How big is your triangle?
That's a geographical quetsion posed by this piece about the effects of communiting on human happiness and community. The short answer: not good. Long commutes result in significant amounts of both. Here's a quote:
Postwar zoning laws aggressively separated living space from commercial space, requiring more roads and parking lots—known to planners as Euclidean zoning (after a Supreme Court decision involving Euclid, Ohio), and to civilians as sprawl. Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five- minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to theBologna Italy store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.
Part of our upcoming downsizing/relocation is an attempt to significantly shrink the size of our triangle. I don't think it's an accident that I've started to consider dropping our Costco membership at the same time--we'll be living a life of a small refrigerator. But hopefully it will be a richer life in other ways.