**Historical Perspective of Commuting**:
– The separation of workplace and residence due to the steam railway invention
– Origin of ‘commuter’ in US cities like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago
– Industrial Revolution’s impact on work specialization and urban factories
– Various commuting modes including automobiles, motorcycles, trains, aircraft, buses, and bicycles
– Potential shift towards flexible working to eliminate traditional commutes
**Suburban Commuting Dynamics**:
– Impact of commuting on city growth and the rise of suburbs
– Development of commuter belts around large cities known as metropolitan areas or commuter towns
– Urban sprawl leading to reverse commuters and secondary commuters
– Core city residents working in suburbs creating reverse commuting
– Outlying city businesses attracting workers from exurbs, leading to secondary commuting
**Gender Differences in Commuting**:
– Studies showing women experience more psychological stress from commuting than men
– Highlighting the need for gender-sensitive road safety policies, especially in places like Mangalore
– Women feeling stressed and scared when commuting alone, particularly at night
**Impact of Commuting on Education**:
– Concept of commuter schools in the US, like community colleges with limited or no student housing
– Students commuting from their residences due to lack of on-campus housing
– Increased commuting due to the absence of student housing
– Commuter schools catering to local student populations
**Traffic, Pollution, and Social Trends in Commuting**:
– Morning and evening rush hours leading to congestion on roads and public transport
– Examples of heavy traffic like on Interstate 405 in Southern California
– Issues like inadequate road design, maintenance, and collisions contributing to longer commute times
– Impact of commuting on air pollution, with single-occupant cars inefficiently using fuel and roads
– Various social trends related to commuting, including data from the American Community Survey on average commute times and modes of transportation.
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Commuting is periodically recurring travel between a place of residence and place of work or study, where the traveler, referred to as a commuter, leaves the boundary of their home community. Regarding occupation, it is also colloquially called the journey to work. By extension, it can sometimes be any regular or often repeated travel between locations, even when not work-related. The modes of travel, time taken and distance traveled in commuting varies widely across the globe. Most people in least-developed countries continue to walk to work. The cheapest method of commuting after walking is usually by bicycle, so this is common in low-income countries but is also increasingly practised by people in wealthier countries for environmental and health reasons. In middle-income countries, motorcycle commuting is very common.
The next technology adopted as countries develop is more dependent on location: in more populous, older cities, especially in Eurasia mass transit (rail, bus, etc.) predominates, while in smaller, younger cities, and large parts of North America and Australasia, commuting by personal automobile is more common. A small number of very wealthy people, and those working in remote locations around the world, also commute by air travel, often for a week or more at a time rather than the more typical daily commute. Transportation links that enable commuting also impact the physical layout of cities and regions, allowing a distinction to arise between mostly-residential suburbs and the more economically focused urban core of a city (process known as suburban sprawl), but the specifics of how that distinction is realized remain drastically different between societies, with Eurasian "suburbs" often being more densely populated than North American "urban cores".