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I'm not sure there is much value in measuring this in simply spatial terms, like miles per hour. A mile of dense city covers a lot more "ground" than a mile of desert.

How about a measure which accounts for population or economic density, say "people per hour". Hard to make the units work though, as density is a "per square mile" type of quantity.

How about "number of people/businesses accessible within 1 hour" or 5 hours etc.

I would factor energy into this.

  Number of people able to access necessary points of interest per hour per joule of energy used in that trip

A place where everybody can access all the things needed for life literally by walking out their front door is far superior to one where you have to step on a rocketship to go for groceries.

Also there has to be a point where you use so much space and energy for transportation that you will not be able to have any given unit of area support a lot of people.

The "1-2 hours of commuting every day" he gave is a pretty good (inverse) metric for quality of life.

Edit: Not as in, 1 hour of commuting is good, but as in, commuting time is a good way to measure quality of life.

If someone lives in a small village where everything is 5 minutes walk away, that person might still decide to work at the better paid job 30 mins drive away, or shop at the bigger shop in the next town over. And in his free time, he may choose to fly to a beach rather than spend his holiday in his garden or local park.

People trade off travel time for other benefits.

True, I mean it's an important metric, not that it's directly inversely proportional to quality of life.

Like air quality, for example. It's important, but pretty much everyone living in a city trades it for something else.

> Average travel speeds for people haven't done so well - people in London 100 years ago travelled at an average of 12 mph, mostly on trains and cars. Today, travel in London still averages 12 mph. People still spend 1-2 hours most days travelling.

Most people don't want to travel more than 30 minutes one-way on a day-to-day basis, and that has been true for most of history:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant

* PDF: http://www.cesaremarchetti.org/archive/electronic/basic_inst...

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-29/the-commu...

People used to walk 30 minutes to work, then perhaps cycle or take the train or tram, and post-WW2 drive for 30 minutes one-way. This increased the distance because which each new technology you could (theoretically) go faster, but the time stay the same (on average).

> So: If you here on HN can think of a way to dramatically increase travel speed for people, goods, or information, I think you will become rich, famous, and very impactful.

I think it's nearly trivial to have a system with much higher (2x? 3x?) traveling speeds: Rent a private jet. Doing this in a climate-friendly manner is merely (;)) an engineering challenge, cue synfuel. The real challenge is in scaling this up to the masses in a economical way.

The frustrating part is that air travel is obviously the best way to get people quickly from A to B. Humans have just the right size and weight. There's so much space available in the skies that congestion only is a problem at the nodes. Safety is great because everyone intuitively understands the risk. Speed is maximal and, most importantly, the amount of required infrastructure doesnt scale linearly with the number of connections. Yet, air travel is seen as obscene in modern society because it currently relies on fossile fuels. I fear it will never lose this stain.

What we're currently lacking is a strong movement to CO2 neutral, large airplanes. I believe if we'd focus on air travel the resulting solutions would be tremendously helpful to free other sectors from carbon emissions.

Jets need to be cheap and convenient enough that you decide to fly to another city to meet a friend for a coffee and fly back home. Sure, the flight might be only 30 mins, but the 'other stuff' makes it impractical.

That will never happen though. The aircraft world is ossified with regulations, and isn't the sort of industry a VC backed startup can swoop in and disrupt Uber style.

"I consider average travel speed to be a critical metric by which to judge society", is an interesting take on this.

I'm curious as to what aspects of a society it's measuring, what those metrics tell you about a society (e.g. it's values) and what sort of society you'd get by optimising for them or (just being contrary) trying to minimise them.

I mention this as the first thing that came to mind when I saw the title was the 15-minute city concept [1]:

"A 15-minute city is a residential urban concept in which most daily necessities can be accomplished by either walking or cycling from residents' homes."

"15-minute cities are built from a series of 5-minute neighborhoods, also known as complete communities or walkable neighborhoods".

"the 15-minute city concept as a way to ensure that urban residents can fulfill six essential functions within a 15-minute walk or bike from their dwellings: living, working, commerce, healthcare, education and entertainment."

I say this as someone who used to regularly commute over 1hour in each direction to work (London) and know of people who used to do closer to 2hours. This would have been massively sub-optimal (by a number of metrics) if I hadn't of spent a lot of evenings in london socialising, seeing gigs or doing courses/events etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city

Then again faster travel often results in more sprawl, less dense neighborhoods and does not reduce average travel time very much.

In practice there are various things that people tend to value about being able to live in less dense neighborhoods, so it's not surprising that they'd be willing to sacrifice travel time to achieve this.

Given that some people strongly prefer (or at least appear to strong prefer) aspects of those lower density residential areas, it seems as though faster travel enabling those people to live a life they enjoy has benefits to them, even if it doesn’t save them time as compared to living in a denser place they’d not like as much.

The 'remote' neighbourhoods, generally commuted via trains or trams, could themselves be designed to be walkable:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

So your work neighbourhood is walkable and your home/sleeping neighbourhood are walkable, it's just your commute that you don't perhaps walk (or cycle). Pre-WW2 / pre-car towns and villages outside of major metropolitan areas were reachable by train, but themselves pedestrian-based.