City Borders Have Pretty Much Always Been Defined By The 30-Minute Commute

Photo: joe daniel price (Getty Images)

Even with the proliferation of work-from-home employment during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, commuting is still a prominent part of society. Bloomberg’s Citylab explored how humanity’s cities have evolved and expanded as transportation has become faster over the past two centuries.

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The size of cities remained relatively stagnant for around 1,000 years. Bloomberg compared how ancient Rome and medieval Paris were roughly the same size, mainly due to most people needing to commute on foot. Municipal boundaries paralleled rough estimates of how far someone could walk in 30 minutes, also known as the Marchetti Constant.

Most people still commute 30 minutes each way every weekday, but how we commute has changed. Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Second Industrial Revolution introduced ever faster and more convenient methods of public and personal transportation. From railroads and streetcars to subways and highways, development eventually led to the poster child of 21st-century suburban sprawl, Atlanta.

Modern Atlanta may bear little resemblance to the cities of past millennia, but its current residents share something fundamental with urbanites of the distant past: The average one-way commute time in American metropolitan areas today is about 26 minutes. That figure varies from city to city, and from person to person: Some places have significant numbers of workers who enjoy or endure particularly short or long commutes; some people are willing to travel for much longer than 30 minutes. But the endurance of the Marchetti Constant has profound implications for urban life. It means that the average speed of our transportation technologies does more than anything to shape the physical structure of our cities.

The expressway-focused infrastructure of Atlanta wasn’t inevitable. The direction taken was the result of choices made over decades. Please read the full feature from Bloomberg’s Citylab to find out exactly how we reached the present.