From a post by Buzz Anderson about why he’s leaving Apple Inc.:
But it wasn’t just the workload. As the stress and hours increased at work, my 45 minute commute down 280, which I had initially thought of as a reasonable (even pleasant and scenic) drive, became a soul crushing daily slog. With most of my social life in San Francisco, but my demanding job an exhausting drive away in Cupertino, I started finding it harder and harder to keep up relationships. As a recent article about commuting in The New Yorker put it:
“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,†Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,†about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten percent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.â€Â
In case you were wondering where Neal Boortz’s audience comes from…
The moral is live close to your job if you can. That’s especially important in Georgia, where long-range transportation planning has been reduced to playing tonsil hockey with the road lobby.
Yeah, people make fun of us for living OTP, but honestly, when we bought our house? It was less than five minutes from my office. That number has changed - my company moved offices, I got a new job, and now another new job, but when there is not traffic, it will probably take me 20 minutes to get to work. And work is very close to where we perform, and is generally on the way to everything we do that is social. My dad had a stupid commute, and I vowed I would never do it. I tried commuting from Athens to Atlanta — it was ridiculous. RIDICULOUS. Contrary to popular belief, there really is not enough money in that to make it worth it.
This is why I love living in L5P.
I have no commute. I’m at work in only a few minutes and I don’t own a car.
Why, then, am I sooooo lonely?
“That’s especially important in Georgia, where long-range transportation planning has been reduced to playing tonsil hockey with the road lobby.”
That might be the best (and most true) single line written on any blog in Georgia this year…
And maybe this “social isolation commuting” theory and hateful conservative radio is worth some more research. Surprised Boortz didn’t get more flack on his “ghetto slut” comment on Cynthia McKinney went it hit national blogs after Imus.
Thomas,
We live near Freedom Park now on Ralph McGill. We should grab a beer.
Trackboy,
It does seem like some of those standards are applied arbitrarily. I’m guessing there’s a correlation between the level of outrage and how seriously the person is taken when not making asinine comments.
For example, few people take the KKK seriously anymore, so when they say something stupid, people watch their little parade go by and go, aww, isn’t that cute! White supremacists!
If the CEO of Coca Cola came out and made a statement like the one Boortz made or marched in a Klan march, there’d be international outrage.
Audience size doesn’t appear to be a factor like I thought it might be. Boortz has an audience of 2.5 million or 3.5 million depending on which source you believe. Imus had a radio audience around 3.25 million and a TV audience of 335,000/hour according to the source (Talker’s Magazine) that gave the high Boortz estimate.
I guess people, for whatever reason, took Imus more seriously than they did Boortz.
Not only is living close to where you work important for happiness, it is important for sanity and safety; especially here. People drive like MANIACS!!!
Oh, I remember when I lived less than 2 miles from where I work… that was NICE.
I loved this article. It satisfied both my Apple fanaticism and my constant queries about commuting. We live about 20 minutes (surface roads, low traffic) from our business. With numerous routes to select from each day we have the opportunity to watch the city change and keep tabs on our neighborhood. It’s also a great way to prepare for the day in the morning and detox in the evening. Any longer and I would probably go bonkers.
Wise words from Woz and Jobs are always a treat. Having spent some time at Infinite Loop and having several friends who were there in the early days, Buzz made me miss those folks and the Apple online community I spent so much time in (and coincidentally where I met the love of my life). Good times. Good friends. Good code.
Thanks Rusty. Good read.
I think the notion of ITP/OTP is a little ridiculous. Plenty of people that claim to be ITP snobs would go here:
http://www.google.com/maps?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&q=whole+foods&near=Sandy+Springs,+GA&cid=0,0,14995029719957863543&f=d&daddr=5930+Roswell+Rd+NE,+Atlanta,+GA+30328,+USA&ie=UTF8&z=16&ll=33.916685,-84.379183&spn=0.012109,0.020084&om=1&iwloc=A
But I doubt many of them would go here:
http://www.google.com/maps?q=3070+Merk+Rd+SW,+Atlanta,+Georgia+30349,+USA&ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=33.704349,-84.504089&spn=0.194218,0.32135&om=1&iwloc=addr
Both of them are about an equal distance from the Perimeter, but I think ITP really means the Central/Northern “white” areas inside or close to the Perimeter.
Also, Nikki makes a good point about work. To a large degree you can’t choose where your office is located. I live next to a MARTA station and used to ride it to work when I worked in Midtown, but now that I work in Marietta I’m out of luck (though I will probably experiment with CCT one day).
I’ve always been a big proponent of people working where they live, via mixed use or commercial development wherever that happens to be. If someone wants to live in Buford or Woodstock for whatever perceived benefits they think they’ll get out of that (larger house, better schools?) I say to each his own. At the same time, I wonder why the desire to work out there also and reduce commute times doesn’t seem to be expressed more vocally or more through political choices.
Obviously you can’t just expect your work to move to wherever you live, but people change jobs so frequently these days that you think they’d want to encourage more job opportunities in their area so that they can find a close when it’s time for a new job or whatever.
Interesting to hear about commutes and social isolation though…I know I dread my commute!
Well, to my mind, one major problem with the second and third ring areas is there’s little to no public transportation. And getting away from Atlanta - take an arguably metropolitan area such as Augusta. NOTHING. So yeah, people might live close to where they work, but if the only option for travel is to drive, then that equals gridlock - just for a shorter distance.
And, I don’t believe lack of public transportation to be a defining characteristic of the suburbs. Just look at NYC and Boston for two examples.
I think one failure of marketing for public transportation here has been that the amount of time it takes to ride it is viewed as a huge negative instead of spun into a positive.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone complain that MARTA takes as long as driving (or slightly longer) and that they’d just assume ride in their own car etc, discounting the fact that you can’t be productive at all if you’re driving compared to extra sleep or work or whatever you can accomplish when you’re not.
I think for too long Georgians (who already are suspicious of transit) were scared away by planning officials who either mishandled intentionally or accidentally the expectations of what transit can and can’t do.
In DC, for example, sitting in traffic can take a long time and so can waiting on the Metro to take you somewhere, but waiting on a train and then riding it isn’t nearly as maddening as navigating 395. What Georgia needs is probably some sort of “45 minute” task force or something that will choose a set time limit (45 minutes for example) and try to determine transit solutions that will get you places in that time limit. Then you could build on that with ad campaigns (ie “What can you get done in 45 minutes?”).
Right now transit and transit proposals are a total mystery to Georgians. It’s easy to blame ourselves/voters for being too backwards when it comes to transit but at the same time we haven’t been that creative in marketing a future that people can see themselves as part of.
When I worked in midtown I was uniquely lucky in that my average car commute took almost the exact amount of time as riding MARTA. It was very easy to ride MARTA at least 3 times a week and especially if I didn’t need to run any errands, although I also enjoyed going to the Lindbergh Best Buy and Home Depot on the way home from work. I would wager most Atlantans who could ride MARTA have no idea what their commute could be if they did.
I live 3.1 miles from my office, and my commute time is about 15-20 minutes, depending on what time I’m driving. (I have to drive through the 285/400 mess that is Glenride, or drive up Roswell Rd. or Peachtree-Dunwoody.) As such, MARTA is an inconvenience from me, as in the time it would take me to drive to MARTA, park, wait on a train, get off MARTA, wait on the bus, walk to work, it would be a 30-45 minute ordeal.
Even when I was living off Howell Mill/Collier, and I was about 10 miles to work via interstate and surface streets, MARTA was still too much of a hassle, as there are no stations along I-75 north of Brookwood. While there was a MARTA station in the building I worked in, I didn’t want to deal with the buses and then walking, particularly with nasty weather.
Granted, I love taking MARTA for sporting events, going to the airport, etc. And my BF takes it daily, as it ends up taking the same amount of time and is less costly, and the stations are convenient to his home and office.
But until it takes the same or less effort to ride MARTA, people just aren’t going to bother.
Muse,
MARTA is awesome when you both live and work near a rail station, but yeah, after that it’s a real crapshoot. There are gaps in the service that could really stand to be filled.
We’re +/- four miles from work. We now drive most of the time because it costs us less even with parking and gas factored in, and it takes less time unless the rail transfer at Five Points goes our way.
Our commute typically only works out to about 15 minutes or so driving, and it’d probably be slightly more if we were going on MARTA, depending on how the Five Points rail transfer went.
When I lived in Decatur and even in Marietta, I found it more convenient to use transit though. The commute time was about the same in both cases (in the 35-45 minute range), the difference being I got a lot of reading done on the buses and trains and found it less stressful. And it was less expensive.
There may come a time when we get back on MARTA though, because traffic is much worse on the way home than it is on the way to work for some reason. If it gets too bad, we probably could avoid most of it on the southbound rail line. The bus ride from Five Points to our apartment is short, and I don’t expect the traffic on that leg of the route would be too bad.
Also, it is good that many MARTA stations (esp. the more ‘far-flung’ ones) have plenty of parking. So people can drive to the station and take the train the rest of the way into work.
Rusty,
You commented some weeks ago that you were trying to get more healthy. Like I said above, I live in L5P (technically Poncey Highlands but who outside of that neighborhood actually knows where that is) and my jobby job is at N.Side and Marietta (where Somber Reptile once was). I often walk to and from work.
Sure, it’s a hour’s walk but it gives me plenty of time to think and is great exercise. I can also finish a number of my weekly errands along the way.
I understand that this isn’t a viable option for everyone but I also think that Atlanta is a foot-phobic city and that people, where possible, should get out and tread their way more often.
Northside and Marietta… I used to work over there. You work in one of those old converted buggy factories? I did.
Anyway. Not sure why you had to put in the “you said you were trying to get more healthy” thing in your comment. What are you trying to insinuate?
That New Yorker article that Anderson quotes from is terrific. A big chunk of the piece is about commuting in and around Atlanta.