I'm about to leave work for home this evening going from North Portland to my little town of West Linn. It's 25 mile journey than can take from 25 minutes to 1 hour. I know that doesn't sound like bad traffic to most of us and when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area that would have been great commute time but for Portland? We think that's really too long.
Of course it might not seem so long if I didn't commute 10 miles to one job (at 7:30 am) and after four hours I commute 25 miles to my second job and come home in 5:00 traffic. So my commute is 60 miles round trip. That makes a long time in the car.
How does this relate to searching behavior? First I checked www.sigalert.com for Portland. Uh oh, traffic is at 10 to 15 miles an hour along the route I have to take for the first 10 miles. You see, I live on one side of the Willamette River and work in the other. So Sigalert has has traffic cams. Yuck, traffic is slow. Ok - let's try www.maps.google.com. I can play with a few surface streets but it looks like it'll only shave about 5 minutes off my commute.
And what does this have to do with searching behavior? I guess I'm a whole lot like my students searching the web. If I don't like the answer I find in one place, I'll check another and another hoping I'll find something else that makes my thesis (a shorter drive home) work.
But I don't buy a gps system that would actually make my elusive search for a shorter drive home possible because I just don't want to have to learn to use a new gadget.
Go figure!
I enjoyed your comments on commuting. You're right about how people perceive commuting times in different areas. I commute to and from Boston every day. 20-25 minutes to subway station and then about 30 by subway if it's running on time. Afternoons are longer. It's a long haul but pretty typical for here.
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