I completely agree with this article. As someone who has lived with varying amounts of transit most of my adult life, I definitely see the strong correlation to inertia limiting my transit use.
When I lived downtown, hit that “discontinuity” they talked about, transit became a habit, an indispensable part of my life and my freedom. I didn’t understand people living without it. While I keep my car, it was mostly an annoyance I needed for occasional road trips and visiting the boonies
However now that I live in a suburb
- when I worked downtown I could have walked or cycled to the train station but weather and potential inconvenience stopped me. I got back Into the car habit to get to the train station and needed another discontinuity to break me out of it. I walk past there a couple times a week for relaxation so there’s clearly no challenge
- now that I work in the next town over there is no transit but it’s nearby so has a solid argument for cycling or electrified personal transportation. But again I’m back in the car habit (plus free charging!). It seems inconvenient with the weather, hills, no safe route, but I wonder if it’s more the habit. I’d there was a discontinuity to help me break that habit, would I better enjoy a non-car commute?
Insufficient transit
Exactly that. 30-45min of driving, or 90+ minutes of public transit with random delays or trams that simply don’t come. Plus 15+ minutes of walking.
I’m fortunate enough that I only have to drive a mile from my home to take transit downtown on a weekday which saves me time and money, but only because my office is literally across the street from a station.
Even the closest bus stop is blocks away from my home, making it practically useless for my disabled wife.
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It’s cause property tax encourages sprawl.
Everything is far from everything. Downtown is single-story buildings spaced out by vacant lots. All your friends live far away. It’s suspiciously convenient for a police state to control people who literally can’t reach each other without traveling through long gauntlets of cameras on roads where you must have a license and aren’t allowed to walk.
It’s more than that; it’s that the zoning code mandates sprawl. It is literally illegal to build walkable developments in most places.
“Even when better options for commuting are available, people usually don’t make the switch.”
Interesting working hypothesis… Sadly the article and the “studies” cited are total bullshit.
It’s full of second-hand conclusions based on studying only tangentially related topics to build the narrative how people wouldn’t change their commuting habits anyway.
That’s basically the whole actual content: people are creatures of habit so we can assume that they would not easily change those habits. We haven’t actually checked because their is basically no representative area with better commuting options… but we areclaiming it anyway to keep those alternative options neglected. 👏
My commute is 15min by car, 45min by bike, 2hrs by foot
If my commute by foot or bike was 15min, and the trip by car was 45min-2hrs I would choose to walk or bike.
Ugh I’ve got a similar setup, a little longer on bike… 20 minutes by car, 1hr 10m by bike, and five and a half hours walking… I love biking for fun but I’ll never do two hours of commuting a day with one.
15min by car, 45min by bike,
You still save time, getting 45 minutes of nice aerobic exercise instead of stressing and burning fuel. You have to exercise a bit some time, why not while commuting?
15 is a smaller number than 45
I get where you’re coming from
