Posted on 10/28/2013 12:05:08 AM PDT by Cronos
According to the Census Bureau, more than three-fourths of all commuters drove to work in single-occupancy vehicles in 2009. Only 5 percent used public transportation, and 2.9 percent walked to work. A mere 0.6 percent rode bicycles, although cycling has finally begun to rise in popularity as cities like New York create bike lanes and bike share programs.
But workers are not the only ones driving for hours a day. The mid-20th century suburban idyll of children going out to play with friends in backyards and on safe streets has yielded to a new reality: play dates, lessons and organized activities to which they must be driven and watched over by adults.
In “My Car Knows the Way to Gymnastics,” an aptly titled chapter in Leigh Gallagher’s prophetic new book, “The End of the Suburbs,” she describes a stay-at-home mom in Massachusetts who drives more than her commuting husband — 40 to 50 miles each weekday, “just to get herself and her children around each day.”
..Suburban sprawl “has taken a huge toll on our health,” wrote Ms. Gallagher, an editor at Fortune magazine. “Research has been piling up that establishes a link between the spread of sprawl and the rise of obesity in our country. Researchers have also found that people get less exercise as the distances among where we live, work, shop and socialize increase.
..Erika Sandow, a social geographer at Umea University, found that people who commuted more than 30 miles a day were more likely to have high blood pressure, stress and heart disease, Sandow found that women who lived more than 31 miles from work tended to die sooner than those who lived closer to their jobs. Regardless of how one gets to work, having a job far from home can undermine health.
(Excerpt) Read more at well.blogs.nytimes.com ...
But you are not living in the city. You are living 45 minutes away from it. That is the suburbs.
I live outside of Washington DC, just where the suburbs stop and the countryside begins. In some ways my situation is perfect, because I have a house and garden, and am a five minute drive from horses but yet a ten-minute drive from the terminus of the DC metro (subway) system that takes one into DC. I have also lived in or near several other large US cities, and have traveled and stayed throughout both Eastern and Western Europe. Cities are fascinating and exciting to visit for cultural purposes or to stay in briefly, but I cannot endure living in or near so much hardscape. I need trees, fields, soil beneath my feet, horses.
Like many Americans, I also want to be less dependent upon and controlled by government and less vulnerable to the behaviors of most city-dwellers. If the Lord allows, I will move further out into the countryside soon.
It makes no sense for Manhattan to be a manufacturing center.
There’s no benefit to manufacturing being in such a tight space, whereas financial services and other type businesses thrive in such proximity.
I see. It makes more sense for the city and its suburbs to be welfare cesspools, then?
Self-driving cars are here and are going to make living in a dirty city old fashioned. The suburbs will grow and the cities will become primarily reservations for the welfare class. A long distance commuter can shower, dress, and enjoy a quiet breakfast then walk 10 seconds to work.
“Self-driving cars are here and are going to make living in a dirty city old fashioned.”
Many people can already telecommute. I do and it is rare I ever have to go into the city. What office work cannot be done at home? The majority of people I know that commute into work are those that don’t have a home office and kids at home.
You gotta make decisions in this world. When you decide to live “away from it all” you have to remember that “it all” is where you spend most of your not at home time, so you drive. That’s why I live in quiet corners of midtown, near “it all” but still with space and peace. Almost none of my drives are more than 15 minutes.
; obamacare; zerocare; abortion; deathpanels
The “commuting” described is that of a soccer mom taking her overscheduled kids around to various activities in the suburbs. The need for this could be obviated by — ta dah! — not overscheduling the kids.
That said, using the family vehicle (or more than one) to get around is 200% to 400% more time efficient than using public transportation, give or take wrongheaded public policy. In a few urban areas (LA comes to mind) so many single-occupant vehicles are on the road in the same two periods (one in the morning, one in the afternoon) that the same handful of major roads are jammed. And there’s a vacant carpool lane. This is a consequence of very few pairs of people both living in proximity to each other and having exactly the same (or reasonably similar) destination at more or less the same times.
Got to work by carpool, and not your week to drive, and the kid gets sick at school? What then?
Public/mass transporation is grossly inefficient in terms of time spent getting around, it simply cuts out more hours per day in by far most cases. It happens to be the best of the worst choices in a (very) few jam-packed urban areas, or (most obviously) for people who either have no personal vehicles (somewhat common in NYC, and in the ‘hood), have lost their licenses (DUI offenses and whatnot), or can’t find or perhaps afford the cost of, parking at their daily destinations. And of course, adding stupid bike paths while cutting out a driving lane — in parts of the country where winter eliminates 99% of the bike traffic — is another one of those Sunshine State one-size-fits-all “solutions” that warrants hunting down its advocates for extrajudicial executions.
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