Death of the commuter - birth of a new lifestyle

The graphic shows the average time a rush hour commuter spends stationary in a car relative to distance travelled in the major urban centres of the UK. Even though the average distance travelled by a London car commuter is only 6.8 miles, nineteen minutes of the journey time are still spent in stationary traffic. It would be quicker to cycle, if only it were safe to do so.

Congestion remains one of the biggest obstacles to economic expansion over the next two decades, and that’s before the environment or public health is even considered. Put simply, travelling to an office to work in front of a computer screen occupies as much as two hours of every working day. Not only could much of that work be done as well in a home office, but all the lost time and energy could be better spent elsewhere.

The news for American workers is apparently much better, as over the past five years the average daily commute has decreased from 25.5 to 25.1 minutes, affording the tired commuter an additional four minutes of rest & recreation a week. However, most of those who spend over an hour a day in their cars travelling in each direction find that somewhat difficult to believe, especially those who commute from the outer suburbs - the nation’s fastest-growing communities. America’s longest average commutes are shown opposite, with the long-suffering New Yorkers topping the table as expected.

Despite the creation of car pools, the proportion of people who drive alone to work increased from 75.7 % in 2000 to 77% in 2005. However, during the same period, the proportion of people working from home increased by only 0.3% to 3.6%.

Whilst some 3.1 million of the estimated 4 million people who work in Manhattan live within the New York Metropolitan Area, some 800,000 make the daily trek from New Jersey, Connecticut, or New York State. Although tens of thousands of New Yorkers have switched from their cars to public mass transit in an attempt to relieve the strain, 62% still continue to drive. Elsewhere in the continental USA, the proportion of those who drive to work is closer to 90%, either because public transportation is so poor or because it is absent altogether.

The cost of relieving all of this congestion across the continental USA is estimated to be around $533 billion, at least according to Los Angeles based Reason Foundation. According to this think tank, the time spent in traffic in the United States will increase by 65% over the next 25 years unless more money is found to ease traffic congestion. This is of course not withstanding the impact of the increasing costs of gasoline or the pressure to drive the consumption of fossil fuels down. Rather than debating the respective merits of electric cars, hydrogen power, hybrid vehicles or of taxing SUV’s to extinction, perhaps the simplest way to minimise congestion is to commute as little as possible.

Within the European Union, UK citizens spend an average of 48 minutes every day travelling to and from work, slightly more than the Germans (47), Dutch (46) or Swedes (41). The Bon Viveurs of France spend an average of 37 minutes per day, the Spanish 34, and the Italians only 24 minutes. Once again the workaholic natures of the North Americans and Northern Europeans are confirmed by the statistics. Perhaps our creation of the need to commute long distances to work is entirely cultural and inherent within our natures.

Many in the UK choose to brave the roads and to cycle to work. OK, cyclists probably do get there faster and can average 12-15 miles an hour through stationary traffic. However, most motorists pay little heed to cyclists as they turn corners, open car doors, or pull out of traffic in frustration. So it isn’t just sweat and car exhaust fumes that threaten the health of brave cyclists and the contents of their laptop computers. Perhaps more importantly, employers pay little attention to the needs of cyclists; their need to securely store their bicycles; their need for changing facilities; or their need for a shower for personal hygiene. So until the culture changes and winters are abolished in the Northern hemisphere, cycling to work doesn’t appear to solve the problem either.

The true cost of commuting

There is a long established association between stress and commuting, and countless volumes have been written about the relationship between stress and ill health. Aside from all the lost productivity and frustration over missed meetings due to congested highways, the more time commuters spend in their cars, the less time they appear to spend asleep. Clinicians are well aware of the deadly combination of long commutes, long working hours, and of living in ‘drive everywhere’ communities. Sufficient sleep, along with adequate exercise and good nutrition, is essential to the maintenance of good health. There is in fact a strong correlation between sleep deprivation and an increased health risk for hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, cardiac arrest and stroke. Presently Americans are clocking up sleep debt at much the same rate as they are accumulating credit card debt, with around three-quarters of Americans failing to get the required eight hours of daily sleep they require, even at weekends. The consequences are more sick leave, reduced performance at work, and stressed office communities. Without adequate sleep, mental performance is sharply reduced, with resulting impairments of memory, focus, concentration and reaction times. Many road accidents, travel disasters and poor decisions have been attributed to sleep deprivation.

Other than British parliamentarians, who annually claim some £87 million in expenses for travel, accommodation and office costs between them, most of us are obliged to pay our own way to work. Nowhere is this culturally more deeply enshrined than within the United States, where the pioneer mentality of making your own way remains deeply embedded, at least for the less affluent members of society.

So how much do we typically pay to work? British workers spend on average around £229 a year on food consumed in transit, in contrast to a more modest £56 a year by the Spanish. This ‘travel food’ is of course mainly ‘fast food’ and beverages, most of which is unhealthy fare. The pressures of long working hours and commuting forces Britons to eat ‘on the go’, often because they miss traditional meals or because they resort to comfort eating to pass the long, lonely hours spent in transit.

The costs of commuting to work have only just started. The ‘Total office costs’ survey estimated that an office workstation sets an employer back an average of £8,000 a year, a cost which rises to £18,000 in central London when the impact of rent, rates, heating, lighting, IT, in house services, insurance and other amenities are factored in. This is merely the cost of office commuting to the company. It is of course the commuter who bears the brunt of the costs of the daily tour of duty. A London train commuter faces the cost of driving to the station and parking (often in excess of £10 per day), coffee and snacks (£5), the tube (£4), train ride (£19), and luncheon expenses (£10), a total of between £12 and £48 a day. A typical road commuter may incur costs of between £17 (an average of 17 miles at 40p per mile, £5 for coffee & snack, plus £5 for lunch) and £33 per day in London, not withstanding the £16 Congestion Charge, car maintenance and any parking fee. If this is translated into a weekly sum, together with the purchase of additional office suits and clothes (£20), dry cleaning (£12), taxis (£15) and other ‘on the hoof’ expenses (£8), then the total annual direct cost to the commuter ranges from £5,750 to over £15,000. For long distance rail commuters travelling during peak hours, the costs may be even higher.

In the fashion conscious world of the modern office, employees are estimated to spend some 20% of their net income on improving their personal appearance at work, as employers often expect them to ‘look their best’. The abuse of commuters takes many such indirect forms, but also includes direct forms of exploitation such as pressure to work overtime. In the UK the provision of unpaid overtime has come to represent a rite of passage. Whilst the rich and the high fliers get their bonuses, British employees provided an estimated £23 billion of unpaid overtime work in 2005, or an extra £4,600 per head if paid at their normal hourly rate.

The impact of the IT revolution

So what is all of this commuting actually in aid of? Most of us travel to work from a home furnished with a computer, printer, telephone and a scanner to an office that is equipped with more of the same, complete with additional noise, interruptions and office politics. Given that most companies hold weekly meetings and occasional performance reviews, and taking into account that most modern office communications occur via electronic mail or telephone, there seems little to be gained by travelling to the office more than once a week. Not only would this release an additional eight hours or so a week to employees, but it would also enhance their quality of life, solve the problem of traffic congestion, counter global warming and slash our dependency upon foreign energy reserves. There is simply no point in commuting many hours a day to an office to do work that could equally well be done at home.

Attitudes to such ‘remote working’ are changing with the times. Employers who were previously sceptical are now beginning to see the potential benefits of home working. Employees are often happier in their work, and pregnant women and mothers with infants require less maternity leave and cover. Offices would become smaller and overheads would decrease. Indeed, over the past year, there has been a 28% rise in the number of small and medium sized enterprises (SME’s) adopting home working in the UK. Currently some 60% of businesses offer some form of remote working support to their employees, and advances in IT have ensured the widespread domestic uptake of broadband and the provision of remote access to restricted networks. Moreover, companies may now take advantage of B2B (business to business) services such as remote Internet-based file storage and telecommunications that include VoIP, voicemail, call forwarding, video conferencing and SMS messaging. Consequently employees can be connected to their office email 24/7 rather than for 8 hours a working day (excluding weekends), further reducing staffing costs.

By law companies are required to accommodate reasonable requests for flexible working made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or from those with disabled children. Combined with the immense losses suffered in terms of cost and expertise during maternity leave, it makes financial sense to allow remote teleworking from the home, car, lap-top or mobile. The Wi-Fi revolution is spreading throughout restaurants, coffee bars, airports, trains and their terminals. Remote B2B hosting companies can even handle company databases or information storage requirements, affording even greater savings and flexibility. Remote working offers businesses the potential to become operational 24/7, whether their employees are in hotels, airports or domestic environments. The travelling salesman and executive are no longer incommunicado.

Teleworking enables mothers, the disabled, the elderly and carers to work and to contribute to the growth and success of a company. International meetings, which once incurred vast time and travel costs, may now be achieved through videoconferencing. Such remote networking also allows documents to be prepared and shared online in real time, a feature which is particularly useful for corporations whose specialists are scattered around the world. Despite these advances, many companies still cite infrastructure costs and security hazards as a means of explaining their reluctance to adopt remote teleworking. Although the number of teleworkers in the EU has almost doubled over the past three years to some 20 million, only 2% of all employed people work from home on a full-time basis.

The rise of the Internet is also fostering the creation of networks of like-minded specialists, from models to consultants. Over a hundred thousand Americans have already adopted the practice of flexible home or ‘ki’-working, leading a wave of change in the way we will live and work in the future. Home-based businesses represent a growing sector within the UK economy, with over a million self-employed individuals currently working from home. In the USA the gross turnover of home-based businesses is over $530 billion a year. Further, over half of all small American businesses are based at home, and these typically realise higher net incomes than their office-based rivals.

The home office also promises an end to the ‘outsourcing’ of work overseas, stemming the exodus of call centre jobs from the UK and the USA. To date, this ‘off shoring’ phenomenon has led to the ‘export’ of some 30,000 jobs from the UK alone to call centres in India and South Africa. This loss of jobs is predicted to cost the UK economy some £20bn in the form of lost taxes and skilled labour over the next decade.

Evolution of the 21st Century lifestyle

The sanity of home and teleworking is gradually prevailing. This in turn is resulting in the appearance of revolutionary new ways of living and working. So-called live/work properties have emerged in many of the more expensive cities. Eliminating the cost of running tailored office premises allows valuable resources to be diverted towards marketing, networking, equipment and other materials. Suddenly, traditional home office costs such as newspapers, magazines, computers, printers and furniture become tax deductible, representing a major upswing in household income.

Of course home working can mean anything from a lap-top on the couch or in the bedroom, to the elegance of a purpose built home office. Garden offices allow employees or company clients to visit without risk of domestic disruption or any loss of privacy. There are of course other solutions to the problem of locating the home-based office, including creating an office space in or above the garage. Some individual companies even extend their houses or add conservatories to create purpose-built office space.

The widespread social stigma of working from home is gradually being overcome by improvements in quality of life, savings in office and commuting costs, and by the environmental persuasions of the overcrowded 21st Century. Office blocks may soon become a thing of the past as they are converted into live/work units or housing. Office-centred businesses are seeking to relocate to more natural settings to offer their remote workers the opportunity of a more pleasant working environment and commute. Employees may now be based virtually anywhere in the world, allowing round the clock corporate coverage. Virtual universities will replace traditional ones as the main educators within the New Age Economy, and full time courses will be replaced by integrated work-study degrees. People will study and work for longer, and will often develop portfolio careers as consultants, models, moderators and specialists. Relax; you’ll always be working with the comforts of home.