Category: history of technology

What’s your Thoreau speed?

In Walden, Thoreau proposed a modification of the traditional formula for calculating speed. Instead of merely dividing the distance traveled by the time it took to cross it, Thoreau proposed reckoning also the cost of the ticket. Imagine, he writes, that he and a friend both want to go from Concord to Fitchburg.

I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have traveled at that rate by the week together. You will in the mean while have earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.

The thought experiment provided the donnée for a children’s book published in 2000, Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, by D. B. Johnson.

There’s no reason to distrust Thoreau’s math. A healthy adult could walk thirty miles in a day. According to a 2007 study, people in cities walk in the range of 3 and 4 miles per hour. Thirty miles is a long day’s walk, but it’s feasible. Nonetheless, I remember that when I first read this passage in Walden, I admired the cleverness but didn’t think it could possibly be true nowadays. After all, in a week I could earn the fare for an airplane ticket that would take me to California, and I couldn’t walk there in a month, I don’t imagine. (I made this innumerate estimate, of course, long before the price of oil skyrocketed, taking airplane fares with it.)

Lately I’ve started to wonder about cars, though. I have a new bike, and it seems quite often that cars make a great show of passing me, only to have me catch up at the next stop light. (When I bike in the city, I wait at stop lights, by the way, so this isn’t about the bonus that accrues to outlaws.) When driving, too, now that I’m bike-conscious, I’ve noticed that we may pass a biker in Manhattan, only to have him pass us when we get off the expressway in Brooklyn. Do cars actually reach their destinations faster than bikes? And even if the simple speed of cars is higher, is what we might call their Thoreau speed higher?

The concept of Thoreau speed was reprised in the social critic Ivan Illich’s 1974 book Energy and Equity, a critique of transportation. Illich writes that

The typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly instalments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent.

Unlike Thoreau’s numbers, Illich’s aren’t the sort you can look up on a railroad timetable or check against your own pedometer, and Illich doesn’t give his sources. So I was skeptical of his algebra, too, when I read it. But there is an awful lot of high-quality data readily available on the internet. . . .

According to Pat S. Hsu and Timothy R. Reuscher, Summary of Travel Trends: 2001 National Household Travel Survey (U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, December 2004), in 2001, the most recent year whose statistics are available, the average length of a weekday trip in a vehicle was 9.75 miles and a weekend trip 10.22 miles. The average time spent driving on a weekday trip was 64.79 minutes, and on a weekend trip 52.39 minutes. That means that the average speed on weekdays was 9.02 miles per hour and on weekends 11.70 miles per hour.

Right away, then, it’s apparent that the simple speed of cars is about that of bikes. It’s higher than that of walkers, but only by a factor of three or four.

Now what happens if you add in the time it takes to earn the cost of the ride, as Thoreau and Illich think you ought to? According to the Federal Highway Administration, the average annual miles driven by a vehicle in 2001 was 11,078. According to Your Driving Costs: How Much Are You Really Paying to Drive? (AAA, 2008), estimates of the average cost per mile of driving a car vary according to annual total mileage and the size of the vehicle, but for an average-size sedan (i.e., not an SUV or a minivan) that goes 10,000 miles a year, the average per-mile cost is 71.0 cents. This is an awfully convenient statistic for our purposes. Since this AAA number includes fuel, maintenance, tires, insurance, license, registration, taxes, depreciation (“the difference between new-vehicle purchase price and estimated trade-in value at the end of five years”), and financing charges, there’s no need to fiddle around trying to research gas prices or the actual cost of buying a car. Returning to the average trips from the Federal Highway Administration, it now appears that the cost of an average weekday trip is $6.92 and of a weekend trip $7.26.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly wage of an American in 2005 was $18.62. (I realize I’m using driving statistics from 2001, cost-of-driving statistics from 2008, and wage statistics from 2005, but in each case these are the most recent numbers I could find. Sorry!) Therefore, on average, the cost of a weekday car trip sets an American wage-earner back 22.3 minutes, and a weekend trip sets him back 23.4 minutes. From here it’s easy to recalculate the speed of those trips including the time it takes to earn the cost of taking them. The Thoreau speed of an average trip is 6.72 miles per hour on weekdays, and 8.09 miles per hour on weekends.

So the Thoreau speed of a car exceeds the speed of walking by only a factor of two. If hidden costs of cars such as car-related injury, death, pollution, and global warming were included, it might well be a tie.

At this point in my calculations, I Googled to find out the average speed of bicycles, and I discovered, serendipitously, that I’m not the first person to try to do this math. What’s more, I’m not even the first person to invoke Thoreau and Illich while doing so; someone named Brad Morgan invoked them in 1991. And a fellow named Ken Kifer has made a much more thorough assessment of the costs of driving. Kifer has also assessed the costs and the Thoreau speed of bicycles, into the bargain. He estimates the Thoreau speed of cars as between 4.8 and 14.4 miles per hour, and the Thoreau speed of bicycles as between 8.9 and 14.8 miles per hour. Though beaten to the punch, I’m posting anyway, because my sources and method are different yet I end up confirming Kifer’s conclusion: When costs are factored in, cars are not faster than bikes and only twice as fast as walking.

No forwarding address

Reading the chapter on cemeteries in Dell Upton’s Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (Yale, 2008), I learned that eternal rest beneath a headstone was originally the exception not the rule:

Burying grounds were commons in the traditional sense. Anyone could use them but no one could own them or appropriate them for their exclusive use. They were places to return the dead to dust, not to preserve and celebrate them. By law and custom, public burying grounds were a kind of consecrated waste-disposal plant, processing the abandoned cadaver after the soul of the deceased had gone on to another realm. As an English judge noted, in deciding a case in which a family sought to bury one of its members in an iron coffin that would slow or prevent decomposition, a graveyard was “not the exclusive property of one set of persons, but was the property of ages yet unborn. . . . All contrivance, therefore, to prolong the duration of the body, was an act of injustice, unless compensation was made for such encroachment.”

In such a cemetery, bodies were buried willy-nilly, one grave overlapping another. “When a new tomb is dug, an old one is laid open; and one body that has been slumbering a few years in peace, is removed from its resting place to make room for another,” wrote a horrified nineteenth-century reformer. Once the earth had done its work, graves were reopened to provide space for subsequent users. In European cemeteries and some American ones the skeletal remains were removed to charnel houses. In the light of its grisly function and high religious purpose, the cemetery was, in theory, a “garden of equality,” a place of “modest simplicity.”

Long before America was founded, though, the simplicity began to be undermined by elites, who insisted on privatizing a few spots for themselves. The rest of Upton’s book is not so morbid, by the way; it’s about early American urban design, and ranges from street noise to office architecture, with special attention to Philadelphia, New Orleans, and New York.

Is reading online worse than reading print?

As I explained in an earlier post, my review-essay “Twilight of the Books” appears in the 24 December 2007 issue of The New Yorker, and as an online supplement, I’m summarizing some of the data that I drew from, organizing the summaries by topic, and including links where I can. These are merely evidence in raw form and are probably a bit indigestible taken en masse. For analysis and discussion and hopefully a more pleasant read, please see the New Yorker article itself.

Previously: Does internet use improve or impair academic performance? Does it decrease the amount of time spent reading? Today: Is it more efficient to learn by reading print, by reading online, or by watching video?

  • When surveyed, medical students and business school say that they prefer to print out reading materials rather than read them onscreen. But an experimental test of 114 Scandinavian doctors found no significant difference in comprehension and retention of a short article between those who read it on paper and those who read it online, despite the doctors’ overwhelming preference for reading on paper. [Carrie Spencer, “Research on Learners’ Preferences for Reading from a Printed Text or from a Computer Screen,” Journal of Distance Education, 2006. Linda A. Martin and Mark W. Platt, “Printing and Screen Reading in the Medical School Curriculum: Guttenberg vs. the Cathode Ray Tube,” {link to citation only} Behaviour & Information Technology 2001. Pal Gulbrandsen, Torben V. Schroeder, Josef Milerad, and Magne Nylenna, “Paper or Screen, Mother Tongue or English: Which Is Better? A Randomized Trial,” Journal of the American Medical Association 2002.]
  • In a 2007 study, 132 college students in Alabama were shown a PowerPoint slide presentation on the country of Mali in one of three formats: text only, text with audio commentary, and text with an audiovisual commentary. The commentary was by a presenter who read the material on the slides almost word for word. When quizzed about the presentation, those shown the version with audiovisual commentary scored significantly lower than those shown the text-only version. The scores of those shown the version with audio commentary fell in between. Those shown the text-only version were more likely to agree with the statement “The presentation was interesting,” and those shown the text with audiovisual commentary were more likely to agree with the statement “I did not learn anything from this presentation.” [Steven C. Rockwell and Loy A. Singleton, “The Effect of the Modality of Presentation of Streaming Multimedia on Information Acquisition,” {link to citation only} Media Psychology 2007.]
  • In a number of studies led by Barrie Gunter and Adrian Furnham in the late 1980s, adults and children proved better able to recall information conveyed to them in print than by audio or television, “even where exposure time is equated across viewers, listeners, or readers.” (In fact, equal exposure time gives an advantage to readers; not only can readers set their own pace, slowing down when they reach a difficult passage and speeding through an easy one, but readers are often able to read a transcript silently more than once in the time it takes for the same material to be performed or read aloud.) Gunter and Furnham proved that print was superior whether the subject matter was television news, party political broadcasts, television advertisements, or scientific information. A 2002 study, however, found that when children and adults were quizzed about a children’s news program that they had either watched or read in transcript, children had better recall when they watched, especially if they were not proficient readers; adult recall was the same for both modalities. [Adrian Furnham, Barrie Gunter, and Andrew Green, “Remembering Science: The Recall of Factual Information as a Function of the Presentation Mode,” {link to citation only} Applied Cognitive Psychology 1990. Adrian Furnham, Samantha de Siena, and Barrie Gunter, “Children’s and Adults’ Recall of Children’s News Stories in both Print and Audio-visual Presentation Modalities,” {link to citation only} Applied Cognitive Psychology 2002.]

The end! This is the last installment of an online annotated bibliography for my review-essay “Twilight of the Books”.

UPDATE (27 Feb. 2009): For ease in navigating, here’s a list of all the blog posts I wrote to supplement my New Yorker article “Twilight of the Books”:

Notebook: “Twilight of the Books” (overview)
Are Americans Reading Less?
Are Americans Spending Less on Reading?
Is Literacy Declining?
Does Television Impair Intellect?
Does Internet Use Compromise Reading Time?
Is Reading Online Worse Than Reading Print?
I also later talked about the article on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show and on KUER’s Radio West.
And, as a bonus round: Does media violence lead to real violence, and do video games impair academic performance?

Are you aware how fast your vehicle was going, sir?

If you have read, over at Paul Collins’s Weekend Stubble, that in 1903 the speed of thirty miles per hour earned a car the epithet “scorcher” in the New York Times, and that the speed limit in Long Branch, New Jersey, was in that year six miles per hour, you may have wondered how, in the time before radar, such laws were enforced.

As it happens, that question was still novel enough in 1926 for Upton Sinclair to put the answer in the opening pages of his novel Oil!. It is 1912, and the hero, Bunny Ross, age thirteen, is being driven through southern California by his father, who is going fifty miles per hour in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone. Suddenly they fall into “A speed-trap!”:

Oho! An adventure to make a boy’s heart jump! . . . It must be a dreadful thing to be a “speed-cop”, and have the whole human race for your enemy! To stoop to disreputable actions—hiding yourself in bushes, holding a stop-watch in hand, and with a confederate at a certain measured distance down the road, also holding a stop-watch, and with a telephone line connecting the two of them, so they could keep tab on motorists who passed! They had even invented a device of mirrors, which could be set up by the roadside, so that one man could get the flash of a car as it passed, and keep the time. This was a trouble the motorist had to keep incessant watch for; at the slightest sign of anything suspicious, he must slow up quickly—and yet not too quickly—no, just a natural slowing, such as any man would employ if he should discover that he had accidentally, for the briefest moment, exceeded ever so slightly the limits of complete safety in driving.

The technology of speed traps may have changed, but it seems that the psychology of the driver suddenly aware that he is under surveillance is one of the eternal and unchanging verities of the universe.