ancient cities

416 Journey to Work
Throughout her life, she remained a gradualist,
opposed to cataclysmic change and tyrannical
forces—whether public or private. She retained
confidence in the inherent ability of healthy communities
to be self-correcting in the face of a various
dangers, and dedicated her writings and
activism to ensuring the vigorous civic life she
thought necessary to do so.
Christopher Klemek
See also Neighborhood Revitalization; New Urbanism;
Public Realm; Urban Life; Urban Planning;
Urban Village
Further Readings
Allen, Max, ed. 1997. Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of
Jane Jacobs. Owen Sound, ON, Canada: Ginger Press.
Fishman, Robert. 1996. “The Mumford–Jacobs Debate.”
Planning History Studies 10:1–2.
Jane Jacobs tribute issues in the following journals: City
& Community 5:3 (September 2006); Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians 66:1 (March 2007).
Klemek, Christopher. 2007. “Placing Jane Jacobs within
the Transatlantic Urban Conversation.” Journal of the
American Planning Association 73:1.
———. 2008. “Jane Jacobs and the Fall of the Urban
Renewal Order in New York and Toronto.” Journal
of Urban History 34:2.
Jo u r n e y t o Wo r k
The concept of journey to work normally refers to
journeys from the residence to the workplace, usually
also including the return from the workplace
to the home. Commute is often used as a synonym.
Often, journeys to work include stops on
the way, for example, at kindergartens, coffee
shops, kiosks, or grocery stores. In the United
States, less than half of the journeys to work are
nonstop trips between home and workplace.
In spite of a rapid increase in leisure travel, journeys
to work still make up a major proportion of
travel in urban areas on weekdays. Among workforce
participants in the United States, work tours
accounted for 45 percent of the travel time on
weekdays and 42 percent of weekday traveling
distance in 2001. In Europe, higher proportions of
daily traveling distances are often reported; for
instance, among workforce participants in the
Copenhagen Metropolitan Area, commuting accounts
for about two thirds of the distance traveled within
the region on weekdays and nearly half the weekly
traveling distance. Across nations, there is a general
tendency for longer journeys to work among
men than among women.
Although increasing use of flextime work has
leveled out the morning and afternoon traffic
peaks somewhat, journeys to work are still characterized
by a higher temporal concentration than
other traveling purposes. The capacity of urban
expressways and public transit services are used to
the highest extent in the peak periods, and changes
in journey to work patterns are therefore important
to congestion levels as well as revenues for
transit companies. This has led to a strong focus
on journeys to work in transport planning and
research. These journeys have considerable social,
economic, and local environmental implications
associated with their nonoptional character and
their temporal and spatial concentration. They are
also important to overall energy use and emission
levels. Journeys to work probably make up a
higher proportion of actual travel time and distance
than reported in many trip-based travel surveys,
which often fail to take into account the role
of the daily commute as the fixed and basic trip
onto which other trip purposes, for example,
grocery shopping, may be hitched.
Commuting Distances
Following general trends toward higher mobility,
commuting distances have increased over time.
This applies both to the journeys made by urban
residents to workplaces within the same city and
intercity commuting. In particular, the latter trips
have become longer and more frequent as the
friction of distance has been reduced through
motorway construction and new high-speed rail
connections, leading to a functional integration of
increasingly large regions.
In countries like the United States and Denmark,
one-way commuting distances are on average
about 18 kilometers (11 miles). In comparison, on
the affluent Chinese southeastern coast, where car
ownership rates are still low but rapidly rising,
urban workers travel on average less than one
third of that distance to reach their workplace.