I've recently been hearing a lot about ''March Madness''.
Apparently in March each year we all move a lot, and lots of local daily movements leads to hugely congested roads and motorways (in Auckland at least) but interestingly, also higher than average public transport patronage.
You see, by March we've all gone back to school, back to university and back to work, so we are all fighting one another to get across the cities and towns from home to wherever we need to go.
I also found it interesting to read that we're all more diligent in March as well, and this makes the issue worse.
In March, students are still early in the university year and eager to attend, and employees are well rested after the summer and not yet taking annual leave.
So we're all going in the same direction, from the suburbs to the city.
And this got me to thinking about how we choose where to live.
Now for some people, there isn't much choice.
But for other people, there is a process of prioritisation that weighs up: lifestyle, cost, proximity to work/school/shops etc.
And it seems we're becoming more tolerant about the time we will spend commuting.
For a long time, it appeared that there was a wall, a limit, to travel time.
This is called ''the Marchetti wall'' after Thomas Marchetti, who in 1994 proposed a 60-minute travel budget for urban travel (commuting).
Marchetti argued that in order to keep travel time relatively constant, people will adjust their lives, including the location of their home relative to work.
With improvements in transport infrastructure over the past century, we've been able to travel further within that budget.
And this has allowed us to live further and further away from the things we need to access.
But this could be at an end.
Research has shown that we are now exceeding the one-hour average time budget for urban travel, and this could be contributing to the congestion on major roads.
Frances O'Grady of the Trade Union Congress in the UK has argued that: ''More home-working and flexi-time could easily be introduced to allow people to cut their commutes and save money at the same time. This would be popular with workers and would also help take the pressure off our congested and overloaded transport system.''
Another approach could be for us to simply live closer to the things we need to access; choose the closest school, live near university or work.
Now I know this won't be a popular suggestion, and I am not expecting a flurry of houses for sale, but how about the next time we make a housing, education or employment decision, we use whether we can access it by foot or bike as a deciding factor?
• Debbie Hopkins is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Otago Centre for Sustainability. Each week in this column, one of a panel of writers addresses issues of sustainability.
