"The Soul of the Commuter"

"Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each way. People travel between counties the way they used to travel between neighborhoods," writes Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker. "The number of commuters who travel ninety minutes or more each way—known to the Census Bureau as 'extreme commuters'—has reached 3.5 million, almost double the number in 1990. They’re the fastest-growing category, the vanguard in a land of stagnant wages, low interest rates, and ever-radiating sprawl."

The question is--why?

"Commuting makes people unhappy, or so many studies have shown. Recently, the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger asked nine hundred working women in Texas to rate their daily activities, according to how much they enjoyed them. Commuting came in last. (Sex came in first.) The source of the unhappiness is not so much the commute itself as what it deprives you of. When you are commuting by car, you are not hanging out with the kids, sleeping with your spouse (or anyone else), playing soccer, watching soccer, coaching soccer, arguing about politics, praying in a church, or drinking in a bar. In short, you are not spending time with other people. The two hours or more of leisure time granted by the introduction, in the early twentieth century, of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude. You have cup holders for company.

“'I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,' Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. (Putnam wrote the best-seller Bowling Alone, about the disintegration of American civic life.) 'There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness....'"

"Three years ago, two economists at the University of Zurich, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, released a study called 'Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.' They found that, if your trip is an hour each way, you’d have to make forty per cent more in salary to be as 'satisfied' with life as a noncommuter is....

“'People with long journeys to and from work are systematically worse off and report significantly lower subjective well-being,' Stutzer told me. According to the economic concept of equilibrium, people will move or change jobs to make up for imbalances in compensation. Commute time should be offset by higher pay or lower living costs, or a better standard of living. It is this last category that people apparently have trouble measuring. They tend to overvalue the material fruits of their commute—money, house, prestige—and to undervalue what they’re giving up: sleep, exercise, fun.

'They have to trade off social goods for material goods,' Stutzer said. 'This is very difficult for people. They make systematic mistakes. We are very good at predicting whether we’ll like something but not at knowing for how long.' People adapt to a higher living standard but not to social isolation. Frey and Stutzer infer that some people, even when the costs become clear, just lack the will power to change. 'People have limited self-control and insufficient energy, inducing some people to not even try to improve their lot,' they write. In this regard, they say, commuting resembles smoking and failing to save money."

  

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