@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).

What this mean is that as new technologies became available -- such as the automobile -- we were able to further decentralize and still only consume about 60 minutes of our day. Apparently the average one-way commute time in America is indeed about 27 minutes. Some people, of course, have much longer commutes, but this is the average. Currently mine is about 12-15 minutes with a coffee stop. Yes, it's luxurious.

This 60-minute rule of thumb has become known as Marchetti’s Constant. And there are a number of possible explanations for why this has remained the case. Again, the obvious one is that it helps us detach from work, which is why so many of us have felt burnt out while working from home. We haven't been shutting off and we need to.

For more on this, click here.

PLOS One recently published a paper and a set of maps that looks at commuter flows across the United States (over 4 million data points). The objective was to identify all of the country’s “megaregions.”

Here is one of those maps. I think it says a lot.

We often think of cities as having discrete boundaries and population counts, but the reality is that studies and maps such as these provide a much better sense of the overall economic geography of a place.

It’s worth noting that the commuter dataset used for this study is from 2006-2010. So things may look a bit different today. The full report can be found here.

Earlier this week I wrote a “Tech Tuesday” post talking about Uber’s new Smart Routes functionality, which it is currently testing out in San Francisco. At the end of the post I ended by saying that it’s not just the taxi industry that should be thinking about Uber, it’s also public transit authorities. 

And that’s because many people in cities rely on multi-modal forms of transportation (I know I do) and in my mind it is clear that Uber is trending away from just “Everyone’s Private Driver” to a service that is starting to look and feel a lot like urban mass transit.

Then today my good friend Evgeny sent me a post called, “Public Transit Should Be Uber’s New Best Friend.” And it’s one of the best pieces I’ve read on Uber and its impact on urban mobility. I highly recommend you give it a read, particularly if you’re in the city building arena.

The article does a deep dive into how New Yorkers commute. Here’s how they broke it down.

It then talks about what it will take for a company like Uber to make a meaningful dent in car ownership (which is one of the company’s goals) and how the truly big opportunity for Uber is to go more mass market and tap into the public transit market – either by interfacing with or by building its own version of it.

Here’s their concluding paragraph:

But there’s a much wider potential audience if Uber can also reach middle-class customers who want to save money. Perhaps in the distant (or even the not-so-distant) future, Uber can build its own version of “public” transit, making rides so cheap that they cost less than the $4 or $5 that Americans now pay, on average, to make a trip in their personal cars. In the meantime, it might have more success among “car-cutting” customers who can use Uber along with public transit. That might mean Uber’s growth is concentrated more in cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago — and in Europe and Asia — that already have reasonably strong public transit networks.

It’s definitely worth a full read. Thanks again for sending this over Evgeny.