覺得騎車或步行上班太花時間?你可能想錯了大綱

Barely 3 percent of the American work force bikes or walks to work with any frequency, despite the obvious virtues: decreased risks for obesity and diabetes, environmental benefits and lower transportation costs. Ask people why they eschew what’s known as active commuting, as many surveys have, and the primary reason cited is time. Those things take too long, most say.

在美國，只有3%的人騎自行車或步行上班（頻率各不相同），這樣做有明顯的優點：能降低肥胖和糖尿病的風險，有益於環境，降低交通成本。然而很多調查發現，當被問及爲什麼不選擇這些所謂的“活躍通勤”方式時，人們提到的主要因素是時間。大多數人表示，這兩種交通方式耗時太長。

They’re probably wrong. A new study published in a journal called Transportmetrica A: Transport Science shows that people often overestimate the time required to commute actively, a miscalculation especially common when someone has secured a parking permit near the office.

他們很可能錯了。一項發表在《運輸計量A：運輸科學》期刊(Transportmetrica A: Transport Science)上的新研究表明，人們往往高估了活躍通勤所需的時間，在辦公室附近擁有停車許可證的人尤其會做出錯誤估計。

For the study, researchers at Penn State solicited the school’s faculty, staff and students to complete an extensive series of online questionnaires about their fitness, health, commuting and parking habits, comfort and ability on a bike or as pedestrians, distance from home to their main workplace on campus and how long they thought it would take them to either bike or walk that distance. Only a few of the 505 respondents went by foot or bike; most of them were students. Estimates of commuting times were then compared with the corresponding route times calculated by Google Maps. The researchers independently timed some of the routes by walking or riding them.

爲了這項研究，賓夕法尼亞州立大學的研究人員請求該校的教師、員工和學生完成一系列廣泛的在線調查問卷，內容包括健身、健康、交通和停車習慣；騎車或步行的舒適程度和能力；住處與他們在校園內主要工作地點的距離；以及他們認爲騎車或步行到那裏所需的時間。505名受訪者中只有少數人步行或騎車；其中大多數是學生。然後，研究者將受訪者估計的通勤時間與谷歌地圖計算出的相應路線用時進行了比較。研究人員還以步行或騎車的方式對其中一些路線進行了獨立計時。

The survey participants — faculty and staff members above all — proved to be generally poor at guessing active-commuting times. About 90 percent of their estimates were too long by at least 10 minutes. The few assessments close to Google’s were almost always made by riders or walkers. Parking availability and distances affected the estimates. Those with parking permits, a fiercely sought-after campus amenity, tended to overestimate active-commuting times significantly; the closer someone lived to the workplace, the better the guesses. Confidence had an outsize effect, too. The people surveyed, especially women, who had little bicycling experience or who did not feel physically fit thought that active commuting would require considerably more time than the Google calculations.

受訪者，尤其是教職員工，在估算活躍通勤用時方面大都很糟。他們估計的時間約有90%都至少超過10分鐘。也有少數人給出了與谷歌用時接近的估計，他們幾乎都是騎車者或步行者。停車權和距離對估計有所影響。有停車證的人往往會大大高估活躍通勤的用時——停車證是一項很吃香的校園福利。住得離工作地點越近的人猜得越準。信心也會產生巨大影響。沒有騎車經驗或覺得身體不適的受訪者，尤其是女性，對活躍通勤的用時的估計大大高於谷歌的計算。

The study is limited, of course, because it relies on an insular, self-selected group of respondents to provide information about themselves, a topic on which people can be surprisingly unreliable. The published results also did not delve into such pressing active-commuting concerns as hygiene, showers or the logistics of carrying changes of clothes. But the study’s results do indicate that time may be less of a barrier to active commuting than many might anticipate, says Melissa Bopp, an associate professor of kinesiology at Penn State and the study’s senior author.

當然，這項研究具有侷限性，因爲它依賴的是孤立的、自選的調查對象羣體，並要求他們提供關於自己的信息，人們對自己的判斷可能會非常不可靠。公佈的研究結果也沒有深入研究活躍通勤的一些主要顧慮，比如衛生、淋浴或攜帶換洗衣物等問題。但該研究的高級作者、賓夕法尼亞州立大學的運動機能學副教授梅莉莎·博普(Melissa Bopp)表示，這項研究結果確實表明，與許多人的預期不同，時間對活躍通勤的阻礙並不是很大。

“I’d urge anyone who is considering biking or walking to work to do a test run,” she says, perhaps on a weekend (although the traffic patterns will be different from those during the week). Ask colleagues for route suggestions. “Google is good at finding bike paths,” she says, but it emphasizes brevity and directness over scenery for walkers.

她表示，“我會敦促那些考慮騎車或步行上班的人進行一次試騎或試走”，也許是在週末（儘管週末的交通情況可能與工作日不同）。可以向同事徵求路線建議。她表示，“谷歌很擅長尋找騎行路線”，但谷歌偏重簡潔和直接，不太關注步行者看到的風景。