The Best Trip to Work: Adding Value to Your Commute
May 12, 2008 by torbjornrive
Part I - Green space, Commutes, and moving them below ground.
First, imagine that you had to walk or bike to work - or downtown - everyday. Imagine that it wasn’t particularly because you felt like it, it was because there were no public roads to downtown - only paths through forested greenspace. This would be my impossible city planning ideal: if downtown, one’s common Central Business District (CBD) - would be the centre of a donut-shaped Green Barrier separating the residential space from the work and social space. A barrier that not only works for the environment, but keeps chaos out of a pedestrian haven by having you park outside its perimiter.
Sadly, I’m not building a city from the ground up, and neither are you (I assume), so the best I can do is provide you with tips to make your commute useful, healthy, or productive.
Before I go on, you should know about projects like this, which are always going to suffer for lack of funding. The gist of it is that several cities are interested in “capping” their highways. The idea is to purchase land in the airspace above freeways (yep, you’ve got to purchase that), and build green space so that it “caps” the highway and keeps it in a tunnel for a portion. It allows for new parks (<–visualization) where space to build them just isn’t available. In certatin parts of LA, up to 66 percent of children do not have access to parks or open space at a walking distance. Compare that to NY where only nine percent don’t have that access. Central Park must be partly to blame for that number - and a damn fine park it is. *endnote
Part II - Value-added Commutes
…But, highways won’t be underground and embedded beneath parks for a while. Furthermore, my donut-shaped traffic-cutting green space is only a half-reality in its more minor form where it does exist. So, thinking in more realist terms, if you do have a commute here are some ways to add value to it:
1) Taking it to a train and working during that time could add hours to your at-home life. Instead of staring at the rear of the car in front of you, leave work early and bill those hours you work during your commute.
My sister - who lives in Dublin, Ireland - commutes by train or bus for up to an hour and a half in the mornings, and sometimes two hours in the evenings. In which case she’s purchasing a laptop to take the work to her commute where possible. This greatly adds value to an otherwise crap commute.
Seek out if your city offers a ‘park-and-ride‘ service. This allows people commuting in from the ‘burbs to park away from the CBD, and ride the train or other public transport for the final portion. No more parking or traffic hassles!
2) Straight-up bike. This is a more difficult option for many, but if it’s there as an option I highly suggest you take it. Just do it. Do it twice a week to start, and move on up from there. Also, try that park-and-ride service by stuffing your bike in your car and pedalling that last bit to town. When your city has a capped highway (finally), take a route through that space knowing that you’re benefiting while the drivers below wish they were biking.
Taking this active approach allows you bonus exercise when you otherwise woulnd’t be able to get it. You don’t have to search far to read about the benefits of exercise to your workday efficiency.
3) Meddling with a car habit and finding alternatives such as the above is a great way to save some time and money. Time is money. Once you are finding ways to save money on commuting you are adding value to a commute. Explore your options!
I don’t commute (in its most proper form) and have never needed to. I bike about 10 minutes, or bus when I have to. I can’t really imagine having to properly commute, but if I did I sure would look for ways to maximize that time spent, or cut it out completely. The only value I’ve been able to add to my ‘commute’ is (besides my cheap alternative of biking) 10 minutes of iPod time, or reviewing class material when I was busing to my night class at the university.
How do you add value to your commute? Any ideas to add for other readers?
**(Giant hat-tip to my Los Angeles urban connection Reid Keller for help in my last posts on L.A…Reid works in the field of urban planning and has added unequivocal value to these two posts.)
While I agree with you in general on these points and where possible everyone should try to implement these ideas into their daily lives, it’s worth considering that beyond a certain basic level of income, outside of work the marginal value of one’s time might be very great. I could take the bus from my apartment to work in about an hour (2hrs roundtrip each day) or I can drive (30 minutes roundtrip each day). That extra 90 minutes is nice now, but it would be even better if I had kids I wanted to spend time with, pick them up from school, take them to soccer practice, the need to cook for my family, and so on. The added cost of driving probably comes out to less than $10/day to the individual depending on the vehicle they choose and the length of the commute, which is not that great a price for a lot of extra time. For example, childcare on a per hour basis is pretty ridiculous.
Missing from the cost is anything not directly paid by the commuter, mainly damage to the environment (getting back to the theme of the blog) - mostly air quality/emissions (totally screwing over your kids in the future) and the fact that most of the world (at least around here) is covered in hard, unnatural surfaces. Sadly, at this point there is no feasible way to impose those costs on individual commuters.
I would be very interested to hear how people travel and why the choose the mode that they do.
Thanks for the comment Reid, you definitely make a good point with the amount of time saved to spend with family etc…and generally getting along with the rest of your day. Public transpo will almost always be slower than driving - unless you do have a fantastically direct train~!
…I have transferred this and your comment to the section at Brazen Careerist in hope that some others will comment. We shall see.
http://www.brazencareerist.com/2008/05/12/change-how-you-commute-to-make-it-valuable-time-again/
I want a capped highway! What a great idea!
But in the mean time I’ll just focus on buying that bike.
we should all be treated to capped highways. people living abnormally close to highways would be absolutely relieved, AND have a way to leave their ‘hood by bike and foot. Finally. and thanks for stopping by!
I probably found you off of No Impact Man or An Adventurous Life or Cheap Like Me, one of those blogs I read daily. To be honest, I can’t remember.
Changing the way we commute solely for the benefit of the environment is one thing, and doing it for the benefit to ourselves is another. We Americans are definitely more personal vehicle centered than much of the world, I don’t know about Canada. We’re addicted to the freedom of leaving exactly when we want to, and in the long run it can save time. Unless of course you get stuck in traffic. Of course if you live where I do, in a rural area, there’s no public transportation available and it’s too far to bike. You also don’t have to worry about traffic, which is nice.
I did some travelling with my Dad last week, and I used the time in the car when he was driving to get some studying in. I could see how that would be enormously beneficial to someone, especially if they routinely spend an hour on the road as many big city commuters do driving in from the suburbs. If you can use that time to get something done and do a little bit to help the environment? There are definitely benefits there. But apparently not enough to entice most Americans.
(Welcome back Michael) I would say that Canada’s not much different…but the populations of course are quite a bit smaller. Also, the cities are generally newer in which case the transport systems may have been overall, more designed around public transport - from subs to downtown.
I don’t know much about others, but Vancouver has a great rail system that’s in the process of growing, and they have busses to and from everywhere. Furthermore, driving into downtown is a nightmare, so most people try not to (but do anyway).
Overall I can’t speak too too highly of Canadian habits, but they are definitely changing faster than American ones.