Life without the trip

Between 2003 and 2022, the average American adult came to spend an hour and 39 minutes more at home each day.¹ The sociologist Patrick Sharkey, who measured this in the American Time Use Survey, found that the rise was under way well before the pandemic, jumped in 2020, and eased only slightly afterward.¹ It happened in every group he examined.¹ Americans spent less time traveling, including commuting, and less time shopping, socializing and volunteering.¹

Most discussion of this shift is about individuals: whether working from home is good for productivity, whether delivery saves time, whether people are lonelier. This piece is about something else. The trips that are disappearing were where a society mixed.

The only unchosen part of the day

Almost everything in modern social life is chosen. People choose their friends, their feeds and, within the limits of money, their neighborhoods. The trip between places was the exception. On the bus, at the counter, on the sidewalk, you were near whoever else was going the same way.

That made trips the main remaining source of unchosen co-presence. Not friendship, and usually not even conversation: just being in the same place as strangers and half-familiar faces often enough to recognize them. When the trip becomes optional, because the work, the groceries and the film can come to you, social life becomes almost entirely chosen.

A chosen social world is, by construction, more sorted than an unchosen one. If everyone you spend time with is someone you picked, they are likely to resemble you. The question is whether the trips actually did the mixing, and whether their loss shows up anywhere.

What the trips did

The clearest evidence comes from phones. Susan Athey and colleagues used location data from more than 17 million smartphones in 366 US metropolitan areas, in early 2017, to measure not where people live but whom they are near over the course of a day.² They call the measure experienced isolation: roughly, how much of a person's exposure is to their own racial group.²

Residential isolation averaged 0.61. Experienced isolation averaged 0.46.² People were substantially less segregated in the places they went than in the places they lived. Experienced isolation was lowest during the day and highest in the morning and evening. In people's home neighborhoods it was even higher than residential measures suggest; outside them it was much lower, and lowest of all at entertainment, retail and eating places.² It was also relatively lower in metro areas with higher population density and more public transit use.²

In other words, the going was what mixed people. The home neighborhood is where segregation is highest; the day's movement, out to shops, restaurants and places of entertainment, is what brings it down. These data come from before the change this piece is about, so they cannot show what happened when trips declined. But the implication is direct: take away part of the going, and a day looks more like the neighborhood.

Where the time went instead

The time-use data show where the hours went. In Sharkey's analysis, each additional hour at home was associated with 7.4 more minutes spent with family, 5.0 fewer minutes with friends, and 21.0 more minutes alone.¹ He also found that the much-discussed rise in time spent alone since the pandemic is fully explained by the rise in time at home: once that is accounted for, there is no clear trend in time alone.¹

That finding changes the story about loneliness. The usual account looks for causes in people: phones, habits, a loss of social skill. Sharkey's result points to the setting. People are alone more largely because they are home more.¹

It also shows the shape of the change. Time with family went up. Time with friends went down. Social life did not disappear; it moved inside, toward the people already closest. Warmer inside, thinner outside.

Does any of this matter to people

One objection is that the encounters on a trip were trivial or unpleasant, and nobody misses being jostled on a train. Some evidence says small encounters count for more than that. In an experiment by Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn, people buying coffee who were asked to have a brief, genuine exchange with the barista (a smile, eye contact, a few words) felt more positive afterward than those asked to be as efficient as possible, and the effect ran through a greater sense of belonging.³ It is one study, and a barista is not a stranger on a bus. But it suggests that the smallest unchosen contacts carry some of the weight of social life.

Sharkey's preliminary analysis points the same way: activities done at home were associated with lower happiness and less sense of meaning than the same kinds of activities done elsewhere.¹ That is an association, and people who stay home may differ from those who go out.

Why it will keep happening

Each trip is priced to the person who takes it: the time, the fare, the hassle. Its social by-products, the mixing and the familiar faces, are spread across everyone and paid to no one. So every convenience that removes a trip will look like a pure gain to the person who uses it, even if the sum of those gains is a more sorted, more isolated public. It is a version of the commons problem: what is rational for each is costly for all.

It is also invisible to the institutions that might notice. A delivery company measures how fast the parcel arrived, and an employer measures output. Even a transit agency counts riders, not who sat beside whom. None of them has a reason to count the encounter that did not happen. Sharkey makes a version of the point about research itself: studies of isolation have focused on how and with whom people spend their time, and largely overlooked where.¹

Where this breaks

The causal chain has a gap. The mobility study shows that movement mixes people; the time-use study shows that movement declined. No source read here measures experienced segregation before and after the decline, so the claim that days have become more segregated is an inference.

The time saved is real, and some of it went to family.¹ For many people, more time at home with children or partners is a gain, not a loss, and an account that treats it only as isolation is wrong.

Phones and screens may explain more than trips do. Sharkey found more time spent using the computer for leisure, which is mostly done at home.¹ Whether people stay home because of what is on their screens, or are on their screens because they stay home, is not settled here.

And the evidence is American. Countries with different cities, transit and work norms may show different patterns.

The trip as public life

Public life is usually described in terms of institutions: elections, libraries, clubs, churches. Much of it was humbler than that: the overlapping paths of people going about their day, near enough to see each other. That was never designed and never paid for. It came free with having to go places.

Now that going places is optional, it no longer comes free. If it matters, and the evidence suggests it does, someone will have to decide to provide it on purpose.