I saw a claim, which I can't find at the moment, by somebody who had compared different cultures and said that people were willing to put up with ~30 minute commute times regardless of the method of commuting: driving, train, bike, walking, there was a fairly consistent limit for what most people were willing to do as a daily trip.
I had always heard that in New York it is much easier to move north/south and very hard to move east/west. If this is correct, I think an oval is more appropriate than a circle.
Some of us have density and cicadas. Which, may I point out, are inconsistent with silence.
I though density only came out ever 17 years.
I really hate this stupid, sweaty heat. I can hardly make myself walk even two or three blocks unless I need to. I don't even walk to the bar at night because I don't like to walk into a bar all sweaty.
The Roc cicadas are annual. Asians have a stronger work ethic.
I had always heard that in New York it is much easier to move north/south and very hard to move east/west. If this is correct, I think an oval is more appropriate than a circle.
This is just like the I-35 corridor!
But anyway, it can still be a circle under the correct metric.
I think we need to include time as a factor, both because of the cicadas and because travel time not only varies greatly by time of day, it does not vary the same for all trips.
By time, I mean time of day, not time of travel.
A man came up to me and asked me what the time was that was on my watch in the most convoluted way possible.
A man came up to make and asked "Why am I soft in the middle now, Why am I soft in the middle? The rest of my life is so hard."
Average commute in London is apparently 1hr 15 (I think that's total per day, so 45 minutes each way). That seems low to me. I don't know if I know many people who have a commute as short as 45 minutes each way, though.
Mine is about 70 minutes each way. Although it takes longer as i do nursery drop off in the middle.
In London, things are so bad that 45+45 is only 75.
This needs to be a time-based metric, not a space-based one. Because there are transit modes with stops spaced far apart (subways, express buses) "what you can reach in 30 minutes" can be spatially discontiguous.
Mapnificent makes some pretty and reasonably sensible-looking maps that show this effect.
re: 14
Heh. The rest we pay in property costs.
That's Manhattan, not the whole city, but yes. I can get thirteen miles downtown much faster than I can get six downtown and two east.
And the zone thing is also true. My walking radius is about 200th St (actually Dyckman, but it's where 200th St should be) up to 230th for ordinary errands, and down to 180th and up to 245th or so if I've got a particular reason. And then anything else is a fairly long public transportation trip. (I'm in an odd spot where there's very little I ever do that's more than walking radius but not much more -- if I'm leaving my neighborhood, I'm usually on the train for at least a half hour, forty minutes or so.)
Moby (@2) - this is because the subways almost all run north/south (14th, 42nd and some weird stuff around 59th being the exception). So if you want to go across town, you're pretty much stuck in above-ground traffic.
Transportation Alternatives (our pedestrian/bicycle/public transit advocacy group) does competitions sometimes between methods of transportation to see which will get you across town the fastest, and more often than not, the pedestrian beats out the cars and buses.
Yes. I've also seen the claim in 1, but seem to remember the limit as 90 minutes (don't remember if round-trip or one way). That would be much more consistent with my experience, but I got that in a very congested city.
So, google says Manhattan in less then 2.5 miles side. You should just use Segways.
that people were willing to put up with ~30 minute commute times
I'm curious what they/you mean by "put up with". I know lots of people have commutes a lot longer than 30 minutes. Are they/you saying that commutes of 0-30 minutes don't noticeably impact quality of life, but longer commutes do, regardless of how? Or that 30 minutes is the average, regardless of how?
FWIW, mine is right around 30 minutes by bike. Maybe 25 from front door to front door, but this time of year I have to shower and change clothes the minute I arrive, and that takes more than 5 minutes.
LB - do you ever find that your "zone" is weighted much more in one direction than the other?
I find that I much more easily will walk downtown towards Columbus Circle than uptown. Even though it's the exact same distance.
My parents, when they moved, suddenly found it a chore to come "uptown" to see me. I live FIVE BLOCKS north of them. In their old apartment. They moved south and suddenly never wanted to going north of their street seemed weird.
But my dad will literally walk to brooklyn when he's bored.
Manhattan slopes downhill from north to south, no? Hence 'uptown' and 'downtown'?
Or do yo feel resistance going both ways?
No on the slope. It's hilly, but not in an organized way like that.
On my bias, yes, I walk south much more than north. But I'm literally at the north tip of the island -- there are two businesses I patronize a block north of me, and then I've got a half-mile walk over a bridge to the Bronx before the next destination. And I hardly go east at all -- I'm a half-block from Broadway, which is where 90% of anything I'm walking to is. I go east of Broadway some, but probably a tenth as much as I go south along Broadway.
It's hilly, but not in an organized way like that.
Mouseover.
I live between two metro stations, one uphill, one downhill. By walking time they're very nearly equidistant, but the uphill one feels a lot closer. The gradient is probably shallower uphill, but I don't think by much.
I'm curious what they/you mean by "put up with". I know lots of people have commutes a lot longer than 30 minutes.
I wish I could find the original article. Obviously lots of people have commutes longer than that, but my sense is that was the dividing line for a "notable" long commute. Something that was clearly more than average for the culture.
But, obviously, some people are exceptional
18: Munich had competitions like that when I lived there: pedestrian+public transport vs bicycle vs car. Including waiting times and time to find parking, the bicycle almost always won door-to-door.
My commute in Moscow was 1hr 15 each way. I got to read a lot, but it was wearing. More so on the nights I taught classes that were 1hr 10 or so from my day-job offices.
I think you need more zones. If you live in NYC within a 5 minute walk of a subway, most things within 5 stops ors so on a single line (no long bridge/tunnel crossing stops) are in a zone 1.5
One thing worth noting is that built environment greatly impacts how big a walking Zone 1 is. We all know that people in highway commercial-style zones (out by the mall, so to speak) basically won't walk any distance, while city-dwellers will walk 1/8-1/4 mile without thinking about it. But even within a reasonably dense, urban area, people will walk something like 50% farther if the walk is both pleasant and engaging. That is, a combination of activity, things to look at, reasonably built up. Long, blank blocks, extensive vacant lots, or suburban-style residential areas will effectively cut short the circle along that axis.
The rule of thumb is that a 1/4 mile radius is walkable, but I think that, in a pleasant, dense environment, it's closer to 1/2 mile for most.
Ekranoplan.
(I've only read the post title.)
Zone 1 needs to include a couple of bars because drunk driving seems like a problem.
Somebody paid a whole dollar to hear "Let's hear it for the boy."
I have a strong preference for active transport (preferably bicycling) and for safe options to travel after drinking, so density and subways are way preferable than driving to me.
Also, I would guess that if you have really niche interests (like a particularly rare cuisine) you'd find more options within a NYC Zone 1 than a Texas Zone 1.
I like heebeis description of zone 1 and zone 2 , it in practice find people to define false equivalence between them in various locales.
Answer to the question nobody is asking : no, I don't know if this is a real return here.
How far 'walking distance' is for me is strongly dependent on temperature.
I walked back from a client meeting last week to the office. Google Maps tells me the walk is 1 mile. That felt longer than I'd have preferred to walk, because it was warm, and there's nothing worse than sitting in the office all clammy and hot.
Similarly, in Rome a few weeks back, my Air BnB was approximately 2 miles from the place I was working. If it had been cool, I'd happily walk that distance in preference to any other mode of transport. But as it was 85+ (F) it felt like hell on Earth.
34: I didn't know you hung out with these guys.
39: I sort of have a couple of times, but I've never bothered listening to the thing and have no idea whether my sense of it is accurate. Apparently it's a problem at DSA meetings that a fair number of people are there primarily as podcast(er) fanboys.
On the "30 minutes" question-
My commute is 30 minutes door-to-door, and it's basically considered negligible (15 minutes of subway riding in between two short-ish walks). Most people wouldn't even consider it a "commute", given that I live and work in manhattan.
It's just about perfect, except when the subway goes haywire.
Early on, I knew people who lived really close to the office, and I didn't want to do that because I wanted to feel like I had SOME separation at the end of the day - like I actually "went home". But any further away and it starts to really impact your life.
I did spend about 16 months commuting up to Connecticut for a job. That was 2 hours door-to-door. Each way (walking-subway-commuter train-shuttle bus to the office). I wasn't going to buy a car for what was a temporary job. I didn't mind terribly because I knew it wasn't permanent, and I got a LOT of reading and podcast listening done on the train, but it did affect my ability to make plans. You can't really "duck out" for a quick doctors appointment when your doctor is 70 miles away instead of 15 blocks.
Plus, you have the risk of Lyme disease.
41: It can be a bit juvenile, but it's sometimes funny and sometimes I learn things (e.g. in the episode at the link, about the differences in tone between Unionist vs Republican propaganda murals in Northern Ireland).
My wife and I ascribe the willingness to go x minutes in one direction, but not the same in a different one to a concept we call, "Psychic differences." From our house in Pasadena CA, going to South Pasadena and going to Flintridge/La Canada takes almost exactly the same time, but very few of our neighbors will go to F/LC, while happily going to South Pas. We saw this in NY (Pound RIdge to Bedford or Stamford CT) and other places.
A lot of people in Heebietown have that between Austin and San Antonio. Psychologically, Austin feels closer. The Austin NPR station covers us. Given traffic, they're actually about the same.
Child had his nursery school 'graduation' today, and at the graduation they played a bunch of cute video interviews they'd done with the kids.
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"Spiderman"
etc
The one that got the biggest laugh, but which was also really awkward, when they asked the only black kid present* what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said "Pink".
* 3 of the 14 kids in that class are black but the other two are away at the moment, so their videos weren't shown.
The one that got the biggest laugh, but which was also really awkward, when they asked the only black kid present* what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said "Pink".
Oh man. That's poignant and sad.
Given that these were pre-recorded videos, I bet if that happened here, they'd re-record it and sweep it under the rug, and not even tell the parents. One is not supposed to mention race around polite children and all that.
Yeah. Some of the staff involved are black themselves. So I'm not sure what the thinking was. They may not have been the people editing the video, though.
But of xelA's five key workers in his time there, three have been black. And it's London, so the kids are very diverse.* It's not a whitey McWhite environment. XelA has never said anything, though, that suggests race comes up as a topic.
* everyone is hyphenated. I think there are two kids with two 'British' parents.
I mean, this isn't a whitey White place either. Fwiw.
Not diverse, though, the way a city is. Just not white.
Re: 52
I wasn't implying anything at all about Heebieville.
More that there are lots of places in the UK that are pretty white (although far less so than some assume) but this area isn't one of them.
Everybody who gets murdered in Wales or who murders somebody in Wales is white and pronounces their name strangely.
although far less so than some assume
89% of the population of the UK is white, so I think there must be a lot of pretty snowy places.
54: I AM NOT DEFENSIVE WHAT'S WITH THE THIRD DEGREE oops.
I suppose I should feel guilty/defensive about vastly preferring my suburban NJ Zones 1 and 2 to the Zones 1 and 2 that obtained when I lived in Astoria, Queens. But whatever guilt I feel is more than outweighed by my sense of relief at the sheer convenience of it all. Also, I drive a Subaru Outback: no apologies.
I miss living in Astoria. Both my zone 1 and how quickly I could get into zone 2.
.
60: I miss Mike's Diner on 31st Street. Also, the Italian bakeries and the Korean grocers.
Moby's comments make me think I should look if there are more episodes of Hinterland because I didn't think there were enough to keep commenting about.
I'm still waiting for season 4 of Hinterland, which I intend to binge-watch just so soon as I have access. I have a weird crush on Richard Harrington.
re: 56
Yeah, I guess so. Although even in my small 70s primary school, which, in semi-rural Scotland pre- major immigration I'd guess was about as Whitey McWhite as anywhere in the UK gets, there was a few BME kids.* Most of my life since about 1991 has been in major cities, though, so I expect my felt-experience isn't really reflective of much of the UK.
* I remember one of the girls in particular being subject to some really nasty racism from one of the other girls, so I'm not talking about some idyllic melting pot, by any means.