The Woes of Commuting

Since I have spent most of my working life traveling an hour or more to my office, I am always interested in factoids like these:

• Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce.
• When asked to rate how enjoyable they find a range of common activities, 900 Texas women ranked commuting last. (Sex was first, socializing second.)
• Long commutes also make us feel lonely. Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone) reports that every 10 minutes spent commuting results in 10 percent fewer "social connections." Those social connections tend to make us feel happy and fulfilled.
• 1 in 3 workers with a 90-minute daily commute has recurrent neck or back problems.
• Commuting promotes unhealthy habits: when we spend more time commuting, we spend less time exercising and fixing ourselves meals at home and we eat more junk food.
• People with long commutes are fatter.
• The stress of a 1-hour commute far outweighs the benefits of living in a bigger house, or of a higher salary; one study found that you would have to get a 40% raise to make up for the added misery of an extra hour of daily commuting.
  

Personally I don't find commuting all that miserable. When I am in the office I ride the train, which allows me to read. In fact I do most of my reading on the train, far more than at home, where there are always distractions. And while spending long hours in the car has started to bother my body, riding the train does not. Still I do wonder what it would be like to live five minutes from my office, an experience I have never had.