Marchetti’s constant is the average time spent by a person for commuting each day. Its value is approximately one hour, or half an hour for a one-way trip. It is named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, though Marchetti himself attributed the “one hour” finding to transportation analyst and engineer Yacov Zahavi.[1]
Marchetti posits that although forms of urban planning and transport may change, and although some live in villages and others in cities, people gradually adjust their lives to their conditions (including location of their homes relative to their workplace) such that the average travel time stays approximately constant.[1][2][3] In his 1934 book Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford attributes this observation to Bertrand Russell:
can confirm: working from home, it takes me an hour to get out of bed after I wake up 😅
tl;dr: The faster your means of transport is, the longer distances you will go - and the longer distance will, over time, eat up any speed advantage.
The fun thing is, within some limits, this also works the other way around: If you chose a slower means of transport, your life will adapt almost automatically to commute shorter distances. And it works both individually as well as collectively.
That’s why people in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and so on, do not spend more time commuting than people in Los Angeles or Houston. See the picture from the article :
(Creative Commns License; CC- by-SA; author Maps.interlude)
My observation is that it also works for holiday travel: In a nutshell, using planes does not save you time.
light rail is apalling in the us, they often rival some car commuting to far away.