Has the Love Affair With Driving Gotten Stuck in Traffic? (washingtonpost.com)

America's love affair with the automobile and those dreams of roaring off on open highways are on the wane as the nation grapples with too much stop-and-go traffic and too many hours spent behind the steering wheel. From a report: Those findings are contained in a report to be released Thursday by Arity, a technology research spinoff created two years ago by Allstate Insurance. Arity underscored the growing disillusionment by using an illustration: Americans, on average, spend more time in their cars -- mostly driving to and from work -- than they receive in vacation time. Arity researchers said most people average 321 hours in the car each year and get 120 hours of vacation [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source was not immediately available.]. "To me, that really crystallizes the issue," said Lisa Jillson, who leads Arity's research and design department. "I get a certain amount of vacation time, and I spend almost three times that in my car just getting back and forth to a job."

Her research showed a notable difference between millennials and baby boomers. Unhappiness with driving becomes more pronounced, with 59 percent of millennials saying they'd "rather spend time doing more productive tasks than driving," while only 45 percent of baby boomers make that same statement.

Comments

Work close to where you live as a priority

[Anonymous Coward]

Either pick your employer to be near your home or buy a home with prospective employers nearby. Commuting is for people who didn't think ahead, and they pay a price and even may die because of it. Think ahead or die on the road.

Re:Work close to where you live as a priority

[MightyYar]

Easy to say when single.

When I was a bachelor, I would rent within walking distance of my employer, even though it was in the suburbs and it involved me cutting through some business parks. Then I got married and my wife got a job. Then my employer moved. Then we had kids and had to think about school districts. We moved to a place that is a 5 mile commute (in heavy traffic) for her and a 10 mile commute for me (in light to moderate traffic) with a decent school system. But either of us could get fired tomorrow and our commute could change, and we wouldn't be able to move without uprooting our kids and selling our home.

Re: Work close to where you live as a priority

[peragrin]

Actually the 60's -90's you got one job and stayed with it until you died.

You might only work for 2-3 companies your entire life.

Millineials basically have to get a new job every 5 years with a new employer as employers do not give out wage increases otherwise. Why do you think wage growth has basically been negative for the last 15 years compared to inflation?

Re:Work close to where you live as a priority

[djinn6]

There's a few big differences between then and now:

1. Both parents work now, so it's much harder to find a place that's close for both
2. People change jobs every 2-3 years, instead of staying at one company for decades
3. Houses have become much more expensive, together with the associated transaction costs

Re:Work close to where you live as a priority

[sjames]

In the '60s, there was usually just one job to consider per family. In the '70s, there was one primary job and a secondary job that was fairly easy to replace or even do without for a bit. That made things a lot easier logistically.

Re:Work close to where you live as a priority

[SirSlud]

What the fuck are you arguing against? Somebody said move to your job rather than care about the improvement of roads and transportation. The other person said that's not a practical solution for huge swaths of people when there's two jobs and kids. Your point is, apparently, "Yes, you're right, it's not a solution, stop whining about it."

Like somebody saying, "Hey this could make things better" and your answer is "My perceived experience with this inconvenience means you shouldn't be interested in whether the conditions dealing with it deteriorate or improve." You're a dumbfuck, cayenne8. Every fucking day.

Re:Work close to where you live as a priority

[Archangel Michael]

You know what happens when a city stops growing? It stagnates and dies. Cities plan for growth, and when it stops happening, bad things happen to the plans based on growth. Governments can grow quite easily, but shrinking is very hard, and often behind the curve creating a death spiral for the city. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it is ugly.

Re:Work close to where you live as a priority

[danbert8]

There is some truth to that. As you build more capacity, traffic in that spot gets worse, but traffic *in general* gets better. The traffic on the main throughfare gets worse, but the traffic on the side streets and alternate routes improves. The key is to expand multiple roads and not just the one.

Re:Work close to where you live as a priority

[ShanghaiBill]

3. Houses have become much more expensive

They are also much bigger. New houses today are twice as big as houses built 50 years ago, despite families getting smaller.

Adjusted for inflation, the average cost per square-foot has barely changed.

Public transportation does save time

[DogDude]

Sadly, as good as public transport can be for a lot of reasons, it's not much fun either and in many cases won't save you any time.

I can't do anything else while I'm driving. I can do all sorts of stuff (work, relax, etc.) while on public transit.

Re:Public transportation does save time

[JaredOfEuropa]

Even here in the Netherlands, with a very dense and well managed public transport network versus congested roads, commuting by car is still faster than public transport in many cases, and a lot of people prefer to spend less time commuting over taking longer but being able to work or read. Public transport is great when you have an efficient single leg journey with a short-ish distance to walk or cycle at either end. But it starts to suck hard once you have to change lines: the chance of missing your connection adds stress to the journey. Even worse when you're on a crowded train: good luck working, relaxing or even just reading a book in that case.

There's a psychological aspect to it as well. As soon as you get in your car, the workday's done in your mind. With public transport, the day ends only when you're at your front door.

Re:Public transportation does save time

[b0s0z0ku]

That's where driverless subway/rail systems can really improve things as well. Instead of a "train" of 10 cars coming every 10 minutes, you can have a single car (or pair of cars) stopping every minute or two. You no longer need to spread the costs of a motorman across 10 rail cars for the system to make sense.

Re:I've been over it for years

[allcoolnameswheretak]

I'm in my late 30's and never made a drivers license, and one of my reasons is that driving a car just to get from X to Y, especially when done daily for commute, is a waste of time. Using public transportation I am free to make use of the time as I see fit. It's also healthier, because there's always some walking involved to move to the stations.
Of course I can afford that, living in an area of Europe that is very well connected with public transportation, I really feel like owning a car is unnecessary. I realize not everyone is so fortunate.

But the bigger reason why I reject cars is that I fundamentally disagree with the car culture: that expectation of having ultra-mobility, and what it has done to our cities and landscapes. Cars are expensive, noisy, they stink, produce a large amount of waste to operate and when they are discarded, are bad for health and the environment. Our cities are designed around roads for cars, grey tarmac everywhere that takes up so much space, flattens the natural soil, animal and plant life. Just for the cars to be able to get everywhere.
Our whole economy is wrapped around this car culture and supplying it with sufficient oil, mostly by buying it from the dictatorships in the most unstable areas of the world.

Not to mention the huge inefficiency of the whole setup. Most cars move over a ton of weight around just to transport one or two persons.

Thankfully people are starting to rethink, and thanks to Tesla, electric is on the move, which will at least relieve some of the issues I have with the car culture.

Re:I hate cars

[PPH]

Why do we live like this?

Because owning your own flexible mode of transportation gives you the option of bypassing all of the crappy businesses that transit-bound people are stuck with. I don't mind taking the bus or riding a bike. But once the local stores figure that they have a significant captive market in their little urban villages, their prices go up and their quality goes down. While all the carless people are stuck shopping within a raduis dictated by how far they are willing to lug groceries on a bus, I'll just jump in my car and head out to the big box store in the suburbs.

Politicians enamored with their socialist Central Planning Bureaus hate people like me.

Re:Not all

[R3d M3rcury]

It is an interesting point...

I used to hate driving. But after saying, "Y'know, if I'm going to spend an hour-and-a-half a day in my car, five days per week, I'm going to get a car that I don't mind being in." So I went and bought a nice car. And I didn't hate driving anymore.

There are plenty of people who look at a car as a necessary evil--"I just need something that will get me from Point A to Point B." They buy that and then they complain that it isn't comfortable to drive for two hours. Well, maybe you should have included that in your requirements.

Re:I hate cars

[tlhIngan]

Why do we live like this?

Because, on the whole, people like cars and governments like (gas) tax revenue.

Public transit takes both of those things away. Electric cars help with the pollution, but costs government the gas tax revenues, hence the sometimes "innovative" proposals you are starting to hear about how to tax electric car owners for their utilization of road infrastructure.

Still, in practically every city, outside of the places where there is simply no possible way to increase road capacity, people will prefer increased road capacity to any public transport solution.

Actually, you can thank General Motors for the love of cars.

Because back in the early 20th century, public transit in North America was actually.... extremely good. In any town or city, bit or small, you could get around using public transit. between horse drawn carriages to street cars it was a completely normal way to travel. Not just New York, or San Francisco, but any twon in any state.

Of course, the Model T brought cars into the mix, but not by much - they were relatively finicky things and you still had to contend with a lot of pedestrian traffic everywhere.

What replaced the street car was buses, which were considered high tech and advanced (since they didn't require rails). This did lead to the failure of many streetcar companies, since people flocked the novel bus that could go more places (and did) over the street car.

General Motors came along and basically decided to buy out all the failing street car companies. They didn't replace them, just bought them up, shut them down and left it as things were. Advertised the heck out of cars giving freedom (we're still talking early 20th century here) and there you go. After the second world war, the car became the status symbol and everyone bought into it, the interstate system was developed and so on. Plus, cities spread out into suburbs designed for cars and you end up with what we have today.

Hard to imagine, but at one time, the USA had a better public transportation system than Europe. Even today it still doesn't quite match what we had back then.

American car culture was literally developed from advertising - just like how weddings were transformed by a few De Beers ads insisting you must have a diamond ring.