Time travel

In Ivan Illich's extended essay "Energy and Equity"  he made the point that a transportation system exists to save people time but that the total time spent should include the time spent earning the money to pay for it. 

But, and here’s a bit of physics, whilst the time saved goes with the speed the cost tends to go with its square. i.e. going twice as fast may save half the time but it’ll cost 4 times as much. So, if you travel more quickly the time you have to spend paying for the trip eventually exceeds the time you save by going faster. 

 He also argued, and here’s the equity bit, that the rich, who can afford to travel quickly, can only do so at the indirect expense of the poor, who can’t. For example, build an expressway through a favela and whilst the rich people in their cars save time its at the expense of the poor people whose community has been divided. The example which sprang to my mind was Concorde. At the time there was a public subsidy of about £5 per head towards its development. This was when the average wage was about 50p an hour. Hence, each of us gave about 10 hours of our time to the project. Time which the vast majority of us were never likely to get back. 

This argument struck me as immensely powerful. The only problem is that most of us can't choose to forgo the expense and take the time instead. For the cleaners who are busy being cleaned out of central London the extra hour's commute will not only use up an hour of their time but probably, to pay for it, the first few hours of each working day.

When the costs and benefits of transport schemes are evaluated, rich people's time is given a higher value than that of the poor. For example, in the UK the time of a typical taxi passenger is judged to be worth £45 an hour whereas that of a person on a bike is only £15. Given that the regularly riding a bike tends to increase your life expectancy, this is a counter example to the ironic fact that the value given to our time seems to be in inverse proportion to our life expectancy.

I used to take students out on bike rides into the North York Moors on a Wednesday afternoon and still can't really believe it was work. During one of these rides a student was talking about the car he was going to buy. We discussed the cost of the car, how much he was likely to use it and the time he'd spend at his part time job in order to pay for it. Once we'd divided the likely distance he'd travel by the time he he'd spend earning the money it came out at about 5mph. I then simply noted that we were already bumbling along at about 12mph so what was the point. As far as I know he never did buy the car.

The next post applies some of these principles to the HS2 Breaking even on the HS2

And a later one the transformational potential of insulation and bicycles