Commuting and daily travel

I think the real problem isn't the length of the journey but its unpredictability. People can accept forty minutes on a train if it's always forty minutes, because they can read or doze; what wears them down is a route that takes twenty minutes on Monday and an hour on Tuesday, so they have to leave early every day just in case. On top of that, commuting is unpaid time that belongs to neither work nor home, which makes it feel stolen. As for what cities can do, the unglamorous answer is to make buses reliable before building anything grand. A dedicated bus lane costs a fraction of a metro line and can be painted in a month. Safe pavements matter just as much: in many Asian cities a journey of five hundred metres is made by motorbike purely because walking means sharing the road with traffic. That said, infrastructure alone won't do it if housing keeps being built far from jobs, so planning where people live is really part of transport policy. Will people travel less for work in future? For office staff, yes, to some extent. The pandemic proved that a great deal of desk work can be done from a kitchen table, and many firms have settled on two or three days at home. But I'd be careful about generalising, because nurses, builders and delivery riders can't log in remotely. So I expect a growing divide between those who can skip the commute and those who never will.