Is the morning commute secretly good for you?

The research here is more interesting than the commute-hating consensus suggests. A study published in Applied Psychology found that commuters who used their commute time purposefully - reading, listening to podcasts, thinking rather than just enduring - reported higher wellbeing than those who optimised to eliminate commuting entirely through remote work.

The transition function is the key insight. The commute creates psychological distance between home-self and work-self in both directions. Going in, it allows anticipatory mental preparation - the chance to shift registers before you arrive somewhere that requires a different mode. Coming back, it provides decompression: a buffer between the demands of work and the demands of home. Without it, those two zones collide at the threshold of the door.

People who work from home often report this as a real problem. The absence of transition means that work intrudes into home in ways that are harder to manage, and home intrudes into work. The boundaries that the commute enforced somewhat artificially turn out to serve a genuine psychological purpose.

This doesn't mean long, crowded, unreliable commuting is good. The research distinguishes clearly: commutes that feel controllable and usable produce positive effects, commutes that feel like lost time in hostile conditions produce the negative effects everyone assumes. The commute quality matters enormously.

The broader point is that we often don't value things until they're removed. The commute is an excellent example: years of resenting it, then discovering that the transition it provided was doing more work than we'd noticed.

From a systems perspective, the commute is doing something that needs to happen somewhere. You need to transition between two different operating contexts with different requirements, different social roles, and different cognitive modes. If the commute doesn't provide that transition, something else has to.

Working from home surfaced this very clearly. People started building their own rituals - a walk before starting work, a deliberate shutdown routine at the end of the day - because the psychological transition function still needed to happen, just without the commute providing it automatically. The commute was infrastructure that nobody had to consciously build because it came built in.

The "secret benefit" framing slightly misses the point. The benefit wasn't secret; it was just invisible because it was provided by an external structure rather than self-managed. Once the structure went away, the function it served became visible because it suddenly had to be replicated manually.

There's also a practical point about information processing. The brain processes and consolidates during periods of low cognitive demand. A routine commute, once the route is familiar, provides exactly this: a period of low-demand mental activity during which unresolved problems from the previous day can be worked through without direct effort. I solve more design problems on a familiar train journey than in a meeting room.

The commute is probably best understood as forced downtime with a side effect of physical displacement. The displacement is the obvious function. The downtime is the one that matters more.

I'll give you the perspective of someone who doesn't have a commute and would quite like one, because it would imply having somewhere to go. The commute is one of those things that sounds miserable until you're on the outside of it.

What a commute actually provides, beyond the transition people talk about, is a schedule that structures your day at both ends. You have to get up at a specific time. You have to be somewhere. The day has an externally imposed shape that the unemployed day conspicuously lacks. I spend a not-inconsiderable amount of effort trying to artificially impose that structure, with varying success.

There's also the social texture of it. Not the conversations - commuters mostly avoid those - but the presence of other people moving through the world with purpose. The train platform full of people who have somewhere to be. That's a form of social embedding that disappears completely when you're out of work. You become invisible to the rhythms of the working world in a way that's easy to underestimate until you experience it.

I used to hate my commute. Not violently, but in the low-level way that commuters hate commutes: the delay, the cost, the hour I'd rather have back. Now I'd take the commute very happily in exchange for what it represents. The commute is evidence of employment, and employment is what I'd like.

So yes, secretly good. Not a secret to anyone who's lost access to one.

The commute has a function that urban planning has always known about and that the post-pandemic conversation mostly ignored. We call it the "transition space" — the physical and temporal gap between the home environment and the work environment that allows the brain and body to shift modes. The commute is not dead time. For many people, particularly those in shared households, it is the only reliably alone time in their day.

But — and this is the design point — the quality of the commute matters enormously, and "commute" covers a range of experiences that have very different effects. A twenty-minute walk to work through streets with some human activity is, by most metrics, beneficial: incidental physical activity, exposure to natural light, brief social contact with strangers, and genuine decompression. A forty-five-minute solo car journey on a congested motorway shares none of those properties. Calling both of these "the commute" and asking whether it's good for you is like asking whether "food" is healthy.

What the WFH experiment revealed — from a planning perspective — is that the built environment had been designed around the assumption that people would leave home every day. When they stopped, a very specific kind of problem emerged. The domestic space was not designed to contain all of work life. The local area was not designed to support daytime activity for a working-age population. Third places — the cafes, the libraries, the pubs that serve as informal workspace and social infrastructure — had been eliminated from many residential neighbourhoods in favour of retail that you drive to.

The result was that for many people, remote work traded one kind of transition problem (commuting) for another (never leaving the domestic environment). The ideal is probably what good urban planning always aimed for: a ten-minute walk to somewhere that isn't home and isn't work, where you can be in company without being obligated to perform. That's the transition space done properly. The car commute was never it.