Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> At 06:14 PM 5/23/2008, Jordan Hayes wrote:
> This sounds like what people used to tell me about how long it took
> them to drive to work. I'd hear 20 minutes and couldn't believe
> it. Further prodding revealed they were counting only the time on
> the freeway. Count the time from leaving your door to sitting at your
> desk and you have to add another 40 minutes or so.
>
> I'm not saying you're wrong about the train being slower, but saying
> you can leave Oakland at 9 am and be sitting on the 6th floor at
> Bunche Hall at UCLA at noon, with coffee and a good seat, just ain't so.
The speed of the vehicle is in many instances utterly irrelevant to the time taken by the move itself. In the '80s it took me _much_ longer to drive 2 miles to work in a 1979 Impala than it took my mother in the 1930s to drive six miles to work in a 1928 Chevy. Difference: to get a parking place for a 10am class I had to leave no later than 8:30! Otherwise I would have to walk nearly half a mile from the nearest available parking place. In the '90s (after paying $250 for a reserved spot in a newly erected parking structure, it took me only about 8 minutes from kitchen to office desk! So had the speed of transportation gone up or down between 1938 and 1988? And a few years ago it took me longer to fly from Chicago to Bloomington than from San Diego to Chicago -- the air line kept cancelling the Chicago to Bloomington flight hour by hour until they had a full plane! So we sat for four hours to make a 40 minute flight. That's not counting the time spent waiting for luggage to arrive or the time spent getting luggage out to the car in the parking lot. And all the 'little' time-consumers on a trip add up. Time waiting for a slow elevator to get to the ground floor stopping at every floor! And so forth.
Carrol