A 6-hour workday would be 30 hours/week. If we're going to reduce the working week, then instead of spreading that over 5 days, why not work a 4-day week (7.5 hours/day)? That would reduce commuting congestion by 20%, and make everyone who doesn't like spending an hour a day in a traffic jam happy.
The purpose is not to diminish time wasted by commuting.
In many European cities and regions one does not commute for hours every day. For instance, my brother lives in a 2000 year-old city and walks to work -- it takes him 2 minutes. When I lived in London it took me 15-20 minutes to get to work, with the tube. In a Swiss city before that, 15 minutes driving. And for my job before that, 4 minutes biking.
The Swedish average commute is under 25 minutes (excluding the top 5% who travel an hour or more). [1] My friends' commute in Stockholm includes the walk to drop off kids at the local school. Is Göteborg worse than the rest of the country?
It's not hours that can be the case as in other countries, but I would not describe it as 2 minutes either. 25 minutes sounds reasonable.
Of course it's depends how lucky you are. When I lived in Stockholm for a short while, I had an 50 minutes commute from the outer parts of Stockholm (still within city limits) to the city, first by buss then subway.
In Göteborg, if you need to pass Göta älv (Göta river) in rush hour, good luck with that. It is the main bottleneck in Göteborg with only two bridges and one tunnel, all of the jammed.
Sure buses have their own lane so that runs faster, but the nightmarish slow tram is just painful, half the speed of a subway.
I normally spend 30-50 minutes travelling to work and about the same time going home. That's about 60-100 minutes per day.
> Is there something wrong with your public transport system?
There's actually a bus stop almost outside my front door, and Edinburgh has a reasonable bus service. However if I was to take the bus to the train station, then take the train and be picked up the other end it would take me about 90 min, which is longer.
An hour a day is only 30 min journey time and I suspect many people in the UK spend longer than that travelling to work. I certainly have in the past.
Most US communities, besides a few metro areas, are planned and built with regard to the automobile as the sole form of transporation. If there is any public transport system at all, it usually consists of buses which are often late, infrequent (30 minutes to an hour wait between buses for smaller communities), and travel very slowly on average (since they often make frequent stops to pick up passengers).
Why isn't public transportation better than it is a lot of places? I'd attribute it to lack of funding by local governments due to politicians who don't consider public transport to be important at all (most of them would be embarrassed to ever be seen riding in a bus rather than a mercedes or something). It is considered transportation for the lower classes (who should be embarrassed they aren't wealthy!), and thus isn't reevaluated or improved at all.
I default to America as that's where I live. I don't think much of our public transport. Sure where I live they probably don't need more than just the buses we have but I had never seen a passenger train (just cargo, as far as I know) until I went abroad. The ease of getting around was amazing and I could totally see not owning a car there.
I'm sure there is just as good public transport here but it doesn't seem to be the way we are built.
Anywhere that has hour long traffic daily should probably be big enough to have better public transport so I'll give you that...
Some cities (even some small ones) have EXCELLENT public transport but some places have zero public transport. And with widespread suburban sprawl it gets worse since you generally need a car to live in suburbia.
I live in Green Bay, WI. Not huge like Madison/Milwaukee but a decent size (IMO). Maybe I have just been really unlucky or oblivious. I only just found out last year that every year, for a long time now, ships come and port here, like galleons and stuff] for a few days as part of some event. So I could see me just not spotting one if it did happen.
Not sure why a train would actually come through here though.
