If you're going to point to environmental stress, let's not forget that a stuffy, smelly subway car at rush hour pressed up against hundreds of strangers' bodies is also a less than ideal environment.
Stuffy and smell does correlate to disease spread. How many people die from the flu or other disease as a result of being pressed upon during their commute?
Use of Metropolitan public transport is not associated with the flu (and considering the way it's transmitted it's a very good candidate for a disease that would spread in that environment).
I don't want to get into the whole driving debate. Just wanted this fact out there.
The average American commuting by car is already spending an hour a day doing it.
Even if the commuter has to spend the same time on transit, they have time to relax, read, work etc.
This is ignoring the strides we can make with bike infrastructure which provides excercise along with the commute, even in low density suburban areas. Or encouraging remote work, which eliminates the commute entirely and frees up much more time.
So if you can't afford to live downtown, you should be disconnected from the city altogether, rather than having a reasonable way to get to it?
Sprawl exists because people want to be connected to cities without paying downtown luxury condo rents, and it's the only viable option (considering public school quality, neighborhood safety, etc.) we're being given.
The ridiculous prices in many urban cores is driven by the same supply constraints that cause urban sprawl.
When the only place where zoning and planning boards allow density is a relatively tiny downtown, surrounded by low density development, it's no surprise prices shoot through the roof.
> Sprawl exists because people want to be connected to cities without paying downtown luxury condo rents, and it's the only viable option (considering public school quality, neighborhood safety, etc.) we're being given.
So we already moved the discussion from subway cars being uncomfortable because you have to stand and being smelly (or something) to it taking a lot of time.
Well it turns out driving takes a long time too, but you're really just being a moving couch potato.
I wasn't trying to compare the stress of public transit to driving, just "stuffy and smelly" to "not stuffy and smelly". Arjie's government-funded study notwithstanding, it's common sense that you're more likely to get sick when being around sick people. Someone in the office gets sick? It spreads like wildfire, after that one borderline day that they decide to come in anyhow. How could it possibly be better, having much closer contact with many more people?
> Personally, I find public transit much less stressful than driving in a large city.
I'll agree with that, with the added asterisk that I try to avoid high-traffic times in both cases (and actually large cities in general).
http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-e...
I wouldn't hesitate to guess sedentary auto-oriented lifestyles also have an enormous health cost, along with stress from road noise, traffic etc.