Notices by Evan Prodromou (evan@prodromou.pub), page 18

@photovince so, first, read about social desirability bias.

It's the tendency to give answers that conform to one's image of oneself, rather than to one's actual behaviour.

@GuillaumeRossolini that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about why many respondents might prefer trains at shorter distances but not longer distances.

@_tillwe_ yes, I think that's true everywhere.

@penryu proud to be non-native! It puts me in good company.

@roguelazer but, yes, many people thought of "preferred" as "wished-for" instead of "habitual".

@clacke yeah, I think "preferred" in terms of "habitual, typical" wasn't used by a lot of people. So this new form is better.

@roguelazer I guess that comes down to how you define "preferred".

I'd say that my preferred form of exercise is lifting weights, since that's the one I do most commonly.

But if wine-drinking helped me stay in shape, I'd rather do that instead.

It doesn't, though, so my habitual or "preferred' form is weight lifting.

I may go back and re-run my shorter-distance polls with this new phrasing and see how they compare.

Thanks to everyone who replied!

For me, the last trip I took of this distance was a family wedding in New Jersey. We drove down in our electric car. It was harder than we expected; the availability of chargers in the Adirondacks was pretty lacking.

Second, I changed the phrasing of my question. Instead of, "What is your preferred mode of travel...?" I asked, "What mode of travel did you choose last?"

I think this cuts down a lot on the social desirability bias in responses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias

I think there are two reasons for this.

First, there's a threshold between 500km and 1000km where train travel becomes significantly uncompetitive on time compared to air travel; 2x or 3x the door-to-door time commitment.

WOW. These results are wildly different than my poll about distances around 500km:

https://prodromou.pub/@evan/109855866780546735

@brion I think it's probably fair to say that while a solo 15-hour drive is kind of a test of your sanity, a 15-hour drive with 3 other people is a *R*O*A*D* *T*R*I*P* wooooooooo

@brion flying is about 1.5 hr in the air, but with getting to the airport, check-in, security, then arriving and getting out of the destination airport, I anticipate about 6 hours door-to-door.

That's still a big advantage over driving or train! It only makes sense if price or carbon footprint are *really* important to you.

Once you have 3 or 4 people travelling, that 2-day drive starts to look really economical.

@brion yeah, I was just using this route as the example in my human-computer interface class. I'm doing a project on selecting transportation modes based on real experience like door-to-door times.

The drive time from SF to Portland is about 15 hours, iirc. While it's possible to do that if you have multiple drivers and can trade off, it's more likely that you'll need to stop for meals and sleep, so I estimated a door-to-door time of 29 hours (15 drive, 8 sleep, 6 meals).

@brion so, I think 1000km gets you to the Bay Area, right? I think that's a 20-hour trip on Amtrak; a pretty close equivalent to driving! But I think it leaves and arrives in the evening.

@kat I feel you on this! Our EV has a range of 250-300km, so we'd need 3 charges minimum to make a 1000km trip. Chargers aren't always spaced exactly 250km apart, though!

We'd probably split it up into two days: drive and lunch + charge, then drive and sleep + charge, then drive and lunch + charge, then drive.

Oh, hey, learning a new computer language works better if I take my ADHD meds, I should try that tomorrow

@drakakis epic!

@lanodan one way