Comment by bluGill 21 hours ago
That is false for every american I know. Driving means less time than transit users in every study I've seen - that time is of course more stressful but we spend less time commuting and thus have more time. Working hours can be longer but for many it isn't much longer.
There are a lot of couch potatoes that don't use their time, but they have it.
> It always blows my mind when I see how many subscribers Netflix has.
Not sure how they count, but for example I have a "free" netflix subscription through a tmobile phone plan. So it's easy to pump the numbers. I only watch like one episode of something every other year on netflix, so not exactly a real user of it.
Maybe they're not actually watching it. I have read that the content guidance recommends that media produced for Netflix et al. have the action described auditorially as well as visually, so people can follow the plot without actually looking at the screen.
> Driving means less time than transit users in every study I’ve seen […] we spend less time commuting and thus have more time
Transit is indeed slower, but there are several big assumptions in there that don’t support your conclusion. In the US, only 15% of trips are commuting to work, the majority of trips are shopping, errands, and leisure. People with cars make more trips than transit users, and go out of their way for shopping, errands, and leisure more often, because they can, because it’s “faster” than transit. Driving commuters tend to drive to lunch, while transit commuters tend to bring one or walk. Transit users can sometimes get things done that can’t be done while driving, which can in some cases more than negate the added travel time. I think that’s a minority of transit users, but I spent a couple years commuting by train and working on the train, and I saved a considerable amount of time compared to driving. Because a lot of people spend this “more time” they saved commuting doing more driving for things other than work, drivers don’t actually have more time in practice.
For the purposes of this discussion there is more time to exercise.
Yes transit uses in practice get more, but it is incidental and lower quality exercise than someone who uses their extra time on a well developed gym plan. (There are of courseetransit users with a well developed gym plan)
It always blows my mind when I see how many subscribers Netflix has. Americans are so busy driving and working that they don't have time to do anything (cook, grocery shop, exercise, etc.). How are 90M households finding the time to watch movies or binge on TV shows?