Business

How to fix your cursed commute

Data shows we can avoid crowds and save money by switching up our route to work. Post-lockdown, this could become the norm
Image may contain Human Person Vehicle Transportation Terminal Train Train Station Light and Traffic Light
Hollie Adams/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Freedom day has been and gone and, as many Covid restrictions have been scrapped across England, bosses now have the legal right to demand their staff return to the office. Covid infection rates remain high, though, and while employers are being encouraged to minimise office-based risks, there is nothing they can do to guarantee the safety of commuting. The situation is causing serious concern.

Last May, long before vaccination programmes had begun, 31 per cent of staff were anxious about the prospect of encountering large groups of tightly packed people on their journey to work. Now, despite two-thirds of the UK population being fully vaccinated, that has risen to 38 per cent.

As many employers are planning to make hybrid working a long-term feature of their workplaces, most people will now have no option but to spend at least some of their week working out of their old offices. Those people may not be able to change the fact they will have to go back to commuting, but what they can change is the commute itself.

Emma Griffin, vice-chair of walking campaign group London Living Streets, believes many people will turn to walking to help alleviate some of that stress, rethinking their old journeys to avoid the worst of the commuter bottlenecks. Last year London Living Streets developed a map of “a network of quiet and interesting streets” on behalf of Transport for London. Griffin claims the fact it has been viewed 600,000 times online since September “shows there’s a real interest in it”.

“People coming into London from all sorts of different areas are taking off some part of their journey,” she says. “They might be coming in on the train but doing the final bit on foot. That gives them the time to prepare for where they are going while avoiding the really tight spaces of a mainline station.”

Griffin says factoring a walk or cycle ride into the daily commute should be relatively easy due to the new habits people formed over the course of the various lockdowns. Data from the ONS shows there was a surge in the proportion of people exercising outdoors over the course of 2020 while data collected and analysed by fitness app Strava showed that in February this year there were 6.3 times more walkers in London and the South East than there were at the same point in 2020. If that is maintained – and people do, as expected, spend part of their week in the office and part of their week at home – horribly crowded rush-hour tubes and buses could become a thing of the past.

There is some evidence to suggest that could be the case. In 2014, researchers from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge analysed Oyster card data to see how a strike on the London tube network affected people’s travelling habits. They found that one in 20 people who were forced to find a new way of getting to work as a result of the strike stuck with that route once the service returned to normal and, far from being inconvenienced by the disruption, found it positively impacted on their lives.

“Some people found that their new route was quicker – they learned that they’d been getting the commute wrong for the last couple of years,” says International Monetary Fund economist Tim Willens, who co-authored the report as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. “Their new route was either quicker or more convenient – they found it included a nicer walk that took them past a supermarket or a gym that they signed up to.”

Ultimately, the report found that being forced to find new ways of travelling led to long-term economic benefits because the amount of time saved in the longer term outweighed the time lost dealing with the inconvenience of the strike. Altering a routine, for whatever reason, is a positive in and of itself the positive. Or, as report co-author Shaun Larcom said at the time the report was issued: “The net gains came from the disruption itself.”

Covid-19 has been a disrupter like no other, meaning commuters in crowded cities like London stand to make significant gains if they can find more efficient ways of getting to work. Pre-pandemic, the average amount of time Brits spent commuting to and from work was 59 minutes, but in London that stretched to an hour and 19 minutes. Londoners also bore the brunt of overcrowding, with Department for Transport figures showing that of the 1.1 million people travelling into the city by rail each day over half arrived during the morning peak between 7am and 10am. Due to overcrowding, more than a fifth of them had to stand – the highest proportion recorded in any major city. Around 2 million people were using the tube every day and many were travelling on exactly the same routes. Transport for London figures show that enough people to fill 43 tube carriages got on the Victoria Line at Brixton and got off at Oxford Circus every single day.

Notwithstanding the results of the Oxbridge report, altering those journeys may be easier said than done. A study carried out in China suggested that commuters who fear being infected while travelling by train have little confidence that switching to buses, tubes or taxis would be any better. Research from transport management business Kura, meanwhile, found that a large proportion of people who are afraid of travelling on busy trains will switch to taking their car instead – even in London, 42 per cent of respondents said they would make the switch compared to 51 per cent nationally. Yet with congestion and parking charges known for making driving in the capital prohibitively expensive, the same research found that an increase of just £5 a day in the cost of commuting would put people off using their cars.

Even if just a small proportion of commuters were to change their habits, it would not necessarily be good news for transport companies, says Willems. “Even if people don’t like commuting by car, if they were nudged into buying a car [due to the pandemic] they will use it,” he says. “If people have made an investment in a new car or a new bike – and they discover that they like cycling better – that might mean that public transport will never fully recover.”

That would inevitably lead to operators rationalising routes and services, which in turn would lead to less choice and so a smaller number of busier buses and trains in the longer run. But behavioural economist Colm Mulcahy believes that in reality that would be an extreme outcome. He notes that even when lured with strong incentives people are generally disinclined to change the way they are used to behaving. That means the majority of those going back into the office could well take the same old routes at the same old times as a matter of routine.

“The big thing is that it’s really hard to change behaviours that people are used to,” he says. “There have been studies that have tried to incentivise different modes of travel, such as paying people who live near train stations to take the train rather than the car, and they have been really ineffective.”

What could be different about the current situation, he says, is that the pandemic forced “large scale changes across the board”. It is yet to be tested, but that could mean that after 18 months away from the office workers will not simply slip back into old commuting habits, but rather will be ready to form new ones.

That may come as some comfort to anyone afraid of standing shoulder to shoulder with fellow commuters while Covid continues to rage. However, Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at London School of Economics, says the confusion created by the government means it is impossible for people to judge how best to behave. That in turn makes it impossible to tell whether the current situation will make us a nation of more thoughtful, better commuters or whether we will end up sticking with old habits but exercising them in a panic-stricken way.

“I haven’t got a fucking clue what will happen,” he says. “One of the things we have learned from this past year and more is that people’s preferences respond to policy, not just the other way round. We take cues for our behaviour from the signals that policy-makers make, but now that signal is really unclear – freedom day but not really, wear masks but not really. It’s such a muddled and confused message that it wouldn’t be surprising if people react in a muddled and confused way.”

Returning to normal commutes could end up being a positive for transport companies whose bottom lines are already under threat from the spectre of hybrid working and four-day weeks. But Griffin remains convinced of the benefits that will be felt if things tip the other way. “In London, walking generally takes the same amount of time as taking the bus and some of our walks are only a few minutes longer than going by tube,” she says. “You’ve got to have the space to get your brain in gear or de-stress for the day and the best way to do that is with a walk.”

More great stories from WIRED

This article was originally published by WIRED UK