飩?/p>
Why Americans
Would Rather
Drive
1
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鈥檝e got a good song to listen to, a long commute doesn鈥檛 upset
me. In fact, I
don鈥檛 mind my lonely drive at all 鈥?/p>
I rather like it.
2
And I鈥檓 not the only one.
3
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鈥檛 enjoy driving
greater than the number who did.
4
鈥淭he car offers a rare space over which the drivers have total control,鈥?nbsp;
writes Alan Smith in the survey.
鈥淗ere they can breathe in the middle of
the
breathless
pace
of
work
and
home,
phones,
and
the
Internet.鈥?/p>
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.
5
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鈥檝e been told that cars are bad for the environment and
bad for communities.
We鈥檝e been hit with heavy gas
taxes
and we hear
regular demands that they be made even heavier.
6
Nevertheless
, we drive. Only 5 percent of commuters take mass transit
to
work
鈥?/p>
and
the
number
has
been
dropping. While
the
use
of
cars
has
increased more than 85 percent since 1970, the use of mass transit
鈥?/p>
buses,
subways, trolleys, commuter trains
鈥?/p>
has dropped by 3 percent. Today mass
tr
ansit represents barely 1 percent of the nation鈥檚
surface
passenger travel.