Cesare Marchetti

So, in the planning seminars I have attended in the last few months, there has been reference to something called the Marchetti Constant.  This referred to the distance that humans are willing to travel to get to work, or simply travel during the day which is a one hour per day.  Thus, original cities were designed to accommodate how far someone could walk in an hour.  As different modes of travel emerged, cities got bigger, but still tot he limit of one hour.

Planners use this constant in determining how far a car or public transportation can get someone.  Thus, when things go beyond a thirty minute commute, efforts are made to reduce travel time.

[I am editing this soon after waking so some of the sentences may not make complete sense yet.]

Interestingly Cesare Marchetti only came up with this observation in the mid 1990's and published a paper titled Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior.  Technological Forecasting and Social Change 47: 75-88.
http://www.cesaremarchetti.org/archive/scan/MARCHETTI-052.pdf


He did based part of his work on the research of Yacob Zahavi.  Zahavi did his work for the U.S. Department of Transportation and the World Bank in the late1970s and early 1980s.

This article from Atlantic Cities provides a better account of Marchetti's work:
For Pedestrians, Cities Have Become the Wilderness