Commuting Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Commuting is the movement of people and vehicles between the place of work and the place of residence. Two peak traffic hours, at 7-8:00 a.m. and 5-6:00 p.m., correspond to the critical times of traveling to work and school in the early morning, and going back home in the evening.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated the average travel time to work was 24.3 minutes in 2003. There are not significant differences between big cities-New York, NY, is 38.3 minutes; Chicago, IL, is 33.2; Los Angeles, CA, is 29.0; Miami, FL, is 29.0-but variation is remarkable compared to the cities in the last positions-Wichita, KS, is 16.3 minutes; Corpus Christi, TX, is 16.1. American workers of 16 years and over spend more than 100 hours commuting to work each year. However, averages hide important differences between automobile commuters and bus and train commuters, because mass transit requires extra time for transfers or the search for stops in poorly serviced areas.

Various commuting types depend on the directions of movement. In-commuting is a process of movement from suburbs to the central city in the early hours-completed with a reverse commuting in the late evening. Lateral commuting occurs where there are mixed land uses-particularly within residential areas or suburbs-where job opportunities emerge with service demands. Because residential areas are mostly located outside the city center, in-commuting prevails. This category of commuting, however, corresponds to an urban structure where the city core holds a central business district which excludes residential areas, and that is not the case of old cities with historical districts or high urban density areas.

This massive movement has a direct negative effect on mobility, engendering congestion and compromising urban sustainability. Once carrying capacity of roadways is exceeded, average speed diminishes and traffic congestion leads to supplementary public demands for increasing capacity with improved infrastructures. New capacity eases movement and favors further urban sprawl, increasing the total number of trips and the length of the movements, so new congestion emerges. The effects on the environment are higher levels of air and noise pollution, a reduction of green lands for building roads, and a greater dependence on fossil fuels. Strategies such as carpooling help to reduce the emissions per person, but usually require dedicated HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes, usually shared with buses.

Commuting has two basic accessibility requirements: a wide, complex, and interconnected road network for automobiles and buses, complete with an effective and multiple transit system-including light and heavy train, metro, bus, or ferryboat. However, mass transit has certain dysfunctions. Infrequent services are in low density areas, while others are overcrowded; or cities are almost totally car-dependent because the public transportation system has been scaled down.

Commuter buses and trains offer services with higher frequency at specific hours, fixed routes, and frequent stops and changeovers, and they serve metropolitan areas as an extension of the core city. Intermodality facilitates passengers’ access in an integrated manner to multiple systems, responding to the complex urban structure or to local environment. Also, park and ride terminals-located in main train stations-allow commuters to leave their private vehicle and transfer to public transportation.

Both commuting time and trip length have slightly increased as congestion becomes more intense. The adaptive response is housing and job suburbanization and the relocation to less congested areas in searching for affordable housing. Concurrently, companies change their facilities, offices and factories from city center to the periphery-approaching the workers-and shopping malls move to reach consumers. This response strengthens lateral commuting and reduces inward and outward commuting. In the same way, more compact, dense, vertical cities with mixed land uses contribute to reduce travel times and facilitate walking or cycle commuting, notably reducing congestion. This happens in some European and Asian cities, where almost 30 percent of commuting falls in this category.

Commuting garners not only environmental, economic, or urban planning costs, but also social costs. Families have to pay for high transportation costs, which are progressively increased with rising gasoline prices. This, in turn, induces changes in transportation patterns, favoring a greater use of public transportation. People usually overestimate the benefits of the transaction-better house, salary or school, lower rent-and tend to underestimate the losses-social connections, free time, and stress-resulting in dissatisfaction. Some low and moderate income households can only find affordable housing far from their jobs, or dual-income households fail to live near both jobs, leading to the growing phenomenon of extreme commuting. The percentage of extreme commuters, those who travel 90 or more minutes and even up to 3 hours one way, has increased from 1.6 percent in 1990 to 2.8 percent in 2000.

Bibliography:

Jeffrey Kenworthy, Felix B. Laube, An International Sourcebook of Automobile Dependence in Cities, 1960-1990 (University Press of Colorado, 2000);
Jos Van Ommeren, Commuting and Relocation of Jobs and Residences (Ashgate, 2000);
Alan Pisarski, Commuting in America II: The Second National Report on Commuting Patterns and Trends (Eno Transportation Foundation, 1996);
Qing Shen, “Spatial and Social Dimensions of Commuting,” Journal of the American Planning Association (v.66, 2000);
Wayne Simpson, Urban Structure and the Labor Market. Worker Mobility, Commuting, and Underemployment in Cities (Oxford University Press, 1992).