#TIL: Why you would never really manage to reduce your commute time

by Jagriti Arora

Average commute time for cities doesn’t change even as cities expand. In other words, as humans learn to travel faster, they also learn to travel further.

For instance in 1815 Berlin, commuters would walk to traverse a distance not more than 5km, spending around 1 hour on commute. In 1905 when trams came along, Berliners didn’t get to their workplace any sooner — they instead started increasing their commuting distance to 10 km still maintaining 1 hour commute time. In 1925 when the even faster subways debuted in Berlin, people extended their commute distance even further to 15 km, staying within 1 hour commuting time. One would imagine that there was something going on in Berlin, but turns out that this same pattern was witnessed in Portugal as well! Evidence from this MIT shows that commuters in Portugal spent 70 minutes to reach from their origin to destination, with distances varying from 5 km to up to 40 km. Fascinating, to say the least!

So what exactly are humans thinking?

Enter Marchetti’s Constant

Among the most compelling ideas to explain this phenomenon is that people have daily “travel time budgets” of about an hour that they refuse to exceed. Alternatively, this travel time budget is also known as “Marchetti’s constant”. Marchetti — an Italian physicist, who originally attributed this idea to a transport planner and engineer — postulates that despite the changing urban settings, people gradually adjust their lives to their condition (including their residential location with respect to their workplace) such that the average time spent on commute remains nearly constant.

Today I learnt (TIL) is a weekly series by OMI that brings you interesting nuggets of information that you didn’t know you needed.