
Marchetti's constant - raldi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant
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thanatos_dem
Having had a 3 hour round trip commute time (South Bay to SF), and a 10 minute
round trip commute time (3 blocks away), I think that my current time of about
1 hour is the most desirable.

The long commute took a toll for obvious reasons, but even with the short
convenient walking commute, I found it led to difficulties maintaining a
healthy work/life balance.

An hour total commute (30 minutes each way) is generally enough to keep work
life separated from personal life, while not being too much burden, in my
opinion.

~~~
leesec
Having had a 45 minute walk to work ( no car ), and now a 2 minute drive (lazy
and it's winter). I'd say the 2 minute drive is most desirable. I can
decompress at home however I want and I'll take the extra 250 hours of leisure
a year please and thank you. I don't have kids or a family tho.

~~~
AstralStorm
2 minute drive? What? It takes longer than that to get into the car and get it
out of parking.

My bet is that it's at best 10 minutes. Which would mean it's at most 0.5 km
if the 2 minutes is actually drive time. Which means by the time you got into
a car you'd be there on foot.

Going that distance takes 10 minutes for a reasonably fit person.

Unless your car goes some 300 km/h...

The usual rule of thumb is that going by car is about 6x faster for urban
conditions and 20x for long roads.

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JamilD
> Ever since Neolithic times, people have kept the average time spent per day
> for travel the same, even though the distance may increase due to the
> advancements in the means of transportation.

I wonder how they deduced this. There isn’t a citation, and it seems pretty
extraordinary to be able to figure out the mean travel time of people in the
Neolithic era.

~~~
mirimir
As a wild-ass guess, consider some ~uniform fertile plane. Look at the
distribution of communities. The mean travel time is arguably at least
proportional to the mean separation. I'm not sure, but they might even be
equal.

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abdulhaq
Why all these named numbers all of a sudden? It doesn't make them any more
significant, it's just useless junk to memorize. Just say the average commute
is one hour.

Also, it's not a constant so call it marchetti's number or marchetti's
average.

~~~
perfmode
Everyone wants to leave their stamp on the earth.

\- Perfmode’s aphorism

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xchaotic
Well one arrives at such silly average because some have 0 commute and others
have very long ones. Ever since we settled as a species, there was no commute
to speak of - farming, merchants, blacksmiths all pretty much lived where they
worked. Commuting to an office is recent invention and was perhaps necessary
before internet, but in my view it feels a bit archaic now, and a waste of
time. There is social aspect of course, so if you want social interactions,
I'd say they should be deliberate and not some chance side effect of driving
to a crowded city centre.

~~~
emiliobumachar
The existence of farmer villages means that farmers did not, in fact, live in
the middle of their plot of land.

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bladecatcher
In Indian cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, one can easily spend 3 to 4 hours a
day commuting

