with schools, which explains some of the decline in children’s walking.) A study of Seattle grocery stores found that in 1940, the average store was .46 miles from a person’s house, while in 1990, it was .79 miles. That small change in distance was basically the death knell for any thought of
not
driving to the store, for a half mile is as long as planners believe the average person is willing to walk. Even if the stores are bigger, moreover, we are going to them more frequently—the number of grocery trips per week almost doubled from the 1970s to the 1990s.
The reason we see so many people on the roads, getting in our way, is that so many of them are doing things that used to be done at home. This, too, is a function of affluence, but it’s a complicated relationship. Do we drive to a restaurant for take-out food because we can afford it or because we are so busy trying to make money we have little choice? Either way, these sorts of social changes have their effects on traffic—often so fast that engineers can’t keep up. When Starbucks began serving customers at drive-throughs a few years ago, the people who study traffic flows were caught flat-footed. Their models for what is called “trip generation”—basically, the additional traffic flow a new business will create—included numbers for “Fast Food Restaurants with Drive-Through Window,” as well as for “Coffee/Bread/Sandwich Shop,” but “Coffee Place with Drive-Through Window” was completely alien. For Starbucks, which will go so far as to put stores on opposing corners to capture different traffic flows and spare drivers the agony of having to make a left turn during rush hour, the drive-through represented a natural progression in its slow evolutionary insertion into the daily commute.
“Can you imagine, thirty years ago, saying nobody will make coffee at home?” Nancy McGuckin, a travel researcher in Washington, D.C., asked me on a break during an annual traffic conference. In her research, McGuckin (whom one colleague called “the queen of trip chaining”) fingered coffee as a prime culprit in a dramatic new shift in traffic patterns. Men, it seemed, were suddenly doing more trip chaining. Sure,
some
were dropping off kids, but more were making a latte stop. She calls this the “Starbucks effect.” The prime demographic, she says, is middle-aged men. “Who knew they needed ‘me time’?” she asks. “We’re used to women saying this: ‘We’re so busy, we need “me time.”’ But it was middle-aged men who were making that stop at Starbucks in the morning. I had some of them saying they were leaving their homes before it becomes chaotic with the backpacks and the school. [He wants] to get up and leave the house and go to Starbucks, where, by golly, there’s somebody there who greets him by name, knows what his favorite drink is. It’s like his time to prepare for the office environment. I don’t think the psychology of that has been explored very well.”
The same might be said for the psychology of commuting itself. It does not seem unreasonable to wonder why, if traffic is so bad, more people keep choosing to drive more miles. This question puzzles all kinds of people, from economists to psychologists to traffic engineers.
One important thing to consider, of course, is that for many Americans it is not so bad. They still get to work and back in that same roughly one-hour time frame. In relative terms, American commute times, Pisarski argues, should be “the envy of most places in the world.” In cities like São Paulo, where the congestion is so bad “motorcycle medics” are needed to ferry patients between stalled queues of cars to the hospital, average daily travel times clock in at upward of two hours. The average car journey takes up to one-third longer in Europe than it does in the United States (which is perhaps why Europeans make fewer car trips). Driving to work alone, which is what nearly nine out of ten Americans do, is still, on average, about one and a half minutes faster than the average time for all other travel methods. One study that looked at the working poor found that those with a car were able to get around three times more quickly than those without one. Even people who do not
own
a car are more likely to commute via car than public transit.
Trying to crack the commuter psyche is rather bewildering work. On the one hand, people seem to hate commuting. When Princeton University psychology professor Daniel Kahneman and some colleagues surveyed a group of women about their experiences in a typical day and how they felt about them, commuting came in at the bottom. (“Intimate relations” and “relaxing with friends” were near the top.) On the other hand, Patricia Mokhtarian, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Davis, has found that when people were asked to name an “ideal” commute time, their mean response was not, as you might expect given its popularity in the aforementioned survey, “no commute” but sixteen minutes.
In another study, Mokhtarian and two colleagues located what they described as “an apparent paradox.” When people were asked if they drive more than they would like to, the response was a unanimous yes. When those same people were asked if they drive more than they need to, the response was a nearly unanimous yes. Why were people seemingly acting against their own interests? Why were they doing more of what they wanted to do less of? The researchers surmised that the driving people didn’t want to do was, in fact, the driving they
needed
to do. Maybe it was the reasons they were driving that they wanted to eliminate, rather than the driving itself. Or maybe driving just seemed easier than figuring out alternatives.
A pair of Swiss economists have identified another kind of commuting paradox. They begin with the assumption that commuting, with its toll of time, stress, spilled coffee, and crash risk, is a “cost” that people rationally figure into their decisions about where to live in relation to where they work. If you have a long commute, that should be reflected in either a high-paying job or a nice house. The benefits that those things bring should offset the longer commute; in other words, a longer commute should not make you more unhappy. But that’s precisely what the economists found in a study of German commuters; the researchers concluded that people making just the average twenty-three-minute commute would need a 19 percent salary raise to make the commute “worth it” from a rational perspective.
Commuters may, of course, have little choice. Housing might simply be too expensive close to where people work, so they’re forced to live farther away from their jobs than they would like, out past the billboards that chide, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now.” The economist Robert H. Frank, comparing U.S. Census data between 1990 and 2000, found that commuting grew the most in counties in which income inequality had grown the most. He calls this the “Aspen effect,” after the affluent Colorado city, which keeps expanding because the middle-class people who work in the town keep having to move farther away to find affordable housing. But there is a paradox here as well: Statistics show that commuting miles
rise,
not fall, with income. In other words, the people with the money to live close to the action seem to be doing more of the driving. Maybe those people are moving farther out in Aspen
because
they have more money, and they’re choosing to buy bigger homes despite the commute.
This, however, is where things start to go wrong, according to many psychologists. A commuter who lives in the older suburb of Eagle Glen decides he wants to move to a new, bigger house in Fledgling Ridge. Getting the bigger house requires adding twenty minutes to his commute. This seems worth it because the bigger house provides such a boost to his quality of life. But gradually, that rosy glow fades. He quickly undergoes what psychologists call “hedonic adaptation.” Suddenly, the newer, bigger house just seems normal. Everyone else has the same newer, bigger house. Meanwhile, the commuter has lost time (more of which cannot be made, unlike money). This means less time to do the things that are shown to actually bring happiness. He’s locked into a longer commute, and studies show that the longer a commute is, the more prone it is to variability—to be longer or shorter than you expect. And some studies show that we are bothered more by
changes
to our commute time than by the actual time itself. As Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues, “You can’t adapt to commuting, because it’s entirely unpredictable. Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.”
For a portrait of a driver in purgatory, consider urban bus drivers. Few drivers face as much traffic or are as affected by changes in their commuting schedule. The hassles they endure are legion, from the simpleton car drivers who accuse them—irony of ironies—of “causing” congestion to passengers yelling at them for being late. Despite the size of the buses they drive, they are struck by other vehicles at a higher rate than are passenger cars. And what happens to them? Studies of drivers in various countries have shown they have more stress-related hormones in their system than other people—including
themselves
before they started driving for a living. The worse the traffic, the higher the hormones. Medical ailments send more than half of them into early retirement. No wonder Ralph Kramden of
The Honeymooners
was always so grouchy!
The problem with the models used in the Swiss researchers’ commuting paradox is that they rely, essentially, on asking people to turn their feelings into numbers. This is slippery stuff, prone to all kinds of biases. Psychologists have found, for example, that when college students were asked two questions, one concerning the number of dates they had in the previous month and the other concerning their general sense of life satisfaction, the results varied with the order in which the questions were asked. Ask about life satisfaction first, and this does not change the way they answer the dating question. Ask about dating first, and suddenly the students’ idea of how happy they are seems to vary with how much they’re dating. This has been called the “focusing illusion.” Things become more important when we think about them. Ask a person how long their commute is, and then how happy they are, and they might give an answer that is different than if you had not first asked them about commuting. Maybe this betrays how unhappy their commute is really making them. Or maybe commuting is just not that important to their overall lives—until a researcher’s question makes them think it is.
This is the murky, human side of traffic. Engineers can look at a section of highway and measure its capacity, or model how many cars will pass in an hour. That traffic flow, while it may mathematically seem like a discrete entity, is made up of people who all have their own reasons for going where they are going, for enduring that traffic. Some may have no choice; some may choose.
Moreover, Brian Taylor, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, observes that when we travel to work by car, there may be any number of parts to that journey. We may walk to our car, drive down our residential block, briefly cruise a larger arterial, then pop onto the highway for a spell before exiting onto another arterial, continue on to a smaller street, then drive up a parking-garage ramp, walk to the elevator, and finally walk to our desk. In the course of Taylor’s hypothetical commute, the highway portion could be over half the distance traveled but less than half the
time
(and we perceive a minute of driving on a highway as shorter than a minute of walking to our car). Taylor notes that even if the speed on the congested highway were doubled, the total time saved would be less than 15 percent. For all these reasons, we cannot look at a jammed section of urban highway moving at fifteen miles an hour and assume that everyone is suffering, or suffering in the same way.