I walk ten minutes to work everyday. I've found that having a short commute is highly under-rated in popular discourse, though I guess it isn't in the happiness research.
I moved to a new city three months ago (my current city), and my first walk to work took at least 15 minutes. It has progressively gotten shorter - over 30% shorter. It is interesting to note how this happens. I've been able to shorten my route by:
-finding parking lots on the corners of city blocks and crossing them
-crossing on side streets to avoid waiting for lights
-following the flow of people instead of watching the traffic lights
So this last point gets to the heart of this post. I'm trying to figure out if not watching traffic lights increases my risk of an accident. I wonder if our risk of an accident over our lifetime is normally distributed given our behaviors/appetite for risk. If so, each of these people that I allow to be my "traffic heuristic" lies somewhere on that distribution - and if the way I pick these people is random, then their behaviors should cancel out, and I should be sitting right in the middle of the risk distribution. So I guess the question becomes - where did I sit in the distribution before my heuristic approach? My guess is that I was a higher risk than the mean, simply because I am not used to cities, and I am less adept to reading the flow of people and cars than the average person in the city.
So maybe not watching traffic lights does more than save time.
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