I enjoyed the availability of public transport when I lived in London, and I must confess that I’m a bit of a London Transport geek. I have pencils with the names of bus routes and Tube stations printed on them, in that wonderful Johnston Sans typeface, and I’m always up for a rousing game of Mornington Crescent.
London Night Bus, photo by Flickr user doug88888, under Creative Commons License
Ideally, I would live close enough to work that I could commute by walking; the next best option would be to cycle to work. Cycling would be a good option for me, if distance were the only consideration. However, cyclists in most parts of my city must have a death wish similar to that of the Beast’s sciurid friend, or to that of Squirrel Nutkin. As it is, I’m stuck with an automobile commute of 15-30 minutes each way (depending on traffic), in a 2001 Honda Accord coupe that gets pretty good gas mileage. I realize it’s a rather large car, by UK standards.
Many of the “greening your lifestyle” and “saving the planet” books and websites suggest that readers, who otherwise commute by car, take public transportation to and from work one day each week. This is something I thought might be worth a try. In the book WorldChanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century, the chapter on Urban Transportation includes the following paragraph:
Passenger buses are one of the most cost-effective methods of mass transit, able to move large numbers of people along existing roads. Unfortunately, in the United States, buses are not used to their full potential. When most Americans think of municipal bus service, they picture lumbering diesel behemoths that get nowhere fast, tracing circuitous routes that emphasize coverage over speed.
Right. Forewarned is fourlegged forearmed. Undeterred, I checked the VIA website for bus schedules, between my neighborhood and the medical center, where I work. As I planned my experiment in public transportation, I came up with the following timetable, such that I could arrive at the medical center by 8:00 AM.
- 6.25 Leave the house to walk to the nearest bus stop
- 6.45 Bus arrives at designated stop
- 7.04 Bus arrives at large undergrad university transfer station
- 7.12 Same bus with different route number leaves transfer station
- 7.54 Bus arrives at medical center transit station
- 8.10 I arrive in my lab, after walking around the university hospital (I’m not walking through it)
Going home in the afternoon will take approximately the same amount of time, as the only bus route available goes north to the undergrad university, and then south to either my neighborhood, or to the medical center. Another annoyance is the difficulty of navigating a busy stretch of road, with no sidewalk or footpath, to walk to and from the bus stop. However, the plus sides are that the bus fares are low (US$1.10 each way), and that I can read a crime fiction book from the library while I sit on the bus for almost 3 hours.
I plan to try the experiment this week, so stay tuned for Part 2: Data Collection.
You know the first question someone here at NN is going to ask?
I’ll head them off at the pass!
Excuse me madam, but ….
:-D
You know the first question someone here at NN is going to ask?
Is it “You know the first question someone here at NN is going to ask?”
Seriously though, good luck with this. It’s such a Catch 22; people don’t use the bus because there is no convenient route for them, and the bus companies don’t introduce new routes, because no-one uses the bus. To break the cycle you need either a far-sighted municipal government that values and is prepared to invest in public transportation, OR many individual citizens to put up with the kind of crazy journey you’ve described while lobbying the bus company to bring in new routes.
I’m lucky in that I’ve always lived in places with a decent transportation infrastructure (even though I complain about overcrowding and bad etiquette from my fellow passengers, I can get from home to work in about 15 minutes on a good day). However I much prefer the daily exercise and fresh air that I get on my bike, and it only takes about 5 minutes longer… so I only use the bus when snow, ice or poor planning (i.e. going to the pub on a Friday and leaving my bike at work) make it necessary.
Having lived in crowded cities for the past decade, I’m so spoiled when it comes to public transit. It’s always there, I don’t even need to plan a route, I can just stand at a stop and wait for something to come along. When I visit my parents now, I’m completely annoyed by their sparse and backwards transit system (and that’s in Holland, which is pretty much as perfect as it gets when it comes to having public transit everywhere – you can plan your route to anywhere in the country on a single website! ).
I’ve got to do similar this week. As R’s away, my lift to work is away (10 – 15 minute car ride to work, I don’t drive), I have two options. The first is to walk the 5 miles to work, the second is to take the bus. I used to get the bus and if I left home at 7,20, I would be lucky to get to work by 8.40, particularly when the bus sat empty and waiting for 25 minutes in the bus station en route. If I wait and get a bus at 8.30 I can probably get there by shortly after 9am. Nothing in my early morning schedule this week so that’s looking good. It is generally quicker for me to walk home (downhill) than to get the bus. Walking to work takes about 15 minutes more due to being uphill, so just about the same length of time as the bus but with added bonus of not being completely exhausted by the time I get to work.
@Katherine – 5 miles is about the ideal cycle distance- get a bike!
One of the benefits of large Victorian area (European) cities is the large network of railways and/or tramways that still exist. In Manchester I live near the metrolink (tram or light rail). My route is bike to tramstop (1.5 miles/2.5 km), fold bike and take the tram to central manchester (10 miles/15 km), unfold bike and cycle to the department building (0.75 miles/1km). This take about 40 minutes (we get a tram every 6 minutes at rush hour). I could cycle all the way but it is along a busy road with significant bike casualty figures. In summer (not long now) I can cycle along the canal towpath – this is unlit and not recommended forwinter evenings.
The time for driving (rush hour) is about 40 minutes but occasionally longer, for cycling it is about 60 minutes but (along the canal) you get a prettier view.
Uhm Brian, did I mention the uphill bit, as in the way to work is all up hill? Going to get a bike in a couple of months hopefully. And I’d be even more hungry after cycling to work!
people don’t use the bus because there is no convenient route for them, and the bus companies don’t introduce new routes, because no-one uses the bus
@ Cath: This is exactly the problem here; there used to be a more direct bus route from my neighborhood to the medical center, but it was eliminated three years ago.
Here in Texas, we often have the lowest gas prices in the US, so there’s not much incentive to take the bus. My bus fare will cost more than the gas I would use to get to and from work, but a) that’s not the point, and b) that calculation doesn’t include insurance, maintenance, registration, etc.
@ Katherine: Carpooling would be an option for me, since there are many medical center workers and students in my neighborhood. However, when I’m teaching (which is most of the year), I have strange hours, and often go into work much earlier than most others, or leave later.
@ Brian: Oddly enough, when I lived in Houston (a huge, sprawling city), it was possible for me to cycle from my parents’ suburban neighborhood into the medical center and my undergrad university (Rice), where I had summer jobs. There’s a bicycle path along one of the large bayous, all the way into the medical center; it took me about 45 minutes to cycle each way, IIRC. Unfortunately, this route is no longer safe, because of an increase in violent crime.
I should take some photos along my walking route to the bus stop, to demonstrate the pedestrian-unfriendliness. If nothing else, the signs scrawled by the barely literate ranchers across the road are amusing.
Pictured below is obstacle #1, for walking to the bus stop:
Yes, I realize that my truck is dirty
Note the “no pedestrians” sign; there is no shoulder or footpath, and the road drops off into a rocky wash. If you did try to cross with the light, and walk along the roadside, you might get knocked into a barbed wire fence. That’s just to walk out of my neighborhood.
The posterboard signs say “Please NO Trashes” and “NO Trash’s”. They’re on ranch property inhabited by people who left a large Ron Paul sign posted, even after President Obama had been inaugurated. ’Nuff said. :-S
I’m one of those rare beasts who cannot drive – never learnt. For some reason I also failed to learn to ride a bicycle (I always seem to fall off when I try). I do like walking, but not on a cold morning when I’m half asleep still. Hence I am very glad to live in London with plenty of transport options – though speed is not something you can associate with public transport here. I think the worst thing about my journey to work (20 mins on a good day; 60 mins on a bad day) is the unpredictability and the waiting. To be sure of being on time I need to leave a bit margin of error.
This is a typical commute.
05.40 leave Maison Des Girrafes
06.08 Catch train to Norwich
06.49 Arrive Norwich
06.55 Catch train to London
09.00 approx- arrive London
09.10 take tube
09.30 arrive office
Total time 3h50m
It sometimes takes longer going home as it’s uphill.
@Frank – I don’t drive either, and still get hassled regularly about it. I could accept a bicycle as a necessary evil provided there are few uphill stretches en route. I’d really rather walk places.
@Henry – point taken :) (although I’m set to spend about 24 hours on trains in the next couple of months)
I know. It’s insane. But one might also ask why commuting is as necessary as it once was, now that we have teh interwebz. I travel 130 miles each way to do substantially the same things I can do at home, more efficiently. The current regime’s exhausting, but management (and I mean generally, not just where I work) is wedded to the paternalistic idea that the underlings can’t be trusted to work unless they are doing it in the 19th-century institution of an office, under their watchful gaze.
So, you might ask, does this bus really go to the staion? Or, more pertinently, why do I insist on living in a pretty seaside town far away rather some dull, expensive and crime-ridden suburb of London? To which I should respond – why should I sacrifice the quality of the only life I have to magnify the vanity of management?
But one might also ask why commuting is as necessary as it once was, now that we have teh interwebz
In spite of the tawdry veneer of PowerPoint and Blackboard, much of the teaching that I do requires my actual physical presence. That’s especially true when I’m teaching gross anatomy four days each week, from late July through December. And I’m not taking brains in buckets home to give neuroanatomy lab lectures in front of a webcam, while embalming fluid and bits of arachnoid drip from the brains onto my keyboard. Also, web-based distance learning won’t work well with the real-time drawing method I showed on Eva’s recent post, until the technology improves significantly. There’s still a barrier for students asking questions, which I don’t like.
I still do benchwork as well, and I can’t keep a genetically engineered mouse colony at home. Not intentionally, anyway. I used to have a little take-home kit for processing tissue for paraffin embedding and sectioning, called the “U-Dehydr8”. Never managed to develop the “U-Embed InBed”.
But, yeah, I shouldn’t complain about a 3.5-hour commute, once a week. I shall meditate on patience and humility.
They have the tablet thingies you can draw on and it shows on screen. I assume that would also work over the internet? Obviously I’m no tech expert, though, or I wouldn’t be calling it “thingies” to begin with…
Henry is probably winning the Longest Commute award but I’d like to put in my itinerary for Shortest Commute:
9:00 – realize I should have already been at work
9:01 – put on shoes, jacket, etc.
9:02 – get in elevator
9:03 – step out of building, switch on iPod, walk
9:07 – Buy tea along the way
9:09 – continue journey with tea
9:15 – arrive at work (tea is still way too hot to drink)
Front door to work is a 10 minute walk without the stop for tea. Desk to desk with tea purchase is 15 minutes.
@ Kristi
But, yeah, I shouldn’t complain about a 3.5-hour commute, once a week. I shall meditate on patience and humility.
Actually, it’s three days a week, there and back, approximately 30 hours, but yes, it’s worth it … I think. Or it would be, if the commuting itself weren’t largely pointless.
To get back on topic (hooray!) – we’re talking about the relative environmental impact of various modes of transport used for our commute, when it is far greener not to commute at all, if we can help it, and the sooner employers free themselves from their antique mindset, the sooner it will happen.
Sure, you can’t demonstrate anatomy over the net, and lecturing probably isn’t as effective, but the fact is that most commuters go to an office where they sit in front of a computer, doing work that they could do just as well at home, and be more productive and happier.
Actually, it’s three days a week, there and back, approximately 30 hours, but yes, it’s worth it
@ Henry: No, I meant that I shouldn’t complain about a 3.5 hour commute once a week, which is what I am planning to attempt myself. That’s why I used the pronoun “I”. Sorry, I think that’s a difference between American and British usage … like “Please No Trashes”, and “Ron Paul for President”.
A lot of American commuters could work at home just as efficiently, and I know that when I’m writing manuscripts or grant proposals, or preparing a lecture, I’m happier and more productive working at home. If working at home became a more widespread phenomenon in the US, it might reduce the demand for all those crappy fast food restaurants, with the long lines of idling cars and SUVs. Stuffing an Egg McMuffin and a fried potato pellet in my mouth while driving on the way to work is not my idea of a pleasant breakfast.
I’ve been working at home a bit this weekend and I do get so much more done. Particularly because I go off to do a task (like hanging washing up) which is enough of a break from work then get back to it.
Today in particular, I would prefer to be working from home but am in my office. All the work I need to get done involves my computer so there is little reason to be here.
No probs, Kristi – separated by a common language, eh?
If working at home became a more widespread phenomenon in the US, it might reduce the demand for all those crappy fast food restaurants
Given that my breakfast is so early and my dinner so late, I am prey to all sorts of fast-food temptation in between, which does no good to the digestion (and waistline). My main meal is lunch: one of the perks of working for your favourite weekly science journal beginning with N is that we have a free canteen, and today they have changed the supplier, so what was once rather ruff’n’ready is actually quite civilized. Hopefully, by having a nice big lunch I can survive without snacking until I get home between 7.45 and 8.45. The downside is that in the afternoon it’s very difficult to avoid.d.d..d..d zzzzzzzzzz
I think I might change the title of my blog to Please No Trashes. It’s not Valley Spanglish (which I use occasionally, btw) … Semi-literate LiberTexan, perhaps.
Lunch is my favorite meal on weekdays. I usually bring a sandwich, a couple pieces of fruit, pretzels, and yogurt or a granola bar. Breakfast used to be rather boring and insubstantial, until I found the Fage nonfat Greek yogurt at a nearby grocery store here. My friend in Cambridge introduced me to the breakfast treat of yogurt on granola, with a bit of honey. Yum!
When we went to London for our medical history walking tour (which I still need to write about), we wanted to catch the first off-peak train in the evening to return to Cambridge. Loads of commuters were waiting for the track assignment to show up on the board, and when it did, there was a mad rush for the Cambridge train. One man nearly took me out with his rolling briefcase … I felt like kicking it off the platform. Train rage!
I was just about to have a whinge about my commute time, then I saw Henry’s and I’ll never whinge again. You’re mad Henry! Are you able to get work done during those commute times?
We’ve just gone from a one car to a two car family so I can get my daily commute time down to under an hour (in total) compared with 2-2.5hrs if I were to use public transport.
Should I be ashamed that I value my time and safety (public transport in the dark is not such a good idea where I live) such that I’m willing to cop the additional cost both financially and ‘environmentally’. I’ve got some hippy ‘friends’ (and I use that term loosely) say that I should be.
:-/
But I really am not.
Sorry Eva, I can beat your shortest commute time.
08.00 Wake up.
08.01 Reach for laptop. Turn on laptop.
08.03 Work.
I kinda suspected M@ was going to appear here with something like that. Does your tiresome commute not involve having to actually GET UP and set on yer bean-bag, M@??
Well, not until I get bored of the bed…maybe around 11am.
@ Meagan: Three of my colleagues just used the time and safety arguments to try to talk me out of taking the bus. None of them is a hippy, though. One said that she rode the bus to work throughout her postdoc years, and the best you can do is read a novel or a magazine; little or no actual work can be accomplished. And that was before the iPod and cell phone era.
@ M@: As long as it’s not “artificially-flavored potted work food product”, then it sounds great. If you powered a generator by pedalling a stationary bicycle, to charge your laptop battery, then it would be mega-Green.
I once read something about the energy required to perform a Google search, with calculations for the Grand Imperial Google Server Eco-Farm, or whatever it is. Does anyone know about this? Someone who (unlike me) actually understands the engineering/physics/hardware?
Not looking good for the bus commute experiment this week, as I’ve got early meetings, exam proctoring, or lectures to give each day. What if I had no alternative??
You’re mad Henry!
I’d rather be called ‘ahead of my time’.
You know, sometimes I feel like the greyhound who’s discovered that the hare everyone’s chasing isn’t real. I reckon that 90% of commuting isn’t necessary. Ditto 90% of physical face-to-face meetings. Why can’t people wake up to this?
No, I like face-to-face meetings. It’s more obvious when something isn’t clear. Like, when someone tells me to do something by e-mail or phone, it will take a long time before I realize that I might not know exactly what they want me to do (I might think, superficially, that I got it covered) but in meeting face to face it’s much easier to iron out the little things and discover that maybe we were not on the same wavelength. It can save days.
Also, if this comment thread was a face to face conversation, I’d have said “Matt, I hate you” in response to his comment, but in writing it doesn’t quite come across that I mean that in a totally joking/friendly way.
Eva, that’s a totally defeatist attitude. Fact – most meetings are a waste of time, irrespective of the mode of communication. And if face-to-face meetings are better than virtual ones, what we should be doing is striving to improve the technology, not dismissing it out of hand as if it is somehow incapable of improvement. Again, I refuse to sacrifice the only life I have, the wasted hours I could have been with my family, not to mention the fatigue and the immense expense to myself and to the planet, on the altar of such lazy, woolly inertia. If we are serious about being green we should do more than exchange one kind of commuting for another – we should abolish the commute. Period. End of.
I do a lot of commuting myself. Fifteen minutes on bike or by car (which doubles as the family taxi later in the day if I take it) when I’m in Toulouse; 3 hours door-to-door when I have to go to lab in Paris. That’s every two weeks, when I spend at least two days on site.
The rare times I’ve tried to make the interval and periodicity longer (I’m under contract to spend 20% of my working time in Paris), I’ve regretted the face meetings. As often as I try to make phone calls to the various members of my group and even instill Skype meetings, nothing keeps me as well informed on group dynamics and the advancement of each project underway as the fortnightly off-the-plane catch-up. Teleconferencing is great for one-on-one meetings, but it is nothing like good enough for
free-for-allslarger groups of ten or fifteen. In reality, you can’t interact with a screen in one chair as the missing person, and the physically absent person can not focus on one or a couple people at a time in order to pick up on body language, which can also be a useful non-verbal form of communication.Besides, if meetings are a waste of time, how can conferences or even un-conferences of any use, then?
Kristi, what do they do at that
large undergrad university transfer station?
Seriously though: I agree with Heather on meetings. I’ve had to sit through a LOT of both face-to-face and daylong (!!) teleconference meetings. Usually, complex issues had to be discussed and decisions made. I always found especially the latter to be challenging during the teleconferences, because it’s much more difficult to get someone to commit to something when you’re not looking straight at them…
what do they do at that large undergrad university transfer station?
I think the bus just sits there for 5-15 minutes, probably while the driver goes to smoke a cigarette, or eat a Krispy Kreme donut. Two more colleagues told me today that the bus commute, even once a week, is “not worth it, don’t do it”. One other suggested that I wait until summer, when I have very little teaching, to start the experiment.
I just had a meeting to discuss an experimental design, which would have been difficult to do remotely with current technology. There were just two of us, but we had lots of journal articles, plasmid maps, supplemental data, sketched flow charts, and printed e-mails spread out on a small table, as we puzzled out some constructs and cell lines.
I think Henry’s point about unnecessary commuting is well-taken, and I have been very happy to work at home, when I don’t need to teach or do benchwork. I agree that we should encourage and support improved technologies that allow us to reduce the numbers of face-to-face meetings that we have to attend. Many of the weekly or monthly meetings that I’m forced to endure would be perfect candidates for videoconferencing. Also, conferences and unconferences don’t really fall under the same umbrella of “commuting”, unless you travel quite frequently and earn a substantial part of your income presenting in such venues. Most people I know just go to one or two conferences each year.
My ideal work week would consist of 2 days working from the office (for the social interaction and meetings that work better in person), and 3 days working from home (to actually get the work done).
I think we should all practice un-commuting.
The flip side of meetings can be: do you remember most of them a year on? I take that as some measure of their importance.
In some labs I’ve been in, face time unfortunately seems to count. Only the full-time researchers or senior students with something to write have enough to do on a computer to spend a day (or more) at it. The rest of the personnel who spend time at the bench might start clucking disapprovingly if a member of the lab regularly spent a day or two a week at home. (Maybe exceptions would be made for people living hours away.) There are times when getting away from lab distractions is crucial, so I count myself very lucky to have that flexibility when I need it.
To be honest, it would be possible for me to spend my two days per fortnight to Paris-related activities entirely on the computer, and I could probably even document that for my administration. However, the old adage “out of sight, out of mind” seems to apply after a while, and I get unintentionally excluded from a certain number of loops if I don’t show up over, let’s say, a month. (“I thought you knew about that!” “How could I have done?”). No one will call me, despite exhortation, to troubleshoot a PCR, whereas complaining aloud and getting feedback is more immediate although not always more efficient. That’s not even on the level of a useless meeting, but perhaps is more related to teaching.
The Out-Of-Sight-Is-Out-Of-Mind (OOSIOOM) problem affects anyone who works remotely in a milieu in which most people still go to the
orificeoffice. Mrs Gee is a homeworker and gets it all the time from her office-based colleagues, who are ‘afraid to call her at home’ or somehow assume that as she’s ‘at home’ she can’t be ‘at work’. When she goes to the orifice, about once a fortnight, people say irritating things like ‘I haven’t seen you for ages – where have you been?’ as if she’s been on holiday. It’s pretty demoralizing.Eventually things will change, until we have a time when those who have to commute to work will be seen as the exceptions.
On the utterly irritating OOSIOOM problem, it’s a special kind of hell to work in a department or office headed by an individual who persists in childish egocentric thinking and judgments. You know, the type of micro-manager who can’t fathom that you’re working, unless he or she can actually rush down the hall at any moment, and catch you changing cell culture media at the hood, or pouring a gel, or
manipulating datacreating manuscript figures in Photoshop. The kind of person who leaves notes that say “Stopped by your office, but you weren’t there.” The kind of person for whom you start leaving expectant mommy magazines or ads for exotic automobiles and luxury high-rise apartments in full view on your desk. Heheheheheh. >:-)It’s also irritating when clerical or administrative workers take it upon themselves to keep track of the hours of people who teach or work in labs in an academic environment. Such individuals have no business passing judgment on a grad student who’s preparing a qualifying exam or thesis, or a postdoc who’s working on a manuscript, or a professor who’s writing a grant proposal or preparing a lecture. But that doesn’t stop them from doing so, of course.
I think many managers are like that, but they get their come-uppance in the end.
The Home Secretary at the Depatch Box, explaining the details of the Adult Movie Rental Exception Provision to the new Ministerial Allowances Bill. Yesterday
I think the bus just sits there for 5-15 minutes, probably while the driver goes to smoke a cigarette, or eat a Krispy Kreme donut.
I am so relieved, I thought they transferred large undergrads somewhere.
I think the bus just sits there for 5-15 minutes, probably while the driver goes to smoke a cigarette, or eat a Krispy Kreme donut.
I hope that the driver switches off the engine during this donut/fag time, or we are back where we started (trying to be greener). In fact, you now need to calculate the additional cost to the environment of a donut or fag, and put that in your initial cost-benefit analysis, Kristi. Before long, that car is going to be greener.
I thought they transferred large undergrads somewhere
@ Steffi: That’s also quite possible. The “large undergrad university” is UTSA, in case anyone cares. Their mascot is a roadrunner.
@ Maxine: When the first Krispy Kreme donut shop opened here, it caused traffic jams that required police action (I mean directing traffic, not increasing competition for donuts). Of course it had a drive-through window (this is Texas, after all), and there was a long line of idling cars, trucks, and SUVs … so yes, the humble donut has quite a significant environmental impact.