Urban Commuting Journeys Are Not "Wasteful"

Abstract

Do urban workers commute too much? Bruce Hamilton (1982) was the first to raise the question whether urban workers' commuting journeys are too long or, in his terms, "wasteful." He argued that the monocentric urban model predicts that workers' commuting journeys will be minimized. To test the model, he calculated the minimum commuting journey length for the average worker in a group of U.S. cities and compared the results to the actual average commuting journey length for those workers. He assumed that any difference between the two figures was "wasteful commuting." He found that the average minimum commuting distance was only 1.1 miles, but the average distance actually commuted by workers in those cities was 8.7 miles, or nearly eight times as great. Hamilton therefore concluded that the monocentric urban model has little predictive value concerning commuting behavior and that actual commuting behavior could be predicted just as well using an assumption that commuting is random. Commuting behavior is a central feature of any model that purports to explain urban residential and job location choice. Hamilton's assertion that the monocentric urban model has little predictive value concerning commuting behavior therefore strikes at the heart of