Commuting into the Future: Zahavi's Hypothesis, Marchetti's Constant and Hybrid Work

In the ever-evolving landscape of work and life, something has remained remarkably consistent. Human beings, regardless of historical period, city size, technological advances or cultural differences, seem to have an inherent travel time budget of around an hour a day. We know this thanks to the work of two researchers: Yacov Zahavi and Cesare Marchetti.

The Background

Yacov Zahavi was a transport engineer and urban planner who studied travel behavior. In the 1970s, Zahavi observed that people, regardless of their culture or location, seem to spend a fairly consistent amount of time traveling each day. The time usually averaged around 1 to 1.5 hours, irrespective of the mode of transport. This is referred to as Zahavi's Hypothesis.

Cesare Marchetti picked up on Zahavi's work, and extended it in the 1990s. Marchetti (who we lost just this past April) was an Italian physicist who made remarkable contributions to the worlds of geoengineering (especially around C02), and the Hydrogen Economy. He postulated that people are willing to travel about one hour per day on average, regardless of the technological advances in transportation. This constant has been observed in different societies and eras, from pre-industrial times to the modern day, and is referred to as Marchetti's Constant.

Both Zahavi's hypothesis and Marchetti's constant offer insights into the design of cities and transportation systems. The concepts have been used to guide urban planning decisions, as they suggest that people are likely to live within a "travel time budget" that usually averages around an hour per day.

While there may be exceptions and the exact time can vary, these observations highlight a fundamental pattern in human behavior related to daily commuting and travel. It helps us understand how far people are willing to commute and can influence the layout and connectivity of cities, and our understanding of how people 'spend' their time.

The Future

The landscape of work has seen a seismic shift. As of 2023, 12.7% of full-time employees in the U.S. are working from home (as of 2022 that was 31% in Canada - current numbers are hard to find), 28.2% in a hybrid model, and 59.1% still in-office.

While these number are interesting, as I have combed through the articles to understand their impact on the 'bigger picture', where human behaviour, commuting, urban transportation, urban design, etc. intersect, I could find little that drew on larger economic or social models, like the work of Zahavi and Marchetti.

This matters because if we are only looking at human and organizational behaviour and not using a larger systems perspective that includes broad social, urban, and economic dimensions, we are likely to misread what is going on. Human and organizational behaviour are elements of a larger dynamic, not fixed, self-reinforcing system.

A lens that focuses only on commercial real estate utilization and quiet downtowns (as important as those things are) is likely to miss the potentially massive compound effects set in motion by the new, and statistically significant, shift in workplace and commuting behaviour.

Human Behavior: A Rebalancing?

With 65% of employees wanting to work remotely all the time and 71% finding that remote work helps balance work and personal life, the intrinsic travel time budget observed by Zahavi and Marchetti will take new forms, because it is a constant.

Where will the time saved from commuting be channeled?

The Vote is in: 57% of remote workers saying they'd look for a new job if remote work was not allowed. 32% of hybrid workers indicate they'd be willing to take a pay cut to work remotely full-time drives home the scale of the potential effect (most of the statistics in this article come from: Remote Work Statistics & Trends In (2023) – Forbes Advisor).

A Shift Towards Community

The growth in remote and hybrid work, projected to reach about 22% of the workforce by 2025, will challenge existing trends in city planning and design. We may finally see a shift from the socially and ecologically disastrous formulation of the hub-and-spoke model of urban centers and suburbs, made possible by (and originally required for) the automobile and its related industries.

Will we see a shift from central business districts to local community hubs?

Demographic Factors: Remote work is more accessible for those aged 24 to 35 and those with higher education levels. Interestingly a lower percentage of women work from home than men (30% vs 38% respectively). What are the impacts of these demographic dimensions, on planning for urban transportation?

Efficiency and Quality of Experience?

It is estimated that an employer can realize savings of $11,000 per remote employee. I would imagine to realize this level requires an 'all in' commitment; as long as you keep your commercial real estate, I don't see how we realize those returns.

On the employee side there is a growing realization that by completely rethinking what a work day looks like (https://www.sofi.com/article/money-life/modern-workdays-new-dead-zone/) would allow us to be both more productive and have a life. Many of us have intuited that how our work hours are distributed (flexibility and autonomy) has a greater impact on our lives than the somewhat arbitrary total number of hours worked.

For me, this intuition merges with the concept of the travel time constants observed by Zahavi and Marchetti. They are human centric. They are determined not as we thought, by the mechanistic factors of the work we did or where we lived or the technology available to us. It is just what we do, regardless of all of those things. Our cities and our transportation systems reflect that human constant, not the other way around.

What role will that time play in the rethinking and restructuring of what productivity and quality-of-life look like? It is an hour a day that we will not be using for some things, and will now be using for other things at other times of day... what is the impact of that?

Commuting Into the Future

Workplace and commuting patterns, near-static for almost a hundred years, have become a kaleidoscope of rapidly evolving patterns. As remote work becomes an ingrained part of our lives, Zahavi's and Marchetti's work offer us an important lens to see more of the 'whole system' and anticipate the resulting changes in human behavior, urban landscapes, and transportation.

Between the statistics and the human behavioural constants suggested by Zahavi and Marchetti I see an emerging picture of a world reshaping the relationship between efficiency, productivity, quality-of-life and community. On its own, the constant is just a small piece of the picture. But that piece is a unique lens I haven't seen anywhere else, helping us to see new shapes and possibilities in our cities and lives.

Thank you for reading.

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Clemens Rettich