Getting Two Small Children Into A Car Takes Longer Than The Journey

A ten-minute drive with two small children can take forty minutes door to door. The overhead is fixed and largely independent of distance, which changes what short trips are worth.

The fixed cost of departure

Before the car moves, both children need coats and shoes, a bag has to be assembled, and each child has to be carried or walked out and strapped in.

None of that scales with the length of the journey. The same sequence precedes a trip to the corner shop and a trip across the country.

This is why a nearby errand can be harder than a long drive. The long drive at least amortises the overhead over something substantial.

Why one child cannot wait in the car

The sequence is complicated by the fact that a very small child cannot be left in a vehicle unattended, so the order of loading is constrained rather than free.

The usual solution is loading the least mobile child first and the most mobile second, so nobody is standing in a car park while an adult leans into a seat.

In tight parking, doors that cannot open fully add another layer, which is why families with small children develop strong opinions about particular car parks.

Preparation shifts the work earlier

Most of the overhead can be moved out of the departure window. Bags packed the night before, shoes by the door, seats already adjusted.

What cannot be moved is the children themselves, so the aim is to reduce everything else to the point where the adults are only handling people.

Keeping a permanent kit in the boot removes the packing question entirely for anything short, at the cost of the boot space it occupies.

Consolidating trips is worth more than it seems

Because the overhead is fixed, two errands in one trip cost far less than twice one errand. The saving is the whole loading sequence rather than the driving.

This is the reason families with young children batch errands to an extent that looks excessive from outside. It is a rational response to a large fixed cost.

It also explains the appeal of destinations that combine several purposes, even where each individual element is worse than a specialist alternative.

Walking is sometimes genuinely faster

For very short distances, a pram avoids the loading sequence entirely and often arrives sooner, particularly where parking at the other end is uncertain.

The comparison people make is driving time against walking time, which is the wrong comparison. The right one includes loading, unloading and parking at both ends.

Once that is counted, the crossover distance is further than expected, and a good deal of local driving with small children turns out to save no time at all.