(2007-04-20) Paumgarten Commuter

Nick Paumgarten on the Commute. Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each way... Is there a perfect commute? Many citizens of Bronxville, a small, exclusive, affluent, mostly white enclave that is as close as a town can be to New York City without being part of it, would nominate theirs. A place like this could not exist, of course, without a daily influx of labor from neighboring towns. ("Every Bronxville needs its Yonkers," the historian Kenneth T. Jackson told me.) The Bronxville commute-twenty-eight minutes from Grand Central Terminal-is a well-oiled one, and it has its proud and cagey veterans, some of them whose fathers made the same commute, back when men wore hats.

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 "BowlingAlone," 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."... Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. "You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley," Putnam said. "Where is your community?" The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had.

Commuter-wise, New York City is an anomaly. New Yorkers have the highest average journey-to-work times (thirty-nine minutes) of any city in the country, but are apparently much happier with their commutes than people are elsewhere. It could be that New Yorkers are better conditioned to megalopolitan hardships, or that public transportation (Mass Transit) ameliorates some of the psychic costs. Or maybe they're better at lying to themselves.

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.