介绍:
My daily commute to and from work generally takes about 25 minutes. Traffic and weather sometimes make it last 45 minutes or more. But if I’ve got a good song to listen to, a long commute doesn’t upset me. In fact, I don’t mind my lonely drive at all — I rather like it.
And I’m not the only one.
In a recent survey of drivers in the U.S., 45 percent agreed that driving was their time to think and enjoy being alone. Only 30 percent disagreed; the rest were neutral. This was an issue with no gender gap: there were as many women as men who said they liked their drive time. Nor was it an issue of age: only among people older than 55 was the number who didn’t enjoy driving greater than the number who did.
“The car offers a rare space over which the drivers have total control,” writes Alan Smith in the survey.
“Here they can breathe in the middle of the breathless pace of work and home, phones, and the Internet.” Smith also uses evidence collected by other scholars to confirm that drivers are far less negative about the time they spend in the car than experts have previously believed.
But experts hardly agree that Americans generally like to drive themselves to work. For decades we have been urged to get out of our cars and into mass transit. We’ve been told that cars are bad for the environment and bad for communities. We’ve been hit with heavy gas taxes and we hear regular demands that they be made even heavier.
Nevertheless, we drive. Only 5 percent of commuters take mass transit to work — and the number has been dropping. While the use of cars has increased more than 85 percent since 1970, the use of mass transit — buses, subways, trolleys, commuter trains — has dropped by 3 percent.
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