Right now my typical morning commute consists of a 15 minute walk and a quick stop off for a coffee. I must admit that I’m spoiled. But next year I'll be moving to the Junction and so that means I’m going to need to make some minor adjustments to my routine.
I fully expect that on warm summer nights I’ll probably still walk home on occasion. But broadly speaking, my loose plan is a combination of cycling, e-scootering, and taking the Union Pearson Express train.
Then this evening I was out for drinks with one of our partners and two of the guys were talking about how they cycle to work each morning and compete on Strava to make sure everything gets properly logged. One of them actually lives near the Junction and his regular route is down through High Park and then across along the lake.
Naturally I got inspired and decided — after two beers — that I too should join this competition. So I have now obligated myself to cycling to the office starting next year. That said, I could probably use a new bike, and I’m hoping that some of you will have recommendations.
My criteria is as follows: it should look impossibly cool, it should work for a daily commute, and it should be at least somewhat suitable for tight-fitting clothes and long rides through the French countryside (even though I currently have no concrete plans of doing such a thing).
Any thoughts?
@OceanJangda shared a great article with me today about "the psychological benefits of commuting to work." It is excellent, it cites a lot of psychological research, and I would encourage all of you to give it a read. While it is never fun getting on a packed subway in the morning, the argument is that there are psychological and other positive benefits to commuting. It turns out, we need breaks in our day.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
But here’s the strange part. Many people liberated from the commute have experienced a void they can’t quite name. In it, all theaters of life collapse into one. There are no beginnings or endings. The hero’s journey never happens. The threshold goes uncrossed. The sack of Troy blurs with Telemachus’s math homework. And employers—even the ones that have provided the tools for remote work—see cause for alarm. “No commute may be hurting, not helping, remote worker productivity,” a Microsoft report warned last fall. After-hours chats were up 69 percent among users of the company’s messaging platform, and workers were less engaged and more exhausted.
It also turns out that there's kind of a magic commute number. In the mid 1990s, Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti remarked that, all throughout history, humans have tended to cap their commute times at about 60 minutes per day. So a half hour each way. This was the case in ancient cities and it appears to be the case today (ignoring COVID).
If you had a free 24/7 chauffeur to drive you anywhere you wanted, do you think that would impact where you lived, worked, and played?
Put differently, if you were relieved from actually having to contend with traffic yourself and if you never had to worry about parking and/or drinking and driving, would you be more inclined to live further out of the city to get bigger and cheaper housing?
This is the question I tried to ask in a Twitter poll this morning:
If you had a free chauffeur, would you be inclined to live further out of the city to get bigger, cheaper housing?
— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Personally, I think that this scenario would impact my behaviour, only slightly. I would certainly take advantage of the free chauffeur, but I would not be more inclined to live 1 or maybe even 2 hours of the city.
Sure, I would be able to get more real estate, but I wouldn’t want to sit in a car every morning – even if I wasn’t the one driving. Maybe I’d be more inclined to have a cottage out of the city, but I can’t imagine a big commute. In my view, minimizing commute times is one of the most effective ways to up your quality of life.