Marchetti's Constant

A book I've been reading, A Sideways Look at Time, makes reference, briefly, to "Marchetti's Constant":

Ceasere Marchetti, a Venetian physicist plotted what is called Marchetti's Constant, which argues that from Neolithic times to medieval and to the modern age, the time spent travelling by people each day has remained at a fairly constant one and a half hours; and though this time stays the same, the distance travelled has expanded dramatically...

A google search for "Marchetti's Constant" (currently) only turns up one article ("Why we're reaching our limit as a one-hour city" in the Sydney Morning Herald, April 2004).

I'm curious to read Marchetti's study, but haven't been able to find it (or much information about it) on the web. It might be "Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behaviour", but no electronic version is available, so it's hard to say for sure.

And, while you can apparently order a reprint from the foregoing link, the order form doesn't say how much it costs (so I'm a bit leery to fill it out with my credit card information). Google finds a dozen documents referencing this paper (mostly PDFs).

—Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, January 15, 2005 at 21:29

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