The paper corrects a major misconception and misspecification of how traffic congestion affects aggregate distance traveled, arising from an empirical study by Gilles Duranton (University of Pennsylvania) and Matthew Turner (Brown) published in 2011 in the American Economic Review and gathering over 1000 citations.
For as much as U.S. metros have grown over the past few decades, commute times have remained oddly stable. One-way commutes averaged 21.7 minutes in 1980 and 25.3 minutes in 2010.
Professor Jim Holmes is a macroeconomist with specialties in monetary theory and applied econometrics. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago.