Recent statistics suggest we all spend around 5 years of our life traveling to and from work.
The stats say on average, we spend 29 “working” days each year, with commuters in London spending even longer as their 3 hour average daily commute adds up to a massive 96 working days each year or 18 years over a working career.
The figures actually sound worse than they are, as I guess a working day is say 8 hours, rather than the 24 hour day most of us have, but they still highlight how much time we waste, time that we could be doing something we enjoy, rather than sitting on a train or a bus, or worse still, stuck in a traffic jam in one of the 27.8 million cars on Britain’s roads today
Congestion in towns and cities is becoming a real problem and costing us all in terms of time and money and of course, inconvenience.
Most spectators suggest we dump our single occupancy cars in favor of car sharing, or better still, using public transport or getting on your bike. Better than that would be being able to change the way we work, allowing us either to work from home or other locations, or perhaps adopt some more flexible approach to the hours we do.
Fact is, public transport is expensive, noisy, smelly and almost completely unreliable and mostly you end up sitting next to someone you would be frightened of if you met them in an alley at night. Public transport runs at the time it wants to, not when you want to and involves walking to an embarkation point, and for around 8 months of the year, standing in the rain until the mythical transport turns up and when you do get on, you probably have to stand and chances are, you will arrive early at your destination, leaving you time to kill, or arrive late for work.
Public transport is for many of us the only option, but it’s also the most inconvenient option for many of us. None of us want to waste our lives commuting, but fact is, if we have to spend that amount of time doing it, we really do want to be somewhere we like, with someone we like and if that means sitting alone in our cars, well so be it.
