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Snow Days and Social Capital
Update: Check out this photo--what might be the best illustration of this phenomenon that I've seen.
Do “snow days” increase social capital--the strength of ties to friends, family, and
community? That’s something I’ve been wondering about the past few days, while hearing all kinds of serendipitous Seattle snow encounter stories.
Some are commute related: A stranded co-worker who was picked up at a bus stop on Aurora by a spur-of-the-moment carpooler headed downtown, and ended up having all kinds of connections with the other casual car-poolers; another coworker who, frustrated with the long wait at a Ballard bus stop, stuck out his thumb and was soon picked up by an SUV headed downtown. (His conclusion: Snow makes hitchhiking acceptable.)
Some are neighborhood-related: Yesterday, my husband and I cross-country skied out our door onto what's normally an arterial, then through several neighborhoods, meeting more people in an hour of city skiing than we had in a year of living here. A West Seattle colleague says she's never had so much interaction with neighbors before--10 neighbors and 8 dogs ended up at an impromptu sledding party in front of their house.
Not surprisingly, if you Google “snow and social capital,” you don’t find much, though it does bring up a page on the Better Together website on 150 ways to build community. Tool lending libraries for things like snow blowers are one of the ways.
So in absence of solid academic research but in presence of numerous anecdotes, here's my two-part hypothesis on snow and social capital.
The Vehicle Miles Less Traveled
For installment number 9 million of "Sightline's obsession with gas prices and driving behavior" I give you this new report on vehicle miles traveled from the Brookings Institute. I'm a bit late on this, but it's still worth mentioning I think:
Driving, as measured by national VMT, began to plateau as far back as 2004 and dropped in 2007 for the first time since 1980. Per capita driving followed a similar pattern, with flat-lining growth after 2000 and falling rates since 2005. These recent declines in driving predated the steady hikes in gas prices during 2007 and 2008. Moreover, the recent drops in VMT (90 billion miles) and VMT per capita (388 miles) are the largest annualized drops since World War II.
What's especially remarkable to me is not the decline itself, but rather the timing of the decline. That it occurred prior to the big gas price run-up is, I'd argue evidence of at least two things:
