Going back and forth by car to work each day is a commute even if it just takes 5 minutes.
By your definition, merely opening a laptop and working in your easy chair would be a commute
No it wouldn't be a commuter by my definition (even if people use the word "telecommute" for it)
But it really doesn't matter if it is a commute. The label you put on something doesn't change the reality. If you don't want to consider all workers going back and forth to work to be commuters it doesn't change the reality for all people who go back and forth from work. You can break down people's moving back and forth to work in to a million different categories if you want. But that doesn't mean we have to just focus on some arbitrarily defined category only considering a group that does the most to support your claim.
In any case even that group doesn't do to much. Very few commuters, defined the way you want to define it, have commutes that long.
You lied when you said and I quote "A 130 HP car might get 37mpg, a 260 HP SUV might get 13 mpg, but they aren't the same vehicle with different engines."
Nonsense.
For gasoline cars I'd be correct. Also my statement as written was correct, because it started with "Unless methanol gives much worse gas mileage your list doesn't seem very accurate", so methanol powered cars getting much worse gas mileage doesn't make the statement incorrect. Also if it had been incorrect, that wouldn't make it a lie.
One major positive is that E85 sells for 30-40% less than gasoline (at least where the station doesn't try to gouge you). There is two reasons for this, ethanol isn't charged federal (and in most states) gas taxes.. ...And there is a producer tax credit as well.
A major positive from the perspective of the car owner perhaps, but government benefits don't really make the product cheaper, they just shift who is paying for it.
I said for any metro area. That includes all commutes in the metro area. You can't cherry pick part of them, and then say when you look at just this part, then the commutes might not be an extreme outlier.
Its no different what you do. You want to add in those that go 10 feet downstairs into your commute base.
No its very different than what I did. Its the exact opposite. Cherry picking is limiting what you consider. I'm considerign everything. Even if you don't want to call people who drive 10 minutes to work commuters, that doesn't mean they should be excluded. If commuters are only part of the group of people going to work, then commuters are only part of the group I'm considering. I'm considering everyone, and you considering a subset of a subset, of a subset.
"In the case of normally distributed data, using the above definitions, only about 1 in 150 observations will be a mild outlier, and only about 1 in 425,000 an extreme outlier." en.wikipedia.org
By your tone, you think 2.8 hours is an extreme outlier. By the above definition, if there are more than 30 people in the LA area who commute 2.8 hours, then it isn't an outlier. More than 15 in the SF Bay area.
Leaving aside questions of whether commute time is normally distrubted. By the definition you supply it would be more like 85000 in LA, and 42,500 to be an outlier for the bay area.
I was using the dictionary definition of outlier "A value far from most others in a set of data:" dictionary.reference.com
That definition isn't very precise but it clearly applies to 2.8 hours for a commute. |
