Barely 3 percent of the American work force bikes or walks to work with any frequency, despite the obvious virtues: decreased risks for obesity and diabetes, environmental benefits and lower transportation costs. Ask people why they eschew what’s known as active commuting, as many surveys have, and the primary reason cited is time. Those things take too long, most say.
在美国，只有3%的人骑自行车或步行上班（频率各不相同），这样做有明显的优点：能降低肥胖和糖尿病的风险，有益于环境，降低交通成本。然而很多调查发现，当被问及为什么不选择这些所谓的“活跃通勤”方式时，人们提到的主要因素是时间。大多数人表示，这两种交通方式耗时太长。
They’re probably wrong. A new study published in a journal called Transportmetrica A: Transport Science shows that people often overestimate the time required to commute actively, a miscalculation especially common when someone has secured a parking permit near the office.
他们很可能错了。一项发表在《运输计量A：运输科学》期刊(Transportmetrica A: Transport Science)上的新研究表明，人们往往高估了活跃通勤所需的时间，在办公室附近拥有停车许可证的人尤其会做出错误估计。
For the study, researchers at Penn State solicited the school’s faculty, staff and students to complete an extensive series of online questionnaires about their fitness, health, commuting and parking habits, comfort and ability on a bike or as pedestrians, distance from home to their main workplace on campus and how long they thought it would take them to either bike or walk that distance. Only a few of the 505 respondents went by foot or bike; most of them were students. Estimates of commuting times were then compared with the corresponding route times calculated by Google Maps. The researchers independently timed some of the routes by walking or riding them.
为了这项研究，宾夕法尼亚州立大学的研究人员请求该校的教师、员工和学生完成一系列广泛的在线调查问卷，内容包括健身、健康、交通和停车习惯；骑车或步行的舒适程度和能力；住处与他们在校园内主要工作地点的距离；以及他们认为骑车或步行到那里所需的时间。505名受访者中只有少数人步行或骑车；其中大多数是学生。然后，研究者将受访者估计的通勤时间与谷歌地图计算出的相应路线用时进行了比较。研究人员还以步行或骑车的方式对其中一些路线进行了独立计时。
The survey participants — faculty and staff members above all — proved to be generally poor at guessing active-commuting times. About 90 percent of their estimates were too long by at least 10 minutes. The few assessments close to Google’s were almost always made by riders or walkers. Parking availability and distances affected the estimates. Those with parking permits, a fiercely sought-after campus amenity, tended to overestimate active-commuting times significantly; the closer someone lived to the workplace, the better the guesses. Confidence had an outsize effect, too. The people surveyed, especially women, who had little bicycling experience or who did not feel physically fit thought that active commuting would require considerably more time than the Google calculations.
受访者，尤其是教职员工，在估算活跃通勤用时方面大都很糟。他们估计的时间约有90%都至少超过10分钟。也有少数人给出了与谷歌用时接近的估计，他们几乎都是骑车者或步行者。停车权和距离对估计有所影响。有停车证的人往往会大大高估活跃通勤的用时——停车证是一项很吃香的校园福利。住得离工作地点越近的人猜得越准。信心也会产生巨大影响。没有骑车经验或觉得身体不适的受访者，尤其是女性，对活跃通勤的用时的估计大大高于谷歌的计算。
The study is limited, of course, because it relies on an insular, self-selected group of respondents to provide information about themselves, a topic on which people can be surprisingly unreliable. The published results also did not delve into such pressing active-commuting concerns as hygiene, showers or the logistics of carrying changes of clothes. But the study’s results do indicate that time may be less of a barrier to active commuting than many might anticipate, says Melissa Bopp, an associate professor of kinesiology at Penn State and the study’s senior author.
当然，这项研究具有局限性，因为它依赖的是孤立的、自选的调查对象群体，并要求他们提供关于自己的信息，人们对自己的判断可能会非常不可靠。公布的研究结果也没有深入研究活跃通勤的一些主要顾虑，比如卫生、淋浴或携带换洗衣物等问题。但该研究的高级作者、宾夕法尼亚州立大学的运动机能学副教授梅莉莎·博普(Melissa Bopp)表示，这项研究结果确实表明，与许多人的预期不同，时间对活跃通勤的阻碍并不是很大。

“I’d urge anyone who is considering biking or walking to work to do a test run,” she says, perhaps on a weekend (although the traffic patterns will be different from those during the week). Ask colleagues for route suggestions. “Google is good at finding bike paths,” she says, but it emphasizes brevity and directness over scenery for walkers.
她表示，“我会敦促那些考虑骑车或步行上班的人进行一次试骑或试走”，也许是在周末（尽管周末的交通情况可能与工作日不同）。可以向同事征求路线建议。她表示，“谷歌很擅长寻找骑行路线”，但谷歌偏重简洁和直接，不太关注步行者看到的风景。