What commuters get up to when they no longer commute
“Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many,” TS Eliot wrote in “The Waste Land”. It is 100 years since the poem’s publication, but the crowd heading in to Eliot’s “unreal City” is much depleted. So are crowds of early morning commuters around the world. The aftermath of the pandemic, like the aftermath of the first world war that the poet described, has brought lasting change to working habits, particularly among office workers.
A Financial Times analysis of Google Mobility data this week found UK trips to the workplace were down by 24 per cent from February 2020, as coronavirus struck. Commuting has not recovered to pre-Covid levels in the world’s seven largest economies, with implications for urban planning, management, and productivity.
It is hardly surprising that those employees who were able to work remotely during lockdown are reluctant to resume the five-day routine of métro, boulot, dodo (train, job, sleep), as they say in Paris, where trips to work are down by more than a quarter. The psychological and economic toll of commuting was clear even pre-pandemic. Research identifies a sometimes deadly cocktail of commute-induced stress, family problems and job dissatisfaction.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:The editorial board
