[p2p-research] Long-distance commuting and social connections and alternatives

[Paul D. Fernhout]

 From 2006:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6290776
"""
The Transportation Research Board released a study this week based on U.S. 
Census data, which shows Americans are increasingly working outside their 
county of residence. The study reports "extreme" commutes of 60 minutes 
climbing by 50 percent between 1990 and 2000.
   When it comes to the areas with the longest commutes, there are few real 
surprises -- New York, Chicago and Los Angeles top the list. The Washington, 
D.C., metro area, however, is a sort of first of worst commutes, with the 
largest number of commutes that take 90 minutes or more. The study shows a 
rising number of people leaving their homes at 5 to 6:30 a.m., compared to 
previous decades.
   In 1990, New York was the only state with 10 percent of its commuters 
traveling an hour to the city. By 2000, New Jersey, Maryland and Illinois 
also had 10 percent of commuters traveling for 60 minutes to work.
"""

Longer commutes is another factor in why face-to-face peer-to-peer 
activities in the USA have declined:
"The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Commuter" Robin Moroney
http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/04/09/americas-commutes-arent-worth-it/
"""
Generally, “every ten minutes of commuting results in 10% fewer social 
connections,” says Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. People tend to 
undervalue those losses. Attempts to put them in money terms have shown them 
to be large. Two economists at the University of Zurich found in a lifestyle 
survey of Germans three years ago that an hour-long commute requires a 40% 
boost in salary to keep the commuters as “satisfied” with their lives as 
non-commuters.
   Postwar zoning laws take a lot of the blame for the sprawl that has 
driven up commutes. Mr. Putnam points out, thanks to the division of cities 
into commercial, residential and industrial districts, it can often take an 
hour or two to travel between those three points. For this reason, many 
planning experts are pushing for the removal of zoning restrictions to bring 
the places people eat, shop, and work closer together. Local officials have 
yet to show much enthusiasm for the idea. Mr. Paumgarten declares Atlanta 
“the purest specimen of a vexed commuter town.” thanks to its paltry public 
transport and a sprawl unrestricted by mountains or the sea. Traveling 10 
miles can take 45 minutes. He suspects residents of New York’s affluent 
Bronxville have the most enviable commute in America: a 28-minute ride to 
Grand Central Terminal, with many commuters then needing only to walk down a 
tunnel to reach their offices.
"""

Note that new Greyhound buses have WiFi and electrical outlets (so virtual 
peer-to-peer might increase)
   http://www.greyhound.com/HOME/en/NewBuses.aspx
"We've put a brand-new spin on the idea of the wireless router. Now you can 
access the Internet super highway from the regular highway. Check e-mail. 
Upload photos. Download content. All from the comfort of your seat. All for 
free."

However, many long distance commuters use that time to fitfully sleep, so 
it's not clear if that will increase online peer-to-peer activities.

Also, because long distance commuting is so stressful, such 
peer-interactions may be problematical:
   http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=commuting-takes-its-toll
"""
Commuting exacts considerable stress on the human mind and body and on 
family relationships. All the stressors, day in and day out, take their 
toll. Each added travel minute correlates with an increase in health 
problems. Several studies have shown that long-distance commuters suffer 
from psychosomatic disorders at a much higher rate than people with short 
trips to work. Physical symptoms range from headaches and backaches to 
digestive problems and high blood pressure. Mental ills include sleep 
disturbances, fatigue and concentration problems. Commuters who drive have 
it especially hard--bad weather, traffic jams and accidents all cause 
stress. ...
   More neglected, perhaps, are family, friends and hobbies. A 2001 study by 
Norbert Schneider, a sociology professor at the University of Mainz in 
Germany, reported in depth on 65 long-distance commuters and the spouses or 
domestic partners of 45. Almost 60 percent of the workers complained that 
they had no time to pursue their own interests--no sports, no clubs, not 
even an occasional outing with friends.
   Furthermore, when the people with families finally got home they often 
had insufficient time for spouses and children. Spending open-ended time 
playing with the kids or cultivating a shared hobby with a spouse could 
happen only on weekends or vacations. Interestingly, two thirds of the 
spouses and partners felt that they were just as burdened--or even more 
so--noting that they essentially had to take care of all family duties and 
household chores themselves. Often they managed this task only by sharply 
curtailing their own professional obligations and personal interests. 
Perhaps Schneider's deeper finding was that one third of the spouses and 
partners felt the negatives of a long commute simply were not worth the 
positives.
"""

Longer commutes can also help explain why so many US organizations (both big 
corporations and government) are increasingly dysfunctional, since many 
workers are poorly rested and unhappy from long commutes.

Came across this as I was just looking at a job doing open source 
educational 3D graphics things in Java about engineering (at a good pay 
rate), but it is unfortunately four hours away (each way).
   http://www.concord.org/
   http://www.concord.org/about/opportunities/3Dprogjuly09.pdf
But it's great for anyone who lives in the Boston area or can relocate. 
That's the way a non-profit should be IMHO -- getting grants to make useful 
stuff that is free for all. Unfortunately, moving within the USA is also 
tough right now due to slow home sales. (And personally, if I was going to 
move, I'd prefer a state with better pro-homeschooling laws. :-)
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/724237/which_states_have_the_best_homeschooling.html?cat=17

But the fact is, even if I moved to the Boston areas, it is very expensive 
to live there, so I'd be facing a long commute even then to get affordable 
housing.

In general, the solution I see is that the USA needs more cities. :-)

Seriously, we need to bulldoze suburbs and start upgrading those and towns 
into cities (or build new cities). The upgraded towns should of course be 
designed in a sustainable way and with mixed-use zoning. One person who 
suggested such:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
More ideas:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_city

Mass transit would help too. I've been reading James P. Hogan's "The Two 
Faces of Tomorrow" to my child (slightly editid) and there is a scene there 
about "autocabs" that you get into individually but will form up into trains 
running through high speed maglev tubes, and would get you door-to-door from 
New York City to Washington, D.C. in twenty minutes (when that now takes 
several hours). That book was perhaps the first one I read gave me a 
detailed vision of what a better society with better but realistic 
technology could look like, as well as long-lasting concerns about computing 
singularities. Online here:
http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0671878484/0671878484.htm

The related description:
   http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0671878484/0671878484.htm
"""
The next morning Dyer and Richter met as arranged, boarded an autocab and 
specified the Department of Communications and Information Management 
Headquarters, Washington, D.C., as their destination. The cab navigated 
Manhattan and was pipelined across to New Jersey along one of a battery of 
ten monorails suspended in a single span four hundred feet above the Hudson. 
There it turned south and merged with forty-nine other cabs to form a train 
which accelerated as one unit into the New York-Washington tube, through 
which it hurtled in vacuum, riding on magnetic suspension at speeds touching 
800 mph for most of the way. At the far end the train broke up to become 
independent cabs once again, which dispersed into the Washington local 
system. Twenty minutes after leaving New York, Dyer and Richter were in an 
elevator ascending from the autocab terminal located below the CIM HQ building.
"""

So, I'm guessing such a system might let me commute in a "green" way from 
the NY Adirondack Park to outside Boston in half an hour, while I caught up 
on the p2plist. :-)

Probably the USA needs one hundred new small cities (guessing) as well as 
such a more dynamic mass transit system as above. And there are fifteen 
million unemployed people in the USA, many who would be happy to build all 
that, and trillions of dollars sloshing around to pay them, judged by the 
recent banking bailout. And, a basic income would ensure people could move 
to these new cities at first. So, plenty of resources.

And plenty of land for all that, considering how US population density is 
about one-tenth Europe's:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
"Developed Land- Despite all the hand wringing over sprawl and urbanization, 
only 66 million acres are considered developed lands. This amounts to 3 
percent of the land area in the U.S., yet this small land base is home to 75 
percent of the population. In general, urban lands are nearly useless for 
biodiversity preservation. Furthermore, urbanized lands, once converted, 
usually do not shift to another use. ... The USDA report concludes that 
urbanization and rural residences (subdivisions) "do not threaten the U.S. 
cropland base or the level of agricultural production." This does not mean 
sprawl doesn't have impacts where it occurs. But the notion that sprawl is 
the greatest threat to biodiversity is absolutely false. ..."

Until then, it will be a perennial problem that most non-profits pay less 
but locate themselves in expensive areas to live (Boston, New York, 
Washington D.C., San Francisco). So, in general the only people who can 
afford to participate in them without tragic commutes are well off already, 
sometimes the twenty-something crowd, or those with two working parents 
(usually one as professional who has bought into the system).

So, peer-to-peer ideas eventually provides an alternative to that scene, 
both in terms of things happening over the internet, and also other broader 
social changes like Hogan or Jacobs or others envisoned that might make 
face-to-face work easier.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/