Downhill Travel

Recent events have allowed me the opportunity to solidify my thoughts on a subject I have been noodling with for years. I have a hypothesis (an hypothesis?) about something that I think could be tested, if such testing hasn't already occurred. Simply put, that hypothesis is:

People are willing to drive greater distances in a north-south orientation than they are willing to drive in an east-west orientation.

Every time the possibility of a trip arises in someone’s life, some mental gymnastics are done to determine whether to drive or fly. Time availability is obviously a deciding factor; if you have to be somewhere in a few hours or overnight, flying is really the only option. Cost is also definitely part of the equation; if you don’t have the means to fly, or if you can’t afford a rental car once you get there, then driving is really the only option. Lots of other factors also come in to play, but that’s not what I’m really talking about here.

If you control for the influence of time, cost, and the host of other variables that go into such a decision, I contend that people are more willing to accept long driving trips if those trips are generally oriented in a north/south direction.

You live in Chicago and want to go to Orlando? It’s only 1100 miles. Let’s drive it.

You live in Chicago and want to go to New York? Man, that’s almost 800 miles! Who in their right mind would drive that?

• Some folks are natural-born drivers and will drive anywhere, no matter what the distance.
• Some folks hate driving and fly everywhere
• As a group, young people are generally more willing to drive long distances than are older people.
• Some people are deathly afraid of flying and will never get on a plane.
• Some older folks retire early and drive non stop for years at a time.
• Folks with many children tend to lean toward driving both to mitigate travel cost and to avoid hassles.

You could of course go on and on with such a list of weighted trends and demographic variances. But I really do think that, for those on the fence, when all other influencing factors are removed from the equation, driving north/south is seen as more desirable than driving east/west.

I once had a grown man look me straight in the eye and swear that north “is always up.” And he meant “up,” folks. As in uphill. North to him was always up, and traveling south was always traveling downhill. Maybe that’s what’s going on here. Maybe people are okay with driving downhill for a vacation, accepting the fact that they’ll have to drive uphill on the way home. And maybe people are okay with driving uphill to start a trip, knowing that the return will be an easy downhill jog.

Or maybe people are subconsciously (or consciously) more willing to drive on trips that won't cross time zones and screw up their internal clocks.

Could this phenomenon be studied? Sure. I can think of several measurement instruments that could be used to reliably measure this phenomenon and control for the aforementioned variables. I think a researcher could reasonably arrive at a conclusion as to what influence direction of travel has on an individual’s tendency to choose driving over flying (or vice versa).

But who would pay for such a study? Hmmm. . .

I might have to look into that.