Long commutes affect employees negatively, says a recent study. c Oli Scarff/Getty Images
The average UK worker will spend 400 days of their life commuting, according to new research.
Despite research indicating that long commutes can negatively affect well-being and productivity, most adults don’t question the impact of travelling to work. The research comes from totaljobs’ Commuter Calculator, where 4,248 UK workers took totaljobs’ Commuter Calculator to discover how much they’d spend and what they could be doing instead.
“There is increasing evidence that [commuting] adversely affects our psychological and physical health – even after we account for the increased wages and larger home that commuting further may allow us to obtain. The implication is that that we are spending our limited and valuable time participating in an activity that is not good for our wellbeing,” said Professor Jennifer Roberts, Dept. of Economics University of Sheffield, and Institute for Economic Analysis of Decision Making.
Other key statistics highlighted in the study show that this increases for those working in London, who will spend up to 559 days of their life commuting.
Workers living outside the capital and commuting in every day may suffer the most from their commute. Their average round trip is just under 50 miles and two and a half hours long.
However, workers living and working in London have the shortest commutes in terms of time and distance. Their average round trip is 13.42 miles and they spend 48 minutes travelling to or from work on average.
Londoners will travel 363 days and 141,427 miles by the time they retire, or 161 times the distance from Land’s End to John O’ Groats.
Moreover, it costs them £305 a month on average to commute, the highest monthly spend in the UK. Over their lifetime, they will spend an impressive 559 days and £197,377 commuting.
People living and working outside of the capital have commutes of 34.46 mile round trips lasting one hour and forty minutes on average, which is considerably less time than those commuting into London. Over their lifetime, they will have travelled 337,249 miles and 378 days.
Rebecca joined the HRreview editorial team in January 2016. After graduating from the University of Sheffield Hallam in 2013 with a BA in English Literature, Rebecca has spent five years working in print and online journalism in Manchester and London. In the past she has been part of the editorial teams at Sleeper and Dezeen and has founded her own arts collective.
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