the.com/commute
The daily ritual of paying time to be somewhere you'd rather not be twice.
means To travel regularly between home and work, or to exchange one thing for another — most commonly a punishment for a lesser one.
from From Latin commutare, 'to change altogether,' built from com- (intensive) plus mutare, 'to change' — a cousin of 'mutate' and 'mutual.' For centuries it meant simply to swap or substitute, which is why a sentence can be 'commuted' to something milder. The travel sense came later: 19th-century railway passengers paid a reduced, 'commuted' fare in one lump sum instead of buying daily tickets, and the holders of these commuted tickets became 'commuters.' The swap, in other words, was money for convenience — and the word for the daily journey was born from a discount.
- average length
- Roughly 27 minutes each way in the US
- origin
- From discounted 'commuted' fares for regular riders
- productivity drain
- Long commutes linked to lower job satisfaction
- the carbon
- Solo car trips dominate global commuter emissions
- the death
- Remote work erased millions of daily commutes overnight
london to reading — uk's most congested commute with 125,000+ daily rail passengers on the great western main line
new jersey to manhattan — 1.6 million people cross the hudson river daily, peak hours see path trains every 90 seconds