Posts Tagged “commuting”

Until the phone carriers and MBTA collude to spoil it, my daily subway commute is the only time that I’m completely unavailable to the outside world. No phone calls, no email, no social networks. At only three stops, the journey is too brief to really get into a novel or do serious work, so I’m happy when I find an abandoned newspaper on a seat, usually one of those free papers designed to be read in the span of a typical commute.

Why don’t I just take one of those papers from the box or the people handing them out? Well, that’s where it gets complicated. I don’t want to take a paper because I know I’m going to use it only ever so briefly and then I’ll feel responsible for either leaving it behind - arguably littering - or recycling it right away - which seems wasteful. Throwing it in the trash or using it in some art project don’t even make the list.

The free paper publishers know that litter is a big issue - they are banned for distributing on MBTA property and made a donation of hundreds of recycling bins (bags, really) to try and appease the transit people. So back to my eco-neurotic quandary: Is it littering to leave a newspaper on the subway so that others might read it, and does it make a difference if you originally picked up that paper or just found it on the seat?

If lots of people regularly left free papers on the seats, maybe some people would stop taking papers and the total amount of paper would go down. But if nobody ever took those papers off the train, there would be an awful lot of litter at the end of the day. Like a car that loses value when you drive it off the lot, a daily newspaper gets worthless fast.

I’m sure the law is clear: leaving stuff on the T, even nice clean stuff, even leaving it on the seat, is still littering. I’d also say that once you pick something up, you’re responsible for it, so leaving found stuff is littering again. But I still recoil at the waste of reading matter. Like many people (of the Book) I have a hard time throwing away or defacing books.

So here’s my wacky utopian proposal for the morning commute and reading time:

• If you were born on an even numbered day, you take papers on even numbered days, odd birthdays, odd paper days, and you leave those papers on the seat when you get off the train
• If its not your odd/even day, you pick up a left paper and are responsible for taking it off the train and recycling it
• After the main morning commute time, say 9:30am, alternate rules are off and any everybody is responsible for taking papers off the train

If everybody did this, we’d use only half as much paper for disposable free morning reading.  Fat chance of that.  The free paper people certainly don’t want to cut their circulation in half, and typical Americans aren’ t going to be interested in second-hand papers.

So until everybody switches to a more ecologically sound morning read, I will continue to be quietly grateful for minor littering, and will do my best to take my found paper with me on both odd and even days.

Via ever-alert procrastinator N comes this bit on Environmental Graffiti: America’s Most Pedestrianized Cities. Much to my shock, Boston is rated #1, with 13% of the population walking to work. I’m not sure what definition of city or metro area they used, but I’m pleasantly surprised. Maybe its because public transportation is generally so lousy, or maybe they counted all the students.

Having only recently chucked a car commute for a subway one, I now wonder if I should consider hoofing it to work. The benefits - and the drawbacks - are pretty evident. A quick jaunt to the MBTA website and google maps netted me some data upon which to geek:

A drive to work (above) is 2.9 miles and theoretically 11 minutes. A trip on the red line (below) is ten minutes, plus 14 minutes walk time to and from the station (and apparently no waiting time?) totals 24 minutes according to the MBTA.

Assuming that I walk the driving route of 2.9 miles, I’d guesstimate it would take me around 45 minutes, maybe up to an hour, approximately twice the T time, with some exercise and a saving of $3-4 a day depending on the type of T pass I buy. A close call in nice weather, a no brainer in the dead of winter or dog days of summer.

I normally wouldn’t bother with something like this, but the timing was just too good. As reported in the Boston Herald, a stretch of route 495 turned blood red yesterday, adding yet another hazard to daily gauntlet of Boston-area commuting. Like Marienhoff always used to say, “Blood will flow in streets like borscht!”

Plus, the cheap symbolism makes it easy to use as a lead-in for the corporate blog, and I never was much of a fan of Beaujolais Nouveau. (”Ah yes, but no more 1966. Lets splurge! Bring us some fresh wine! The freshest you’ve got - this year! No more of this old stuff.”)

So I’m leaving early (that means before sunset) today to get to Taste of the Nation, an excellent culinary charity event. I expect smooth sailing on the greentop.

I’ve just returned from two weeks on vacation during which I traveled thousands of miles but didn’t personally drive a single one. In New York City and in cities in Europe and Africa, I returned to car-free living, which always makes me think about my commute to work here in the Boston area.

What is the real cost of commuting? There’s the obvious financial cost the car and it’s associated maintenance (valued by the IRS at 48.5 cents per mile in 2007), plus the environmental cost of that car’s emissions, and of course, the stress, lost time, and physical danger of zipping about in a tin box at highway speeds with hundreds of others doing the same.

Using one of the many web-based calculators available (this one is based on 2003 data), I got a figure of $4,140. It would be nice to have an extra $4k in my pocket, but I don’t see that I would accept double the commute for a $4k raise. So what’s the gap between my personal utility for commuting and the readily available calculators?

How about time? Let’s assume that I could reduce my daily commute by 10 minutes each way, each day. That would be an annual time savings of 80 hours (10 mins/way x 2 ways/day x 5 days/week x 4 weeks/mo x 12 mo/year = 4,800 minutes). That’s about two weeks of time for which I don’t get paid and for which my employer gets no benefit, what economists might call Deadweight Loss. So every minute of commuting is four hours a year of lost time. That sounds a little closer to how I feel about it.

Having geeked out on numbers, the next logical step for me was to geek out on maps. Google maps wasn’t really designed for this, and I don’t have access to a professional GIS tool, so I poked around in Microsoft MapPoint and found a function that draws a “drivetime zone” showing all the places you can reach from a certain point in a certain time. Here is MapPoint’s map of my 10, 20 and 30 minute drivetime zones. The usual disclaimers apply, but you can clearly see the 10-minute zones that are worth two weeks a year each in lost time.

Getting inside the 10 minute drivetime zone puts public transportation and even walking back on the table, although both of those would probably take longer than driving, depending on the parking situation at work. In the meatime, Rabbi Low’s recent mods to my ride are making things a little less awful on the drive to work.