Why Even the Hyperloop Probably Wouldn’t Change Your Commute Time - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/upshot/why-even-the-hyperloop-probably-wouldnt-change-your-commute-time.html
The general law of the 30-minute commute is known as Marchetti’s constant, named for the Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, a mentor to Mr. Ausubel. Mr. Marchetti picked up the work of Yacov Zahavi, a transportation engineer who theorized in the 1970s and ’80s that people have a fixed travel-time budget. We allocate part of our day to getting around. And that amount, about an hour, Mr. Zahavi argued, holds steady no matter where we live or how we travel.
(…)
“What we’re going to see with some of these new proposals is not necessarily that cities will grow much bigger,” Mr. Ratti said. “But we’re going to see two cities become one, in terms of culture, in terms of the labor market, in terms of universities.”