Commuting in the US has always been costly and a huge hassle in general, with the average worker spending nearly 50 hours a year stuck in traffic, while trying to get to and from work. America has some of the worst commutes in the world, and even though the average commute time is 25 minutes, there are about 2 million workers that travel at least 50 miles and spend 90 minutes on the road in each direction. However, while US workers may think that their daily commute is the worst, there are other cities across the world that have much worse traffic jams, where workers spend pretty much the same amount of time in traffic, even when they cover shorter distances.
According to a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, commuting times are more or less the same across cities in different countries and different continents, regardless of the distance traveled. The researchers used mobile phone data to determine the accurate commute times in the largest cities in Ivory Coast, Portugal, Italy, Saudi Arabia, comparing it with commuting data from Boston. This method is different from the method traditionally used for researching commuting practices, which usually only involves doing a survey.
The researchers found that commuting patterns in different around the world are the same, discovering that commute times don’t depend on the distance that people cover when going to and from work. For instance, they found that the average morning commute in Lisbon, the largest city in Portugal, is 70 minutes, for commutes that range between 5 and 40 kilometers (3 and 24 miles). Additionally, they discovered that 28 percent of commuters in Lisbon use public transport.
The average time it takes people in Ivory Coast to get to work is 80 minutes, no matter how many miles they have to travel to get there. As far as Boston, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US, is concerned, the average morning commute is between 50 and 60 minutes, regardless of distance.
On the other hand, GPS data collected from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, showed that the distance actually affects commute time, with an average commute of 50 minutes for trips between 5 and 20 kilometers (3 and 12 miles), whereas those who travel anywhere between 20 and 40 kilometers (12 and 24 miles), spend about 65 minutes in traffic. Most of the workers in Riyadh go to work by car, with only 2% of them using public transport.
Similarly to Riyadh, data from the Italian city of Milan also showed that the more distance workers cover to get to work, the longer their commute is. The morning commute for those traveling up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) is 40 minutes, which increases to 60 minutes for people covering between 6 and 12 miles, and up to 80 minutes for distances between 12 and 24 miles. However, unlike Riyadh, use of public transport in Milan is much more common.
Researchers say that these findings can be of great help to urban planners, who now have a solid proof that having many different transportation options can help reduce commute times, and can use this information to convince people that using public transportation more often, instead of going to work by car all the time, can help them spend much less time in traffic.