Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

From A to B, differently

The benefits of forced experimentation quickly outweigh the temporary costs

Afamily member is thinking of moving and asked for commuting advice.

Well, first add 25 per cent to any journey time estimate containing the phrase ‘door to door’. When commuters cite journey time to work, the journey they have in mind is one which happens with the frequency of a solar eclipse: when every traffic light is miraculously green and the train draws in just as you reach the platform. Generally the words ‘door to door’ can be replaced by ‘in a parallel universe’ without altering the meaning of the surrounding sentence.

I also advised asking the estate agent what is the second-best way to get to work. No one ever thinks of asking this, but it is vital. For a variety of reasons (leaves, signalling failures, strikes) your main route will fail occasionally. If there is a tolerable fallback option, this doesn’t matter much. Your second-best route is almost as important as your best.

My third recommendation was to avoid buying a season ticket for the first few months to encourage experimentation. There is no single answer to the question ‘How do I get from A to B?’ It depends on a host of considerations: whether you are carrying luggage or want to buy a pint of milk on the way home. A season ticket will lock you into a route before you have time to discover useful alternatives.

The week after I had given this last piece of advice, surprising confirmation surfaced in a paper from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge: Larcom, Shaun, Ferdinand Rauch and Tim Willems (2015), ‘The Benefits of Forced Experimentation: Striking Evidence from the London Underground Network’. The authors had analysed Oyster Card data from several weeks around the partial London Tube strike in February last year to test a theory that short, partial Tube strikes may benefit London travellers overall, because they force people to try different routes to work, some of which prove better than the ones to which they have become habituated.

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