cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/30733236

This map shows the average commuting time from home to work in Europe.

(Author: Maps.interlude, Link to image information and dfferent resolutions )

It might be surprising that, in spite of wildly different traffic systems and large differences in the use share of cars, these times are so similar.

An explanation is given in the wikipedia article on Marchetti’s Constant. Basically, the time spent commuting is mostly an anthropological constant, and is largely independent of means of transport and culture.

In other words, if we use faster means of transport, we almost automatically commute larger distances - regardless whether this improves our quality of life or not.

This relationship should probably be central in modern traffic planning, but it is often not considered. (There is an interesting article in German by the traffic scientist Rudolf Pfleiderer, titled “Das Phänomen Verkehr”, which describes in more detail the relationships between traffic, speed, and distance - perhaps somebody knows a good English article?)

  • bryndos@fedia.io
    2·
    1 day ago

    I don’t get how this is any sort of "constant’ - surely it’s multi-modal with loads of variance. I don’t like averaging over such distributions. I’d think a distributional analysis or cluster analysis would be more interesting than averages. And I just don’t think “constant” is anywhere near the right word for whatever phenomenon this is describing.

    The wiki doesn’t give much detail on their sampling frame for proving this “constant”. I suspect it might be a weak and biassed dataset.

    I WFH 4 days a week normally, so i have quite a variance over the week [<00:05, <00:05, <00:05, 01:30, <00:05].

    • more extreme variance if you count stopping off in the pub as “commute” time. So not “constant”.

    People like farmers typically/traditionally have quite short ‘commutes’ - but then they move around a lot from task to task. But office/factory workers will probably have longer commutes. Lots of other peripatetic or locum workers, taxis and deliveroos will inherently vary depending on the first customer/job of the day.