Ask someone if they have regrets, and very few people will say:
"I wish I had spent more of my life commuting."
The time spent travelling from home to work and back again tends to be neither relaxing nor productive.
It is usually routine and sometimes unpleasant:
anything that involves loads of traffic or armpits is hard to like.
In popular culture the monotony is the point.
Commuting becomes a trap ("Exit 8"), a window on the real action ("The Girl on the Train")
or a commentary on the softness of modern society ("The War of the Worlds").
The covid-19 pandemic gave people the chance to experience a commute-free existence,
and many of them loved it.
So when people are surveyed about their perfect commute time, the unsurprising answer tends to be "shorter".
On average people around the world spend roughly an hour a day commuting.
But however long their travel time is, they want to lop that total roughly in half.
A study published last year by Jonas De Vos of University College London
into the commuting preferences of over 2,000 students and staff at the university is typical.
The average actual commute time was a hefty 54 minutes one way; the average ideal time was 31 minutes.
(Ideals vary depending on how someone gets to work:
a person who is on a train for an hour, for example,
envisages a commute that is much longer than someone with a 30-minute bike ride.)
Long journeys can impose costs on employers as well as commuters.