Astonishing Human Potential Wasted on Commutes

People hate their commutes more than any other activity in their lives, even more than work, child care, and home chores. Now an astonishing human potential wasted on commutes as it gets longer than ever before. According to the U.S. Census Bureau it takes the average worker 26 minutes to travel to work, the longest it’s been since the Census began tracking this data in 1980. The Washington Post puts that into perspective: “There were a little over 139 million workers commuting in 2014. At an average of 26 minutes each way to work, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that works out to something like a total of 1.8 trillion minutes Americans spent commuting in 2014. Or, if you prefer, call it 29.6 billion hours, 1.2 billion days, or a collective 3.4 million years. With that amount of time, we could have built nearly 300 Wikipedias, or built the Great Pyramid of Giza 26 times — all in 2014 alone.” For 3.6 million American mega commuter, it’s even worse as commutes take  90-minute one way or waste an entire month sitting in a car or bus every year. (washingtonpost.com)