Commuting in Great Britain in the 1990s

The paper studies commuting in Great Britain in the 1990s. The average oneway commute to work is now 38 minutes in London, 33 minutes in the southeast, and 21 minutes in the rest of the country. There are three other findings. First, commuting times are especially long among the highly educated, among home-owners, and among those who work in large plants and offices. In Britain, people with university degrees spend 50% more time travelling to work than those with low qualifications. Private renters do much less commuting than owner-occupiers. Second, there has recently been a rise in commuting times in the south-east and the capital. In our sample, full-time workers in London have lost 70 minutes per week of leisure time to commuting during the course of the 1990s. By contrast, outside the southeast of Britain, there has been no increase in commuting over this decade. In the south-east, 30% of workers now take at least 45 minutes to get to work. In the rest of the country, only 10% do. Third, after controlling for other factors and allowing for the endogeneity of the wage rate, there is a ceteris paribus inverse relationship between commuting hours and hourly pay.