Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Apr 22, 2006

In Part 1 we discussed this cartoon which postulates among other things, that houses have been steadily increasing in size every year and have now gotten too big. I theorized about some of the causes. The quest to have more and to impress those around us have dangerous side effects. One problem is that the real estate in the city is just far too valuable to allow everyone to have 2500 sqaure feet of house and a yard. Inevitably, one is forced out of the city to get houses with the space desired. Further and further they go as developers stretch the meaning of the word suburb.

As we move outside of a circle in a concentric fashion and the distance between two points is not a straight line, the time it takes to travel goes up beyond measure. Factor in traffic from other people doing a similar or reverse commute and you will find quite a mess. So when somebody says they live 10 miles outside the city the first instinct may be to assume it would take him/her 15 minutes to get downtown whereas in reality it might take an hour. Currently, the concentric circle in many cities has extended over 30 miles making the commute downtown between 2 to 3 hours. Public transportation cannot help most of these commuters because their suburban neighborhoods were chosen in part because of the insulation from the city.

So as suburban sprawl gets worse, commute time increases.. But the numbers are not that alarming. According to a recent survey, the average one-way commute took 24.3 minutes in 2003 which is only two minutes more than it took in 1990. Why is that? Well, one reason is that when people move out to the surburbs small busineses tend to follow. Later on, larger companies do the same, usually to claim some cost savings over the heavy rents in bigger cities. Is this a good thing?

Frankly I am not sure where I stand on this issue. There is a difference between a suburb and a small town and one of the things that help tell the difference is the extent of the local economy. If the suburban local economy increases and more people in those suburbs stay in those suburbs to live AND work then commute times and gas consumption would both decrease. And that is something we can all agree is a good thing.