Drivetime

Predawn commutes are increasingly common. You might know someone that sounds like Dawn Davis:

For an hour, padding about in a fraying robe, sipping coffee from a bucket-sized mug, she forces herself awake. Then, in thick country darkness, she climbs into her miniature red Ford and heads south, racing 70 miles to her job in downtown Minneapolis. By the time she returns home in the evening, she has about an hour of leisure before she hits the sack. An hour? "That," winces the 58-year-old, "is what my friends say."

Why do people do this? For small-town life, a feeling of escape, a sense of security:

"It really tells us something about the American character: that we will trade almost everything to get what we want," said Curtis Johnson, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Council who now leads, from Edina, a national consulting firm devoted to metropolitan issues.

"Long drives before sunrise, the cost, the inconvenience, the loss of family time," he said. "If we want something bad enough -- the bigger home, the feeling of safety, whatever it might be -- we'll trade almost anything to get it."

Is it as David Brooks points out in his book On Paradise Drive--that Americans are eternally restless? That the grass really is always greener on the other side? That the perfection everyone is striving for is really, truly within reach--if only we drive further and get up earlier? If only the kids grow up in the small towns we never knew? If we can each establish and maintain a retreat for ourselves, out there in the semi-exurban semi-wilderness, where life is "simpler" and "more real"?

Can we be perpetually mobile as well as deeply rooted?

Some people say it's purely for the lower home prices (nevermind the outrageous amounts of time and money spent for the car's sake, and the health problems such a lifestyle can produce). Polling reveals that residents of metropolitan areas like Minneapolis would gladly trade proximity for lifestyle if money were no object:

Anne Karl drives to her job at the St. Paul Heart Clinic from her home in Arlington, in Sibley County. The single mom wanted a smaller -- and to her mind, safer -- high school for her kids than they'd find in Richfield, but she couldn't afford closer cities such as Lakeville.  "I chose Arlington," she said, "for the fact that I actually grew up there. It was a great town to grow up in." There are lots of folks who think the same way.

Although the Metropolitan Council strives to concentrate as much growth as possible in the older, built-up areas of the Twin Cities, its own surveys consistently prove that even metro Minnesotans have a profound hankering for rural and small-town life. If folks could live where they'd ideally chose to, council analysts conceded in their most recent report, "the result would be a large exodus from the suburbs, a smaller shift out of the central cities, and a doubling of the region's rural population."

Interestingly, as this NPR piece points out, the migration of jobs to the "donut" of suburbs surrounding a city is a large part of what draws smaller outlying jobs into the commuter belt of a city, making the drive seem reasonable. The average American now spends 25 minutes enroute to work.

These "extreme commuters" have what Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam would call a huge "triangle," where the amount of disillusionment, illness, and inconvenience exists in their lives in direct proportion to the increasing length of said triangle's sides:

Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

Putnam’s favorite city is Bologna, in Italy, which has a population of three hundred and fifty thousand; it’s just small enough to retain village-like characteristics. “It would be interesting to swap the citizens of Bologna with the population of New Jersey,” Putnam said. “Do the Bolognese become disconnected and grouchy? Is there a sudden explosion of malls in Bologna? How much of the way we live is forced on us? How much is our choice?”

The growth of extreme commuting (a term first coined by the US Census Bureau in 2003, to describe the 8% of Americans who now commute more than an hour to work in both directions) affects former farm towns of the Upper Midwest just as much as less expensive corners of Europe, pulling previously remote locales into a jarringly new sense of nearness. The proliferation of discount airlines makes working in London while calling Barcelona home an actual possibility:

When you think of the commuter belt around London you don't immediately think of Barcelona, Marrakech and Tallinn....

By 2016, there will be 1.5 million people working in the United Kingdom but living overseas, using Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted as commuter terminals - predicts a report from the Future Forum, set up by travel firm Thomson. So instead of grinding into work on packed commuter trains, people will be looking for a better quality of life in accessible, more affordable overseas cities, working in jobs where they don't have to be in the office each morning.

Carrie Frais earns her living as a television news presenter in London, but finds it better value to live in Barcelona, using budget airlines for her international commuting. "I couldn't afford this quality of life in London - or else I'd have to be working every hour of every day. In Barcelona, you don't need as much to live on - everything from rent, food and clothes is cheaper."

Frais doesn't trek back and forth every day, unlike Davis in Minnesota; she stays with friends or family during the week. That leads to another question: where does "home" exist in a state of extreme mobility?  How and when does the road or the airport security checkpoint begin to accrue "homelike" characteristics? What happens to "region"? What makes someone a native? A stranger?

(Earlier: Enroute; and life in the Aerotropolis. And of course, Walter Kirn's prescient Up in the Air.)