Government Executive - Authors - Eric Jaffe

Stop Complaining About Your 'Long' Work Week, in 2 Charts

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 16:19:49 -0400

The Transportationist blog points us to data showing the long decline ofannual work hours among developed Western nations. CityLab charted a handful of the labor-hour trajectories below. The trends are remarkably consistent across countries: people have been working less and less since the Industrial Revolution, with total hours falling from around 3000 a year toward the 1500-1800 range:

CityLab

Naturally, this data also means that people are working fewer hours each week. Max Roser charts the weekly trends for 14 countries. Again, across the board, hours fell from the 65 to 70 range toward the 40-hour work week we know so well today. Sure puts those Tuesday blues in perspective. (Visit the original chart to turn the plot lines for various nations off or on.)

Max Roser

The natural assumption here is that if we could extend the year axis to the left, back toward Medieval times, we’d see work hours rise even more. But that’s not necessary true. In her book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, sociologist Juliet Schor writes that people “did not work very long hours at all” in the pre-capitalist era. Here’s Schor:

The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.

Of course, working more hours leads to getting more done, but that relationship isn’t an endless straight line. Evidence shows that as work hours increase beyond a certain point, productivity can decrease. Recent research tracking the non-linear link between hours and output sets the tipping point at about 50 hours a week. As the Economist points out in its write up, that means working 70 hours isn’t much better than putting in 56.

Every now and then calls emerge to chop the workweek down even further—to 30-some hours or maybe 4 days a week. (Although, as my Atlantic colleague Joe Pinsker reports, the idea is largely a fantasy of select labor set: “well-educated, highly-paid workers who manipulate symbols all day—not the nation’s workers as a collective whole.”) But even if you’re stuck working 40 or 50 hours for the near future, you can be thankful you’re not living in the recent past.

(Top image via pcruciatti / Shutterstock.com )

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Where Telecommuting Is on the Rise

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 12:00:00 -0400

Joseph Kane and Adie Tomer at Brookings break down the latest Census data release to bring us a map of where telecommuting is on the rise among U.S. metros. The short answer is basically everywhere (except Omaha):

Brookings

No commute mode has grown in popularity more than telecommuting in recent times. The share of telecommuters has roughly doubled since 1980—up from 2.3 percent then to 4.5 percent in 2014 (according to the new Census release). Kane and Tomer add that about 13 percent of all new commuters between 2000 and 2014 are telecommuters; here’s their big-picture context:

This pattern is nearly universal across the country. With the exception of Omaha, all metro areas experienced a gain since 2000 in the share of people working from home, topped by Raleigh, Boise, and Austin, which each realized a jump of 3 percentage points or more. There’s a bit of a regional pattern to the growth, too, with the largest gainers primarily in the South or West.

Among all commute travel modes, the national share of telecommuting remains slightly below that of public transportation—4.5 percent to 5.2 percent, respectively, via the 2014 American Community Survey—though working at home tops transit as the primary alternative commute mode in many major U.S. metros. The list includes:

San Diego. Telecommute: 7.5 percent. Transit: 2.7 percent.
Atlanta. Telecommute: 6.2 percent. Transit: 3.1 percent.
Austin. Telecommute: 6.9 percent. Transit: 2.5 percent.
Denver. Telecommute: 6.6 percent. Transit: 4.5 percent.
Phoenix. Telecommute: 6.1 percent. Transit: 2.1 percent.

These aren’t competing options, of course, and put together they represent a lot fewer cars on the road during rush-hour. The best research out there suggests that working at home does reduce total driving, even accounting for offsetting increases like non-work trips or the induced demand of new road space. One study that tracked the effects of telecommuting found that it reduced vehicle mileage about .8 percent in 1998—before America hit peak driving.

The benefits of working at home from a business perspective are still debated. A helpful new comprehensive survey of telecommuting research suggests it “may be most beneficial in terms of organizational outcomes when it is practiced to a moderate degree”: a balance of face time and virtual time. But the balance telecommuting also provides to metro area transportation networks should not be overlooked—especially if it keeps increasing.

(Image via dangdumrong/Shutterstock.com)

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Study: Drivers Have More Stressful Commutes Than Transit Riders or Walkers Do

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 15:52:07 -0400

There’s nothing quite like the unpredictability of traffic when it comes to commuter stress.

So says a research trio that’s analyzed commuter survey results of people who walked, rode transit, or drove to work or school in Montreal. The survey measured the various objective (e.g. travel time budgets) and subjective (e.g. trip pleasantness) stressors felt by some 3,800 students, faculty, and staff of McGill University during their commute on a typical winter day. Drivers had the highest average stress, largely owing to “unexpected delays”:

This additional time budget indicates that they have, perhaps paradoxically, less control over their commute than commuters on other modes. Frequent and unpredictable occurrences require of them a peremptory stance toward their commute, where extra time becomes the best way to assure arriving to work or school on time.

Drivers in the study budgeted an extra 21 minutes in travel time, on average, to deal with traffic congestion. They agreed more strongly than walkers or transit riders with the statement that “the only good thing about traveling is arriving at my destination”—suggesting they derive less enjoyment from the trip itself(perhaps they’d prefer to teleport?). Drivers also expressed stronger desires to commute more by walking or transit than either of those modes did about driving.

Only a handful of previous studies have evaluated the relative stress of various commute modes. Some have found driving and riding transit to be equally stressful—and indeed, transit wasn’t far behind driving in the current study. Other results from the current study fell in line with related research: longer commutes were more stressful commutes, and active commuters (in this case, just pedestrians, as there weren’t enough cyclists to include) tended to be more satisfied with their trip.

The new work also tried to identify certain stressors specific to each mode. For drivers, predictability was the big problem. Transit riders (subway, train, and bus alike) had their own predictability issues; transfers were associated with more stress, as were wait times—a stressor that speaks to the psychological power of real-time arrival screens. Pedestrians were the “least stressed mode group,” with feeling safe from car traffic their biggest concern.

The researchers conclude:

Active transportation modes are not only environmentally and socially more sustainable, they are also a less stressful way to travel. On[e] way to increase pedestrian mode-share is to protect walkers from traffic and provide more pleasant and more comfortable streets to walk on. Furthermore, public transportation is also less stressful than driving, which is found to involve (somewhat perversely) less control for commuters. Increasing the predictability and range of transit options in an era of increasing driving unpredictability could lead to a greater transit mode share.

That last line is key. Driving might be the most stressful commute mode, but it often remains the most common one out of necessity. When there’s a reliable alternative, however, commuters respond accordingly—in the current study sample, 54 percent rode transit and 29 percent walked, with only 17 percent driving to work.

(Image via PHB.cz (Richard Semik)/Shutterstock.com)

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Debunking the Myth That Only Drivers Pay for Roads

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Wed, 13 May 2015 16:05:42 -0400

It's perfectly reasonable for American drivers to believe they pay for the roads they use. They’re aware that they pay gas taxes, but those costs are typically concealed in the total price of fuel, and there's no sign at the pump explaining that U.S. gas taxes are laughably low compared to other countries and haven't been raised in more than 20 years. Sure enough, when you ask people how much they pay in gas taxes, most either don’t know or think they pay much more than they really do.

The problem with this illusion emerges whenever it comes time to raise another round of highway revenue—as is the case right now in Washington. Voters and their political proxies balk at the idea of raising the gas tax. Some will invariably grab at the small share of this money that goes to public transportation; this year it's Reps. Thomas Massie and Mark Sanford who (separately) introduced legislation eliminating the mass transit account of the highway trust fund.

Here's Massie via press release:

"By eliminating diversion of gas tax revenues, the DRIVE Act ensures that the Highway Trust Fund can fulfill its namesake duty — to fund highways, without an increase in the gas tax rate."

That these bills won't pass isn't the point. They reflect a failure to appreciate that the gas tax is busted beyond repair, and with it the entire system of paying for road construction and maintenance. There are lots of reasons lawmakers are struggling to craft a long-term transportation funding bill at the moment, even as a May 31 deadline approaches, but the mistaken idea that drivers already pay enough for roads is among the biggest barriers to lasting progress.

So it's perfect timing for a new report debunking the myth that drivers alone pay for the full cost of roads. The trio of Tony Dutzik and Gideon Weissman of the Frontier Group and Phineas Baxandall of U.S. PIRG offer a thorough case that this "user pay" concept "has never been true, and it is less true now than at any other point in modern times." Their point is America can't begin to address its infrastructure crisis without correcting the "fundamental misunderstanding" at its core:

Roads don’t pay for themselves. We, the American people—whether we drive a lot, a little, or not at all—increasingly pay for them through other taxes and uncompensated costs.

We all pay for roads, and have for years

Landing on the moon was still a wild dream the last time gas taxes and other car-related fees paid nearly the full cost of building and maintaining roads. By the 1970s, road taxes still accounted for about 70 percent of road costs, according to Dutzik, Weissman, and Baxandall, but that link weakened in the '80s and '90s. Any vestige of a strong user fee died in the 2000s on account of peak driving rates, better fuel efficiency, soaring construction costs, and a gas tax held flat in the face of inflation.

Who Pays for Roads?

In recent years, tens of billions of dollars in general taxpayer money has been used (barely legally) to keep the Highway Trust Fund afloat. The theme weaves through all tiers of government. Using 2012 as an example, the report breaks it down like this: general taxpayers paid $47 billion in highway funding at the local level, $15.6 billion at the state level, and $6 billion at the national level—a total of nearly $69 billion, or almost $600 per household. Whether they drove or not.

Who Pays for Roads?

That's not counting hidden subsidies and social costs

The use of general taxpayer money to construct and repair roads is enough on its own to shatter the concept that drivers pay their own way. But there's lots more to the problem—starting with the enormous social costs of driving. Those are the costs that society as a whole pays for car-reliance: the environmental impact of pollution, the health impact of accidents, and the economic impact of productivity lost to traffic, among them. These have beenestimated at $3.3 trillion a year.

Then there are the hidden tax subsidies, to which Dutzik, Weissman, and Baxandall offer the following helpful hypothetical: let's say one person buys an $80 pair of shoes and another buys $80 worth of gas. You might think both would pay the same sales tax, with that money going toward certain local programs, while the driver would pay an additional gas tax, with that money going toward roads. In 37 states you'd be wrong—that's how many places have a fuel exemption for sales tax.

So poor shoe guy ends up paying for the programs that rely on the sales tax and paying for roads that inevitably take from general taxpayer funding (as mentioned above). Meanwhile the driver pays for roads alone—and insufficiently.

When you tally all these hidden costs together, alongside the assists that already occur for road construction and maintenance, the average household pays between $1,105 and $1,848 a year in what the report calls "uncompensated damage costs to support motor vehicle use in the United States." Again: whether they drive a lot or hardly at all.

Who Pays for Roads?

We're an increasingly multimodal country

The point is not that drivers are ruining everything. At least, it should be, and to their credit, that's not how Dutzik, Weissman, and Baxandall frame their conclusion. Some drivers also suffer from these haphazard funding schemes: people who spend most of their time on neighborhood streets, for instance, pay a federal and state gas tax on top of the local source of road revenue (typically property taxes). And no one is suggesting transit users pay the full cost of trains or buses, either. Far from it.

Rather, the point is that America is an increasingly (and, now, majority) multimodal place, with a transportation network that offers personal options and collective benefits.The suburban drive-thru is harder to staff without a local bus. The city food joint is tougher to sustain without commuter lunch breaks. The two-day delivery is harder to make without interstates that stretch far outside the metro lines.

Who Pays for Roads?

The reports suggests it’s time to pay for transportation as a system instead of as silos. That means allocating funding by need from a big pool, rather than setting it aside for a certain mode ahead of time. This approach works well for other advanced countries, which pay for transportation through their general budgets. In Europe, road taxes generate so much revenue they end up financing lots of other public programs.

It's also high time to enact a per-mile fee that can be adjusted for the types of transportation costs we'd like to capture—emissions, congestion, construction, maintenance, transit equity, and so on. There’s nothing for a dose of reality like an itemized monthly bill.

(Image via Supannee Hickman/Shutterstock.com)

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10 North American Oil Trains Have Now Exploded in 2 Years

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Mon, 11 May 2015 15:41:50 -0400

The crude oil train that derailed and burst into flames last week near tiny Heimdal, North Dakota (population: 27), was the latest explosion in a disturbing series across North America. Over at Sightline, Eric de Place and Keiko Budech now count at least 10 oil train accidents over just the past two years—dating back to the July 2013 crash in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. Others during that span have occurred in the likes of Illinois, West Virginia, and Alabama.

There's no mystery why these incidents are occurring now: the practice of moving crude oil by rail in North America is climbing at a startling rate. In a separate Sightline post, de Place and Deric Gruen chart the trend via new material from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This one just about says it all—oil train shipments either to, from, or within the U.S. have gone from 20 million barrels in 2010 to 373 million in 2014, largely on the back of new production from the Bakken region:

Sightline

The EIA offers a more visual look via time-based maps. Here's the skinny-arrowed look at how things were in 2010:

U.S. EIA

And here's the fuller and fattened landscape today:

U.S. EIA

Even before the Heimdal explosion, federal officials did recognize the problem. On May 1, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced a four-part plan to improve oil train safety: enhanced tank cars with thicker shells, better braking systems less likely to "pile up," reduced speeds and other operating requirements, and improved classification—building on new rules that included a 40-mph speed limit through urban areas. Canada released similar standards.

The DOT regulations are a good start, though as usual there's a little something for everyone to dislike. Some officials worry the changes will actually make it harder for the public to get information about oil train routes and schedules. Railroads question whether the brake requirements will truly upgrade safety. None of the rules address what one senator told the New York Times is at the core of the problem: Bakken crude is just way more volatile than typical oil.

Taking the wider view, the safety hazard of moving crude by rail is yet anotherhidden social cost of car reliance. The longer these go unpaid, the higher the cost to all.

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How a Quick Glimpse of Nature Can Make You More Productive

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Wed, 06 May 2015 12:00:00 -0400

A nice walk through a city park can do wonders for a work-weary brain, reducing mental fatigue and improving attention. But if you're trapped on the high floors of an office tower all day, you can't exactly break for a long stroll and a picnic. Well, fear not. If you have a view of a nearby green space, like say a green roof, and even just a minute to spare, you can reap some of the same refreshing benefits of urban nature.

That's the upshot of a new paper from an Australia-based research team set for publication in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Their work has found that even taking just 40 seconds to focus on a view of nature can boost "multiple networks of attention"—sharpening your mind to handle the next task dealt by the work day. They call it a "micro-break," and it turns out your brain loves it:

Our results have particular implications for the workplace where sustained attention is vital for performance. They provide a preliminary indication that micro-break views of a green roof could help employees top-up their attention resources as they become depleted in the workplace.

What They Did

For the study, the researchers recruited 150 participants and gave them a "sustained attention task" that's been shown both to require focus and to drain the brain. The task works like this: participants watched two series of 108 digits flash on a screen, and had to press a key after each one—unless it was a "3." After the first series, the participants got a 40-second break, during which some of them looked at a simulated view of a concrete roof …

while others saw a green roof resembling a "flowering meadow":

The researchers then gathered some relevant measures on the task—chiefly, response consistency and error rate—to see whether the micro-break view impacted performance. Spoiler alert: it did.

What They Found

During the first series, which established a baseline, study participants in both groups performed about the same on the attention task. But those who spent their micro-break looking at the green roof demonstrated a "more consistent pattern of responding, suggesting higher sustained attention" their second time through. Compared with the concrete group, the nature group showed less variability in terms of their response patterns on both a gradual and moment-to-moment basis.

In other words, the nature group handled the second task series more closely to how it handled the first—a sign that their flagging attention had been somewhat refreshed by the glimpse of greenery. More technically, the researchers believe that outcome shows a boost to "sub-cortical arousal and cortical attention control."

Study participants who viewed the simulated meadow during their micro-break also made fewer omission errors on their second pass. For this attention task, an omission error occurred if a study participant didn't press a key when the on-screen digit was something other than a "3." Immediately after the break both groups made about the same amount of mistakes, but as the second series progressed, those in the concrete group made significantly more.

What They Charted

During the first halves of their two attention tasks, both study groups made the same number of omission errors, and during the second halves, both tired a bit and made more. But compared with those who looked at concrete during their micro-break (black), those who looked at nature (white) seemed to keep their focus for longer. (Lee et al., 2015, Journal of Environmental Psychology)

What It Means

The digit task might take a little out of us, but it's not exactly deadline writing or floor trading or legal reading in terms of mental energy. How much a quick view of nature would help in those settings, especially against the other distractions of a modern workplace, remains to be seen.

But the findings certainly fit with all that social science has found in recent years about the restorative power of nature. Whether it's a walk through a park, a stand of trees out the window, or a mere desk plant, natural views give the working brain a breather—to varying degrees—by engaging our involuntary attention centers. The new conclusion that greenery might work its magic in mere minutes is an especially intriguing prospect in a fast-paced work world. And if green roof simulations were replaced with the real thing, the performance outcomes in the current study might even have been stronger.

The work also helps build the economic case for green roofs. If the environmental benefits aren't incentive enough to make them a standard part of development efforts, perhaps greater business productivity is.

(Image via Flickr user NNECAPA Photo Library)

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Say Goodbye to the Classic White Boxy U.S. Postal Truck

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 10:32:51 -0500

The classic white boxy U.S. Postal Service truck that's been roaming American streets for decades just received a Dear John letter. The agency has issued a Request for Information for a "Next Generation Delivery Vehicle" it hopes will replace the existing fleet by 2018. Here's Automotive News , which spotted the RFI documents online:

The agency has scheduled a meeting with potential bidders next week in Washington. It says it will pick vendors this summer to build prototypes, which will undergo tests in 2016 before a contract is awarded in early 2017.

It could be one of the largest fleet purchases ever. According to specifications released to potential bidders Jan. 20, the Postal Service would buy 180,000 vehicles at $25,000 to $35,000 apiece, valuing the contract at $4.5 billion to $6.3 billion.

The USPS began purchasing its current fleet of rectangles-on-wheels in 1987—then for $11,651 a pop, according to a 2014 inspector general report . The new information request reveals that the service bought about 163,000 from that time through 2001. In recent years these so-called Long Life Vehicles have become a maintenance burden the cash-strapped agency can no longer bear.

USPS

The USPS wants to expand the payload capacity of its trucks to a minimum of 1,500 pounds, which looks like a nod to its increased emphasis on package delivery. Automotive News suggests the specified needs could be met by European-style vans that have "proliferated in the U.S. over the past decade." As we've written before, this class of slimmer vans, with its ability to take tighter turns, also has the potential to help city planners design safer streets .

The request documents reveal a number of design flaws in the current fleet that the USPS hopes to address in the next one. The preferred upgrades include:

Durable door design —i.e. locks and latches that can "withstand the rigors of the postal duty cycle."
Stronger wipers —the fleet's existing windshield wipers evidently experience "fatigue" from all the rain or sleet or even snow that don't keep post-people from getting where they need to go.
Crevice elimination —apparently the current trucks have lots of "difficult to access" cracks where letters can accidentally slip and get lost in the mail.
Heavy-duty mats —all that stepping in and stepping out takes its toll.
Better climate control —Keeping the semi-exposed delivery person comfortable in every season requires a ventilation system that delivers heat or air "in the right quantities to the right body locations."

And let's not forget a good cup holder. Supplementary material supplies the specs here:

The vehicle shall be equipped with a standard adjustable cup holder. The cup holder shall be within reach of the 5th percentile female and the 95th percentile male in the normal seated operating position. All exposed edges shall be rolled or provided with a radius of curvature to prevent injury.

Which raises the question: In what sense was Newman a 95th-percentile male?

( Image via B Brown / Shutterstock.com )

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Which Mode of Travel Provides the Happiest Commute?

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 14:00:00 -0400

For most people, a satisfying commute is not necessarily a happy one—a not-so-unhappy one will do. Yes, it's true that the ideal commute not absolutely zero commute ; many of us can use the time to decompress or get some thinking done. But it's also true that beyond a certain point—roughly 15 minutes one-way, on average—we just want our lives and sanity back.

Even within that general framework of unpleasantness, some commutes are more enjoyable than others. A group of researchers at McGill University in Montreal recently tried to establish a clear hierarchy among the main six work-trip modes: driving, riding (bus and metro and commuter rail), walking, and cycling. They asked nearly 3,400 people who commuted to campus on a single mode to describe their typical trip in both winter and summer, and to rate their satisfaction with various aspects of that trip. The researchers then converted the ratings into a single satisfaction score for each of six commute modes.

We've charted the results below, but in case you can't wait that long, here are the raw (rounded) percentages: pedestrians (85 percent), train commuters (84 percent), cyclists (82 percent), drivers (77 percent), metro riders (76 percent), and bus riders (75.5 percent).

The first thing that's clear is that, in keeping with previous surveys, active commuters tend to enjoy the journey more than those who passively endure either traffic congestion or transit crowds. But commuter-rail passengers in this survey enjoyed the trip, too—in this sample, even more than bike riders. That result likely speaks to the ability to be productive on the train.

These top three modes received significantly higher satisfaction ratings than did driving and riding the metro or the bus, which clustered around the 75 percent to 77 percent area—creating a sort of two-tiered commuter satisfaction system. Then again, no one was entirely immune from commuting complaints: Walkers and cyclists were less satisfied with their trip in cold seasons, and rail commuter satisfaction went down if the trip wasn't productive.

Those are the basics. But drilling down into the details, the researchers find some notable wrinkles. One, not surprisingly, is that travel time accounts for much of the difference between the two tiers. Longer travel time led to lower satisfaction whatever the mode, but walkers, train riders, and cyclists were the least affected by time variables—again, no doubt, because they enjoy the commute itself, rather than seeing it as a means to an end. The satisfaction of drivers and bus riders also took a hit with additional "budgeted" trip time, likely on account of unpredictable traffic.

A direct comparison of the 439 cyclists and 516 bus riders in this sample shows the impact of time on satisfaction more clearly. The bike riders enjoyed their trip much more than the bus riders, even though both groups commuted roughly 22 minutes on average. And while cyclists only budgeted 5 extra minutes a day for trip delays, bus riders budgeted 14 minutes. That's more than an hour a week set aside by bus riders just to be sure they aren't late for work, and perhaps the same amount on the other end to be sure they're home for dinner.

External factors like traffic and transit frequency didn't explain the whole picture. People expressed more happiness with their commute when the mode they took was the mode they wanted to take.

Interestingly, this finding cut both ways. So satisfaction among bus and metro riders decreased when they preferred to drive—perhaps reflecting captive riders dissatisfied with local service. But drivers who wanted to ride transit more often were less satisfied with their trip, too. This group might consist of people who live in transit deserts, or who drive because their transit commute would take much, much longer. In the words of the researchers:

It seems that the desire, or the need, to use a mode of transportation different than the one currently used negatively influences satisfaction.

The typical caveats about self-reported happiness apply, here, and asking people to recall typical commutes from various times of year—in this case, warm and cold seasons—brings the weakness of memory into the picture. It's also less than ideal that half the respondents were students, a population that might not yet appreciate the full gravity of the daily grind. Last, the comparison might have been stronger if the researchers had controlled for time, given how critical it is to any commute.

So keep those concerns in mind as you taunt the coworker with the terrible drive to work, and this, too: At the end of the day, even a relatively not-so-unhappy commuter has to do it again tomorrow.

( Image via Kryvenok Anastasiia / Shutterstock.com )

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The Ideal Commute Is Not Actually No Commute

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 09:00:00 -0400

I can't say for sure that I have the world's shortest commute, but if it were any shorter, I'd probably be dead. My commute is three each way: That would be steps, not stops or even minutes. Three steps from the threshold of my bedroom to that of my home office. To be totally honest, I've done the trip in one. My version of a traffic jam is when one of the cats is lying in the doorway. My version of a real-time transit update is, I suppose, whatever spinal signal tells the brain the legs are working.

But sometimes—and, not looking a gift horse in the mouth, I stress just sometimes —I wish the trip were a bit more substantial. Or, that it at least existed. That's especially true after work, and I will often leave (or even invent) errands for the early evening to simulate a trip home. It gives some time to decompress. To ruminate on a story in progress. To transition from office persona to home persona. To wonder whether or not my physical environment is the main reason those personas aren't more distinct.

To want a longer trip to or from work may seem strange, if not pathologically self-loathing, when considering all that's known about the stresses and health hazards of commuting. Still, I'm not entirely alone here. You might think the ideal commute is no commute, but when you actually ask commuters, that isn't always what they say. In a memorable Washington Post piece from years back, tracking the affection some commuters have for their home-to-office-and-back trip, one man "cursed with a three-minute drive to his job" wished he had some "time to detox":

He added wistfully: "I wouldn't mind it being a little bit longer."

Whether this man was projecting an anatomical desire onto his commute, who's to say? But the data give the anecdotes some heft. A classic study from 2001 , conducted by Lothlorien Redmond and Patricia Mokhtarian, asked roughly 1,300 workers in the San Francisco area to report both their "actual" and their "ideal" commute times. The researchers found that the average one-way ideal was actually 16 minutes. Nearly a third of the respondents reported an ideal one-way time of 20 minutes or more. Less than 2 percent reported an ideal under 4 minutes, and only 1.2 percent reported an ideal commute of zero commute.

( Redmond & Mokhtarian, 2001, Transportation )

Now, that's the exception, not the rule. Redmond and Mokhtarian did find that most respondents, nearly 52 percent, preferred a commute at least 5 minutes shorter than their actual one (which, on average for these folks, was 40 minutes). But 87 people in the sample, or nearly 7 percent, had an ideal commute that was at least 5 minutes longer than their actual commute (which, in this case, was 10 minutes, on average). For the 42 percent of participants whose actual and ideal trips were more or less the same, the average commute was 15 minutes, one way. It seems a quarter hour is something like a preferred commuter constant.

How do we explain these various groups? Well, most of those who want a shorter commute probably have a job that demands a long trip. Those who feel their ideal is roughly the same as their actual commute, meanwhile, may have found a home close to work, or may simply have rationalized the trip they must make as the one they really want. Less clear is why anyone would have an ideal commute longer than their actual one. Perhaps some participants gave a "realistic ideal"—meaning they didn't pick "no commute" because they couldn't imagine a cosmos in which that was possible.

Then again, maybe there really is something enjoyable, or at least psychologically beneficial, about the trip from work to home and back.

More recent attempts to understand commuter desires have uncovered plenty of nuance. Mode obviously matters. Some work suggests that drivers find their commute more stressful than others , on account of traffic, unexpected delays, and the existence of other drivers. Transit riders can feel some stress, too, especially when the train or bus is delayed, and they also have to worry more about boredom (though that's quickly becoming obsolete ). Walkers and cyclists report the most relaxing and exciting trips.

The type of day you've had matters, too. One study, published late last year , recorded trip diaries of 76 commuters over a five-day period. When the demands of the work day were low, the detachment commuters felt during the trip home didn't influence their anxiety levels once they got there (accounting for travel time). But on days with lots of stress at work, the opposite was true: more detachment on the commute meant less anxiety—and more serenity—upon getting home.

It's worth noting that, for all the participants in that study, any effect of mid-commute detachment on post-work anxiety had disappeared by the end of the evening. Perhaps they were already thinking about the next day's commute.

Admittedly, wanting a longer commute falls into that universally obnoxious category of good problems to have. I've had normal miserable commutes in the past. I've walked across town in the snow. I've squirreled away quarters to park-and-ride from the suburbs to the core. I've carpooled home and seethed at traffic. I've transferred lines at the most crowded subway stations this country has to offer. I don't miss any of these commutes. But sometimes—again, just sometimes—I do miss the trip.

( Image via http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-98524838/stock-photo-smithsonian-metro-station-in-washington-dc-united-states.html?src=fOOSwgLM5k2m0RBeK83AcQ-1-2 / Shutterstock.com )

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How Tolls Could Help Prevent a U.S. Transportation Crisis

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Thu, 08 May 2014 10:55:07 -0400

Earlier this week, Joseph Kile of the Congressional Budget Office outlined for a Senate committee the dire situation that is the Highway Trust Fund. The fund that pays for U.S. highway and transit projects — largely populated by the weak federal gas tax — will more or less run out of money by the end of fiscal 2014. Insolvency could occur as early as August , and the Department of Transportation may need to begin withholding payments to states this summer.

If the gas tax were a fuel gauge, we'd pretty much be in the red.

The good news is that lawmakers have actually started to formulate new funding plans. President Obama sent Congress a $302 billion transportation package late last month; the Senate has promised a bill sometime next week ; a House appropriations committee is busy crunching numbers . The bad news is the sides already feel far apart: Obama's ambitious plan lacks a politically palatable funding mechanism, the Senate more or less preserves the status quo, and the House is leaning toward pretty heavy cuts.

It's too soon to scrutinize the details of the bills, but one element of Obama's plan seems likely to endure. That's an idea to let states place tolls on their free interstate highways. Right now, states can only toll an interstate highway to pay for the construction of new lanes. The new plan would let states create tolls to pay for maintenance of a crumbling highway they have no plans to expand at all. (Three states already have such permission through a federal pilot program — Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia — but none has acted on it.)

Why Mega-Projects Always End Up Costing More Than Expected

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 14:00:00 -0400

Last week the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Transbay Transit Center, a massive transportation hub calling itself the "Grand Central Station of the West," will cost at least $300 million more than project officials estimated. One city official characterized the situation as unfortunate but said it wouldn't have a "meaningful impact" on the project. The comment may have been meant as optimism, but it also reflects the fact that enormous cost overruns have become such a normal part of urban mega-projects that they barely even register as a problem.

So how did it get to the point where the only thing we can confidently expect from a big infrastructure project is that it will cost way more than expected?

One thing's for sure: the people who predict the cost of urban mega-projects do a terrible job. Several years ago the University of Oxford scholar Bent Flyvbjerg, who's made a career researching mega-project mismanagement, analyzed 258 transportation infrastructure projects from around the world and found that nine in ten exceeded their cost estimates. The overruns were greater on rail projects than road projects but averaged 28 percent across the board.

What struck Flyvbjerg most about the problem was how very un-random it was. If people were simply very bad at estimating the costs of huge projects, then one might expect some projects to come in under budget and others over. But an under-budget mega-project is about as rare as a dodo riding a unicorn. Instead, wrote Flyvbjerg and some collaborators in 2002, it's more likely that when it comes to mega-projects, public officials engage in "strategic misrepresentation" — aka lying:

The Case for Making Bike-Share Membership an Employee Benefit

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:47:00 -0400

New York-based tech company Percolate, a small marketing firm that helps businesses create content pegged to social media, takes pride in promoting an active employee lifestyle. The company sponsors a variety of health and fitness clubs started by workers — running, bike riding, yoga, and cooking, to name a few. Earlier this month a handful of employees rode bicycles anywhere from 30 to 155 miles out to Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island.

"The goal of all these things is to be very mindful of the fact that we're working with talented people in a high-intensity start-up culture, and more than anything we want to make sure we're keeping them healthy," says co-founder James Gross. "That's not just making sure they don't have diabetes or heart attacks — we mean are they mentally healthy, clearing their minds and getting out and doing active things."

So when Gross and business partner Noah Brier first heard about Citi Bike, New York's new bike-sharing system, they figured it was in keeping with the Percolate spirit to cover the annual fees for any of their 47 staff members who wanted a membership. After announcing the benefit at a meeting last week, Gross tweeted the decision, saying it "feels right." Pretty soon he had a bunch of retweets and favorites, and received a general response he describes as "overwhelming and all really positive."

The Future of Public Roads Is in Private Hands

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:10:18 -0400

A few weeks ago, the Colorado Department of Transportation reached a 50-year deal with a private investment group to handle the improvement, maintenance, and operation of US 36 between Denver and Boulder. On paper, everyone seems to have made out well. The state gets money up front, the investors get a share of the toll revenue, and commuters get an upgraded corridor 20 years ahead of schedule. CDOT officials are already hoping that this "first public-private partnership" is just the first of many.

"We certainly look at public-private partnerships as an opportunity to provide additional improvements and services to the traveling public," says spokeswoman Amy Ford, who adds that the department is actively considering similar arrangements for several other major roads — segments of I-70, C-470, and I-25, among them — in the metro area.

Public-private partnerships for infrastructure (often called PPPs or P3s) have been on the rise in recent years, and many experts believe the trend has yet to peak. If the activity of the past several weeks is any indication, they may be right. A billion-dollar PPP for the East End Crossing, in Indiana, was announced in late March. News of a $1.5 billion PPP overhaul of the Goethals Bridge, in New York City, came in April. The Pennsylvania D.O.T. placed an open call to private firms for PPP projects just last week.

PPPs provide a valuable public service while shifting the financial risk to private wallets. Advocates also mention efficiency: private developers, driven by an urgent push for profits, can keep costs lowers and complete work faster than the public sector. Supporters believe that in exchange for this revenue share they provide the public with the broader economic advantages of improved metro area mobility. Besides, states just don't have the money right now to do these projects on their own.

"There's a whole series of these efforts that involve both the public and the private sector," says transport scholar R. Richard Geddes of Cornell University. "A lot of this simply would not get built without some private sector investors coming in to put up the capital and to bear the risk of trying it."

Do Long Commutes Discourage Married Women From Working?

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:22:00 -0400

It's easy to reduce commuting to a simple measure of getting to and from work, but its residual impact on our personal lives is becoming clearer every day. Commuting causes us stress and general displeasure, which no doubt sours many a mood and stirs up many a marital argument, though the side-effects aren't all bad. As we reported last spring, couples who commute in the same direction actually (if oddly) have happier marriages.

New evidence suggests that commute times may influence whether or not married women work at all. In research set for publication in the Journal of Urban Economics, a trio of scholars led by Dan Black of the University of Chicago reports that cities with longer average commutes have lower rates of married women in the workforce. The results suggest that commuting, above and beyond other factors, drives the disparity in the female labor force found across major American cities:

We believe that many factors are at play in producing the large observed local variation in female labor supply across the U.S., but, we argue, one explanation stands out: Married women, particularly married women with young children, are very sensitive to commuting times when making labor force participation decisions.

The research was inspired by the wide variation in married women workers that exists in U.S. metropolitan areas — a trend that's gone "largely unnoticed," according to Black and company. (For the purposes of the study, the female population consisted of white women, age 25 to 55, with a high school education.) At the high end of the spectrum is Minneapolis, where 79 percent of women were employed as of the 2000 Census. At the low end is New York City, where that was true of only 52 percent.

The End of Federal Transportation Funding as We Know It

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:37:18 -0400

This month marks 120 years since the federal government got involved in funding road transportation. (Strange as it sounds, bicycle advocates did the bulk of the lobbying.) The original Office of Road Inquiry — today, the Federal Highway Administration — was a line item with a budget of $10,000. That was only enough money to build about three miles of road, and the office wasn't empowered to build roads anyway, but states fought tooth and nail against giving the feds even this incredibly modest level of transport oversight.

Today the federal transportation program faces perhaps its greatest challenge since that shaky start. The most urgent problem is funding. The Highway Trust Fund that pays for America's road and rail program is heading straight toward bankruptcy. For two decades politicians have refused to raise the 18.4-cents-per-gallon gas tax that populates the trust, even as it steadily loses purchasing power to inflation and fuel-efficient cars. The public has yet to embrace alternative funding sources — road fares or mileage fees on the user-pay side favored by economists; income taxes on the social welfare end — in part because people (mistakenly) believe they already pay a lot for transportation.

Money is only part of the problem. The other big sticking point is purpose. There's no longer a clear priority for national transport investment like there was during the heyday (or, rather, hey-half century) of the interstate highway program. Maintaining existing roads lacks the ribbon-cutting appeal of opening new ones. The closest thing to a new national initiative is a high-speed rail program, but while regional lines will no doubt emerge in dense corridors like California and the Northeast, political support for a national bullet train network is, to be generous, rather tepid. Lawmakers can barely muster the energy to pay for the rail system America already has, let alone a brand new one.

At stake is the very nature of America's top-down system of surface transportation funding. Confronted with these obstacles, officials and experts have intensified the debate over what role the federal government will play in funding transportation. Many are wondering, just as they did 120 years ago, whether there should be a federal role at all.

City Life Changes How Our Brains Deal With Distractions

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:00:00 -0500

City life requires a lot of attention. Navigating a busy sidewalk while processing loud storefronts and avoiding rogue pigeons may feel like second-nature at times, but it's actually quite a bit of work for the human brain. Psychologists do know that quick walks through the park can restore our focus, but they're still getting a handle on just what urbanization means for human cognition.

A new series of behavioral studies offers some of the richest evidence to date on the mental exhaustion of urban living. In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, a group of British psychologists reports that people who live in cities show diminished powers of general attention compared to people from remote areas. With so much going on around them, urbanites don't pay much attention to surroundings unless they're highly engaging.

Instead, as the researchers put it, city dwellers have developed a form of attention that puts priority on "the search for potential dangers or new opportunities":

While reduced attentional engagement may be advantageous in high-demanding urban scenarios, it comes at the cost of a generally reduced level of attentional selectivity.

Would we leave disaster-prone cities in the absence of FEMA?

Eric Jaffe, CityLab — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 13:00:00 -0500

Hurricane Sandy highlighted a number of problems that U.S. cities face in the era of climate change. Development has pushed up to the coastline in a way that strikes some as "foolish."Plans for sea walls and storm protections have been met with a lack of urgency. A push for urban resilience, in general, can't afford to wait any longer.

U.C.L.A. economist Matthew Kahn, author of Climatopolis, wonders if these failures have something to do with the comforting presence of federal disaster relief. While it's great that FEMA has helped so many people in New York and New Jersey, perhaps an unintended consequence of this support is that communities haven't adequately prepared for such disasters themselves — either by moving to higher ground, or by investing their own local money in sufficient flood barriers.

In other words, might the absence of federal bailouts actually improve the way cities adapt to rising sea levels?

"We've learned the hard way that the probability of terrible storms has increased, perhaps because of climate change, and that this should trigger investment in self-protection that reduces the impact of these storms," says Kahn. "But if you expect these bailouts, that chips away at investing in resilience. It's a disincentive."

Over at his blog, Environmental and Urban Economics, Kahn recently posted a "tough love" thought experiment: How would New Jersey rebuild the coastline if the state knew that FEMA aid wasn't available in the future? He predicts a combined response from both government and citizens alike. State and local leaders would change zoning laws to discourage risky coastal construction, and coastal residents would take precautions like moving inland to get out of harm's way.