How does transport impact on our stress levels and what can we do to make our commutes smoother?

2 November 2022  |  Michael Solomon Williams  |  Rail

It’s fair to say that most people would admit to feeling the effects of stress, whether occasionally or perhaps more often than we would like. As part of our work on the relationship between transport and health, encompassing everything from the effects of air pollution on our health and the physical health benefits of integrated transport systems through to the importance of mental health such as I covered in my last blog, for this one we’re exploring the relationship between stress and our experience of transport, on this National Stress Awareness Day.  

But what exactly is stress, and is everyday stress any different from more profound complex mental health challenges? Mind, the mental health charity, give us a helpful distinction, describing stress as ‘how we react when we feel under pressure or threatened. It usually happens when we are in a situation that we don’t feel we can manage or control.’ This raises some interesting questions.  

It may prove helpful to address this concept of control with an open mind. The idea that we are more in control of our lives if we travel alone whether by car, bicycle or walking belies the reality of further situations beyond our control (other cars, other people, weather, infrastructure). The logic follows that public transport takes away that agency from us, and that private transport is the logical route to a stress-free life. The reality is most major externalities are beyond our control. We can do little about the weather or other people. There are however many things we can control, such as our exercise, our breathing, our diet, our sleep, and how we interact with others. This all reduces stress.  

The word ‘commute’ has itself been on quite a journey. Appearing as a noun as recently as the mid-20th century, its use as a verb came from the USA, where businessmen in the late 19th Century first bought ‘commutation’ tickets, essentially season tickets which combined many fares in one. In legal terminology still today we might refer to ‘mercifully commuting’ a sentence. In its purest etymological form, it is ‘to change together’ an amalgamation of the Latin ‘com-‘(together) with ‘mutare’ (to change). That sounds like a lovely concept, doesn’t it? Why then has the commute become linked with stress, and does it need to be? Can we actually enjoy our commute?  

In Transport for Humans, Rory Sutherland and Pete Dyson offer an important counterbalance to the notion that transportation is meant to be a means-end process, that we should focus on efficiency above all, grit our teeth and ignore our fellow travellers and moan if there are unavoidable delays. They propose Homo Transporticus as a version of Homo Economicus, being John Stuart Mill’s concept of ultra-rational humankind.  

Transport designers have fabricated a new species: Homo transporticus, a cousin of economic man. Homo transporticus is naturally selected to use modern transportation, with abilities that include a full awareness of the modes of travel available, an encyclopaedic knowledge of routes and timetables, the ability to navigate them without hindrance, and the ability to compare two options and always choose between them in a way that a planner would consider to be rational. Homo transporticus has stable preferences, makes lightning-fast calculations about cost, convenience, and travel time, and always chooses better options when they are available. 

Now I’ll be the first to admit that it’s lovely to find the most efficient route with the help of clever apps and yes, we only live once, so we want to make the most of every second available, but might our inherent desire for efficiency risk us being permanently on the threshold of our stress levels rising? If so, that’s potentially quite dangerous for our own health, and for those around us. It’s important to assess our priorities, as we are all travelling to a greater or lesser extent, all the time. Why would we not want to enjoy it if we could? Travelling can and arguably should be a source of pleasure, of energy, of joy and or possibility. The Slow Travel movement is successfully harnessing a clear public desire to associate travel with pleasure, and as someone who has subverted stress by turning frustration into flowers at my local train station, it’s definitely worth celebrating the fantastic Community Rail Network and the benefits so many have found by embracing their train stations as places of community. Contributing to that shared transport experience as a passenger or as a local citizen is another great source of stress displacement for many, and supports train stations, which are our gateways to the excitement, the discovery, the efficiency (yes!) and the pleasure of commuting, of changing together.