Don't Meet Me In The Middle

When people who live a transit-ride away from me suggest we go for dinner, they often (politely) offer to meet me in the middle. I think this is bad.

(Conditional on living in a city and relying on transit), I would much rather meet in your neigborhood once and then my neighborhood once than meet in the middle twice.

Basically, anytime I go someplace that's more-than-walking distance away, I have to add a bunch of buffer for transit – in NYC at least 15 mins per journey, to account for randomness in the train-arrival time + seemingly-inevitable delays. That buffer-time is basically fixed, rather than proportional to the journey length.[^1]

As such, I think it's inefficient for both of us to pay this fixed cost whenever we meet up, rather than one of us paying the fixed cost and the other going an (invariant) 5 min walk from their own front door.

What's more, if we do meet somewhere that's 5 mins walk from you, when my train inevitably stops in a tunnel for an unknowable period of time, I can just text wait don't leave yet, my train just stopped in a tunnel for an unknowable period of time, and you can continue chilling in your home until I'm 5 mins away from you. By contrast, if we meet in the middle then you're stuck waiting for me at some random place you don't want to be at.

Compromise is a beautiful thing, and society needs more of it. But meeting in the middle is simply inefficient, and society needs less of it.

[^1]: you could argue the buffer-formula should incorporate a term for number of transfers, so it's not quite true that it's an entirely fixed cost, but it approximates to one psychologically