Urban Commuting Journeys are Not "Wasteful"

Abstract

Hamilton (1982) first argued that urban workers' commuting journeys are so long that the monocentric urban models literature has little predictive value concerning commuting. In this paper I re-interpret the definition of "wasteful commuting" to include only the amount of commuting that could be eliminated if workers traded jobs or houses, holding fixed the existing spatial patterns of jobs and housing and the actual urban transportation network in the urban area. Using an assignment model to calculate new estimates of the amount of wasteful commuting, I find that "waste" constitutes only a minor fraction--11%--of the total amount of commuting by workers in the U.S. cities, rther than the extremely high 87% figure found by Hamilton.