The median commute time in the US is 27 minutes each way [0]. Lower in less dense and more car-oriented geographies. Our system of decentralized, sprawling, unremarkable towns and "cities" has many problems, but those things are fucking great for commute times. Residents of giant world cities with excellent public transit infrastructure spend much more of each day getting around.
This feels like a tautology - commute times are close to 30 minutes because on average people have lived about 30 minutes from where they work for thousands of years.
You say that yet both Portugal and Italy have an average one way commute of ~15 minutes. So, clearly 30 minutes is far from any real natural custom. At best you can say commute times are going to some limited fraction of the day as people need to sleep, commute, and work in the same day.
Edit: The metric they use for that may be slightly different as they put US commutes at 48.8 minutes per day. At which point 2 EU countries have worse commutes. Hungary and Romania. If the daily average for the US was 27x2 = 54 minutes that’s worse than very EU country.
> Edit: The metric they use for that may be slightly different as they put US commutes at 48.8 minutes per day. At which point 2 EU countries have worse commutes. Hungary and Romania. If the daily average for the US was 27x2 = 54 minutes that’s worse than very EU country.
It's the same method, the CNBC article is just using the more recent survey, so their number is 10 years newer than the one in that report. This, comparing to the non-US numbers in it is not fair.
> That’s terrible by EU standards or Canadian (24 minutes each way) standards
I don't agree with your definition of "terrible" in the relative sense. Daily, the US number in that report is only 2 minutes higher than the Netherlands, 6 minutes higher than Germany, and 7 minutes higher than Belgium. All three are over 40 minutes per day, so IMO if the US time is "terrible" so are theirs. Ditto the Canadian number, which is only 6 minutes per day less.
It takes a lot to move an average by even one percent across millions of people. Look at a chart of say life expectancy across these countries and it seems almost flat by comparison. The wide spread here represents significant differences that have huge impacts on people’s lives.
Also, 1 minute * 261 work days a year * 40+ working years = 174 hours extra commute time per person. Thus, are talking well past 3,000 hours longer than the best country on this list. Or every walking hour for more than six months for the average working American over the average Portugal worker. So, I am not saying every EU country is doing ok, just by comparison it’s clear the US huge issues in this area.
