From The Metro Morning commutes 'take longer than in 1906'.
I'm interested in the topic of how long people are prepared to spend travelling to work each day, and (while different people have different pain thresholds) had always assumed that the overall average remained the same and had done for centuries. In other words, with faster travel speeds, people commute longer distances, but spend the same amount of time travelling.
So if people are spending more time commuting now than a hundred years ago, that's that theory out of the window. Actually the article explains that the speed of an average bus is slower than it was a hundred years ago, which is almost certainly true, but entirely irrelevant. For a start, in percentage terms far fewer people travel by bus nowadays. And so on.
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Misleading headline of the day
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7 comments:
You need to consider that the length of the working week has reduced dramatically. I haven't looked it up but 100 years ago it must have been well over 50 hours and for many office workers its now down to 40 or even 37. More importantly the working week no longer includes Saturday.
It therefore looks like people have been prepared to trade in some of those extra hours so that they can live somewhere nicer/cheaper at the expense of a longer commute.
On a side note I read of some research in the Economist a few years ago that purported show that we need a minimum of 20 mins commute in order to switch form home to work mode and back again in the evening.
SF, excellent points. Perhaps people do spend longer commuting.
That 20 minute rule may also be true, but I used to have a job which was three minutes walk away and switching wasn't a problem.
It's becasue the railways were cut by that pratt Beacham.
Outside London and possibly other major cities the public transpiort if you want to go more than 5 miles is crap.
The car is the only way.
That's the problem they don't seem to realise that.
I thought Beecham cured travel headaches!
emphasis mine: "...the journey into work may be taking longer than it did for the commuters in 1906."
"Crammed in: Commuting now takes as long as it did in 1906"
"Londoners usually travel at 10.9mph but some routes drop to an average of just 6.7mph.
The 6.6km (4.1 mile) trip from Piccadilly Circus to Hammersmith Broadway on a No.9 bus takes 37 minutes. In 1906, it took 28 minutes on a petrol motor bus and 38 minutes on a horse-drawn bus."
Very misleading headline - they've not actually looked at the average commute, there's nothing concrete here. They're just saying that transport on some routes is slower than it was in 1906. How many people commute from Piccadilly Circus to Hammersmith Broadway today? How many people did in 1906? What bearing does that have on the average commute? All questions they spectacularly fail to address.
wv: busoe
Anon, exactly. The availability of public transport or roads feeds demand and vice versa. New roads or new train lines tend to fill up very quickly as people take advantage of them. i.e. it is an equation that is difficult to get wrong (unless you are Dr Beeching).
RA, exactly. People who live in HB and work at PC would take the Tube, which is about seventeen minutes. On a good day.
I live in a city outside London. Transport links are excellent. I have a choice between rail or bus. I am sure that both go substantially faster than they did 100 years ago.
Takes me 20 minutes to get to work on the bus.
As usual, London is used as the benchmark for everybody else.
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