The link between transport and happiness

A really interesting article the other day on The Guardian explains the link between how we get design our city around transport and our happiness. It starts out talking about Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá who in a few short years massive changed the nature of the city including putting a really strong focus on cycling and public transport.

Peñalosa insisted that, like most cities, Bogotá had been left deeply wounded by the 20th century’s dual urban legacy: first, the city had been gradually reoriented around cars. Second, public spaces and resources had largely been privatised. This reorganisation was both unfair – only one in five families even owned a car – and cruel: urban residents had been denied the opportunity to enjoy the city’s simplest daily pleasures: walking on convivial streets, sitting around in public. And playing: children had largely disappeared from Bogotá’s streets, not because of the fear of gunfire or abduction, but because the streets had been rendered dangerous by sheer speed. Peñalosa’s first and most defining act as mayor was to declare war: not on crime or drugs or poverty, but on cars.

He threw out the ambitious highway expansion plan and instead poured his budget into hundreds of miles of cycle paths; a vast new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas; and the city’s first rapid transit system (the TransMilenio), using buses instead of trains. He banned drivers from commuting by car more than three times a week. This programme redesigned the experience of city living for millions of people, and it was an utter rejection of the philosophies that have guided city planners around the world for more than half a century.

In the third year of his term, Peñalosa challenged Bogotáns to participate in an experiment. As of dawn on 24 February 2000, cars were banned from streets for the day. It was the first day in four years that nobody was killed in traffic. Hospital admissions fell by almost a third. The toxic haze over the city thinned. People told pollsters that they were more optimistic about city life than they had been in years.

That Peñalosa only had three years in office yet managed to achieve so much really shows not only how hard he must have worked but also how much things can change if people really want them too. It also shows how hollow some of the talk we hear about making real changes in Auckland are. At the end of June, when the government announced it would belatedly support the City Rail Link on a delayed time-frame, it came with the sting that they would prioritise whole pile of motorways ahead of it, some of which weren’t planned to be built for 20-30 years. Despite the fact it goes against many of the goals the city has said it was aiming for, the mayor and others celebrated as they seem to come from the view that any investment from the government is good, regardless of the impact it might have.

However putting that aside, what about the thrust of the article about what makes cities happier.

Is urban design really powerful enough to make or break happiness? The question deserves consideration, because the happy city message is taking root around the world. “The most dynamic economies of the 20th century produced the most miserable cities of all,” Peñalosa told me over the roar of traffic. “I’m talking about the US Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami, cities totally dominated by cars.”

If one was to judge by sheer wealth, the last half-century should have been an ecstatically happy time for people in the US and other rich nations such as Canada, Japan and Great Britain. And yet the boom decades of the late 20th century were not accompanied by a boom in wellbeing. The British got richer by more than 40% between 1993 and 2012, but the rate of psychiatric disorders and neuroses grew.

Just before the crash of 2008, a team of Italian economists, led by Stefano Bartolini, tried to account for that seemingly inexplicable gap between rising income and flatlining happiness in the US. The Italians tried removing various components of economic and social data from their models, and found that the only factor powerful enough to hold down people’s self-reported happiness in the face of all that wealth was the country’s declining social capital: the social networks and interactions that keep us connected with others. It was even more corrosive than the income gap between rich and poor.

As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert. The more connected we are to family and community, the less likely we are to experience heart attacks, strokes, cancer and depression. Connected people sleep better at night. They live longer. They consistently report being happier.

So more social interaction is good for us. That in itself might not be surprising but how does it relate to transport and the design of cities?

There is a clear connection between social deficit and the shape of cities. A Swedish study found that people who endure more than a 45-minute commute were 40% more likely to divorce. People who live in monofunctional, car‑dependent neighbourhoods outside urban centres are much less trusting of other people than people who live in walkable neighbourhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services and places to work.

A couple of University of Zurich economists, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, compared German commuters’ estimation of the time it took them to get to work with their answers to the standard wellbeing question, “How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?”

Their finding was seemingly straightforward: the longer the drive, the less happy people were. Before you dismiss this as numbingly obvious, keep in mind that they were testing not for drive satisfaction, but for life satisfaction. People were choosing commutes that made their entire lives worse. Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love.

Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist and author of Stumbling On Happiness, explained the commuting paradox this way: “Most good and bad things become less good and bad over time as we adapt to them. However, it is much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that change. So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house, because the house is exactly the same size every time. But we find it difficult to adapt to commuting by car, because every day is a slightly new form of misery.”

The relationship between the length of someone’s commute, their income and their happiness is astonishing. I’m sure in all of this there will be outliers, those for who the chance to get away from the city is something they enjoy but for the most of us that isn’t likely to be the case. In fact I heard a figure (but can’t back it up) that the average couple that buy a lifestyle property out on the edge of town last 7 years before they sell again and move closer to town because they can’t stand the commute. The comment relating impact on happiness of a single person to finding a new love is quite interesting. I wonder what it does for happiness if that single person not only shifts to a short walk but also finds a new love thanks to living in a more walkable neighbourhood where they have more social interaction? I also wonder if there is an economic bonus that can be associated with happiness. A project like the CRL which would cut the commuting time for tens of thousands of people every day would undoubtedly score incredibly well.

The next part is something that I think many people forget about in their daily lives. I’ve bolded the most important bit.

When we talk about cities, we usually end up talking about how various places look, and perhaps how it feels to be there. But to stop there misses half the story, because the way we experience most parts of cities is at velocity: we glide past on the way to somewhere else. City life is as much about moving through landscapes as it is about being in them. 

There is a level of detail you get from walking and cycling that you simply don’t get when you’re behind the wheel of a car or even on PT. This is especially the case when travelling through the central city. Even just walking around my suburban neighbourhood I often see or find things I’ve never seen before or that I never notice when driving. For example it might just be being able to enjoy the reflection of a stunning sunset or it could be discovering new things like this plaque I found on a local bridge that I pass by almost daily.

Yet despite cars supposedly giving us freedom and convenience, how many times do we hear people (either ourselves or friends/co-workers) complaining about their commute? Yet the frustration of driving in traffic can actually be physically quite bad for us.

Driving in traffic is harrowing for both brain and body. The blood of people who drive in cities is a stew of stress hormones. The worse the traffic, the more your system is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, the fight-or-flight juices that, in the short-term, get your heart pumping faster, dilate your air passages and help sharpen your alertness, but in the long-term can make you ill. Researchers for Hewlett-Packard convinced volunteers in England to wear electrode caps during their commutes and found that whether they were driving or taking the train, peak-hour travellers suffered worse stress than fighter pilots or riot police facing mobs of angry protesters.

What is interesting is that even peak PT users aren’t immune, presumably due to crowded buses or trains putting people on alert. However if both driving and PT use can be bad, what can be good? The answer is walking and cycling.

Why would travelling more slowly and using more effort offer more satisfaction than driving? Part of the answer exists in basic human physiology. We were born to move. Immobility is to the human body what rust is to the classic car. Stop moving long enough, and your muscles will atrophy. Bones will weaken. Blood will clot. You will find it harder to concentrate and solve problems. Immobility is not merely a state closer to death: it hastens it.

Robert Thayer, a professor of psychology at California State University, fitted dozens of students with pedometers, then sent them back to their regular lives. Over the course of 20 days, the volunteers answered survey questions about their moods, attitudes, diet and happiness. Within that volunteer group, people who walked more were happier.

The same is true of cycling, although a bicycle has the added benefit of giving even a lazy rider the ability to travel three or four times faster than someone walking, while using less than a quarter of the energy. They may not all attain Judge’s level of transcendence, but cyclists report feeling connected to the world around them in a way that is simply not possible in the sealed environment of a car, bus or train. Their journeys are both sensual and kinesthetic.

I really love this comment about how we design our city as it seems to be exactly the opposite of what we do as witnessed by the sometimes massive fights that can occur with just to get a pram crossing installed at an intersection.

So if we really care about freedom for everyone, we need to design for everyone, not only the brave. 

Lastly moving back to Bogotá the articles talks about some of the outcomes of the investments Peñalosa made during his three years in office.

The Bogotá experiment may not have made up for all the city’s grinding inequities, but it was a spectacular beginning and, to the surprise of many, it made life better for almost everyone.

The TransMilenio moved so many people so efficiently that car drivers crossed the city faster as well: commuting times fell by a fifth. The streets were calmer. By the end of Peñalosa’s term, people were crashing their cars less often and killing each other less frequently, too: the accident rate fell by nearly half, and so did the murder rate, even as the country as a whole got more violent. There was a massive improvement in air quality, too. Bogotáns got healthier. The city experienced a spike in feelings of optimism. People believed that life was good and getting better, a feeling they had not shared in decades.

The article does end saying that things in Bogotá aren’t as good as they used to be which is partly blamed on the bus system being overcrowded due to underinvestment but it overall it still does show just how much positive impact can be made over a short period of time by focusing on not putting cars at the top of the list. In fact Brent Toderian mentioned during his visit that in Vancouver the transport investment priority within a corridor was required to be:

1. Walking
2. Cycling
3. Public Transport
4. Freight
5. Private cars

Of course if we were to follow suit it you can just imagine the howls of outrage that would occur. Probably all of those motorway projects mentioned as part of the governments transport package would disappear very quickly.

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