It probably feels like more, but the average Briton spends almost as much time commuting as they do holidaying. Glenn Lyons and Kiron Chatterjee, from the Centre for Transport & Society in the University of the West of England, Bristol, tell us that the average worker in Britain spends 139 hours a year commuting, "the equivalent of 19 standard working days."
And most people have to participate in this daily ebb and flow of humanity. "According to the 2001 Census, 21.5 million out of the 23.6 million people aged between 16 and 74 in employment in England and Wales commute to work," say Lyons and Chatterjee in their paper in Transport Reviews, 'A Human Perspective on the Daily Commute: Costs, Benefits and Trade-offs'.
The good news is that although more people are on the treadmill, "the average number of (one-way) commute journeys made per worker per year has decreased from 374 in 1989/91 to 321 in 2002/03". The authors put this down to more teleworking, people working the same hours over fewer days and longer holidays. Who hasn't encountered a colleague who is "working at home" in at attempt to do something productive rather than dealing with office trivia?
A puzzling number for those involved in the daily battle into London is the short distance of many commutes. The average commute has gone up from "7.2 miles one-way in 1989/91 to 8.5 miles one-way in 2002/03". This is a lot more than the 2.5 miles of 1980, but many long-distance commuters would dismiss such journeys as working next door. It turns out that one in 25 commuters in Britain now travels more than 100 km (both ways) to work and 10 percent of commuters spend over two hours a day travelling to and from work.
The Bristol team describes a phenomenon that strikes anyone with commuting experience going back more than a decade or so. Technology can now turn the commute into time in the office. "In the 1970s society had not yet encountered the full force of the information age. Thirty years on and the travelling environment in some respects is now very different. Laptops hold the equivalent of vast filing cabinets full of paper documentation."
The researchers offer fascinating insights into the daily commute, along with interesting observations. For example, they suggest that there is a "link between more thought given by individuals to how they use their travel time and how worthwhile they find their travel time to be. The information age is equipping one perhaps to have more things at one's disposal to do when on the move."
There is a sting in the tail of this research. Responding to the needs of commuters, and making the journey less of a pain, may bring its own drawbacks. "There are social, economic and financial benefits from improving the travel experience for people with long commute journeys, yet improving the travel experience may itself contribute to the trend towards long-distance commuting."
Lyons and Chatterjee focus naturally enough on the transport side of the equation, but their research has implications for others. For example, if workers really do spend a couple of hours a day travelling to and from work tied to their Blackberry and thumping away over PowerPoint presentations, maybe they should start to demand shorter working days and weeks on the grounds that their commute is time spent "at work".
Further information:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01441640701559484
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