How is commuting changing us?

Chris Hatzis
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts now changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

Commuting and podcasts are an almost inseparable affair - they go hand in hand, or rather, earbud to ear. You might even be listening to this on your own commute. Today's guest is David Bissell, and he’s written a book titled 'Transit Life: How commuting is transforming our cities'. He chats to Steve Grimwade about the joys and pains of our daily journeys. But first, a poem...

Steve Grimwade
“Overslept, so tired. If late, get fired. Why bother, why the pain? Just go home, do it again.”

That poem, ‘The Commuter's Lament: A Close Shave’, written by Norman Colp, greets commuters in a New York subway station. It was vandalised by a couple of optimists in 2011 to read: “Over-excited, energised. All smiles, time flies. Come brother, much to gain. Just be proud, do it again.”

I catch the train daily and I think I'm an overslept kind of guy, but the contest here is telling. Why is the commute such contested territory? Do you hate yours? Or is it your psychic bridge to work? Do you work from home and commute in your slippers from the kitchen or are you braving Shinjuku Station or even a two-hour drive from the mountains?

Joining us to chart the personal effects of a capitalist necessity is David Bissell, Associate Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne. Good day, David, how are you?

David Bissell
Hey, I'm well. Thanks for having me.

Steve Grimwade
It's an absolute pleasure and congratulations on the launch of your new book 'Transit Lives' out with MIT Press.

David Bissell
Thank you very much.

Steve Grimwade
That must be pretty extraordinary to be published by them?

David Bissell
Oh. I was really heartened that they were willing to publish a book on something so apparently mundane and utterly banal. The commute is such a banal thing and yet it's something that seems to underline what cities and modern cities are all about. It's something that's only going to get more significant as cities grow and grow in the future.

Steve Grimwade
What is it about commuting that makes it such a loaded term?

David Bissell
I started this project a few years ago and I was really, really overwhelmed by how the commute in popular prose in the media and even in terms of policy debates is always regarded and written about in really negative dystopic ways.

The commute is something that we would rather not be doing. The commute is something that we would do anything to avoid, and so I went into this project thinking well, is that really the case? Is that really the case or is there a much more interesting story to tell here? I had an inkling that that was the case not only from my own commutes but from some of the research that I did previously on public transport commuters - on public transport users. I knew that there was something more going on here.

Steve Grimwade
Let's talk about you. What's the first journey that you remember taking?

David Bissell
Oh, my word. Well, the formative journeys that really, I suppose, led to this book in a very long and rambled way were journeys that I did with my grandparents. When I was really young and on school holidays, my parents would take us to my grandparents in the Midlands in England and we would go on a very, very short train journey; 15 minutes they would take us.

I was from the countryside and so this small commuter journey was just a whole world of unfamiliar sights and sounds that were just completely alien to me, and I was absolutely overawed. It started what really has been a really lifelong fascination with transport and mobility.

Steve Grimwade
As you were talking then it reminded me of the way you write in the book and you've got a very descriptive eye. You see a lot of detail and even in your interviews, which we'll come to, you pick out a lot of detail. Is that a skill that you were born with or something you've made?

David Bissell
For me, I think details are everything. So much of not only policy, media but also quite a lot of academic stuff is trying to simplify it. It's trying to boil things down to their essences whereas actually so much of what makes up the experience of life is subtlety, is nuance, are those things that catch us out of the corner of our eyes that we might not realise are significant at the time but might really impact on us in all kinds of ways under the radar that only become apparent later on. So, for me detail is everything.

Steve Grimwade
How do you commute to work now and what does this say about you?

David Bissell
I love commuting by tram.

Steve Grimwade
God, we've got a sick man here. He loves it.

David Bissel
[Laughs] I moved to Melbourne a year ago and I was based in Canberra for eight years previously and I had a lovely bike ride to work, it was 15 minutes, it was through - it was the Australian imagination, or the imagination that I had when I was in England, it was through fields of cockatoos and kangaroos even sometimes.

That's been my commute for such a long time, then I moved to Melbourne and the idea of a tram was such an exciting thing. We don't have trams, or we didn't have trams in Canberra at that point. So, this for me has been reacquainting myself with the world of public transport and actually has given me - I think I've become probably more empathetic to the people that I talk to and write about in the book since doing my own journeys here, for sure.

Steve Grimwade
How else has commuting changed you?

David Bissell
It's forced me to think about the activities that I do on the commute. Even for the first couple of months here I got my phone out, as a lot of people do, and I found myself idly flicking through websites and social media and realising that actually it was completely addling my brain before getting to work. And so it forced me to think okay, what else could I do with this 20 minutes of time to maybe improve my wellbeing just a little bit. I know that sounds a bit clunky but to make me arrive at work feeling a little bit more in tune with the world, and so I'm reading novels at the moment and it's lovely. Even standing up, it's lovely.

Steve Grimwade
In the 1800s the average commute was about 50 metres, or thereabouts I expect. How much has that changed in recent decades?

David Bissell
When I learnt that statistic I was flabbergasted because it really jars with all of our ways that we're habituated to think about travel as being so normal. Now people move on average 50 kilometres I think it is a day on average for their commutes.

This obviously shows that in such a short space of time historically we've moved from very sedentary lives where our working, our daily activities and our living take place in such close proximity to a situation where we're actually moving, a lot of us all the time, between appointments with work, with things that we're doing for pleasure, for all sorts of other things. Yeah, we've got much more dispersed lives.

Steve Grimwade
Do we define commute as being home to work? Is that important to state outright?

David Bissell
It's interesting, the definitional question. When I pitched this initially to MIT and I said commute they said well, in America commute is public transport. I had to say well, actually, from a European perspective and from an Australian perspective it's very much the whole gamut of travel and certainly in the academic world commute refers to the process of journeying between home and work.

But it's interesting how so many of my participants actually had very different definitions, so when going to the cinema at night, for example, on the train that wasn't a commute, that was a trip for leisure and comes with different expectations. I think that's it. I think the important thing it raises is around how we're disposed to travel. So, the labels are important, actually, and not just incidental.

Steve Grimwade
At first, I thought your book would be a high-level investigation about commuting and its impacts. However, this is no macro-level view; your work is very much at the micro level concerning yourself with the impacts that commuting has on the individual and this led you to do a whole lot of interviews. Maybe you can talk about your methodology and what you did for the book.

David Bissell
Yeah, for sure. What I was really interested is a lot of previous studies had decided we need to think about a particular mode of transport or we need to think about long-distance commuters or something like that. I was really interested - my starting point was thinking about the breadth of commuters; what's the diversity of different experiences out there?

So, I put an ad in The Sydney Morning Herald - it seems very quaint now to put an ad in a newspaper [laughs] - and MX, which was a commuting magazine, and I was really blown away by the number of responses I got.

This was something that really resonated with people and they really wanted to share their stories with me. And so I selected 53 people to talk to who travelled by a range of different modes of transport, who lived in a variety of different places and who commuted different distances, and this was all in Sydney as my case study site. I did interviews with these people and I suppose in a similar way, going back to what we were saying about detail, what I was really interested in was following each interview for its specificity, so really trying to encourage people to draw out the detail of their commutes and what was really, really affecting them.

Steve Grimwade
What are these personal stories telling you that statistical analysis and trends don't?

David Bissell
Statistical analysis and trends can tell us certain things. They can give us that macro-level information. Obviously, that's really important from a policy perspective when we're planning things like infrastructure developments, but what I was really interested in getting was information that flies beneath the radar, so how our habits change, how our dispositions change, how our sense of ourselves and each other changes. These things, whilst they can be shoehorned into statistics they're not really readily for that at all and so you need other skills and techniques at your disposal.

And so for me, storytelling is a really, really powerful way of not only learning about the complexity of other people's lives, but it's also a really helpful way of telling other people and relaying some of that complexity.

I was really struck actually when I spoke to some of the politicians that I talk to in the project about how stories have a way of resonating and impacting that can actually be much more powerful than statistics, so a story of something small but really poignant can cut through where a number can't.

Steve Grimwade
But that's when the subjective comes in and I can select the best story to prove my case in that regard.

David Bissell
I think you can. I think that's obviously part of and there are stories everywhere but I think the point is that when we're advocating, when politicians are advocating for infrastructure developments, when politicians are saying we need to spend your taxpayer money on this, I think it helps to actually get a sense that these are not just dreamt up by politicians, they actually have a locus and a lot of that locus is in commuter pain. And so knowing what these experiences are doing or lack of infrastructure is doing is desperately important.

Steve Grimwade
The conventional assumption is that the time we spend on commuting is wasted time. How does an understanding of those stories behind each commute challenge that?

David Bissell
This has been the conventional logic for such a long time. Transport economists and even transport policy, it's all about reducing the commute, reducing the length of time. For some really lengthy commutes, that might well be very justifiable but what those sorts of policies overlook and what those sorts of approaches overlook is that actually yeah, the commute is a time where people are doing all kinds of things. They're working on their sense of self, they're engaging in activities that they wouldn't do necessarily otherwise.

What I learnt time and time again from talking to people is that this was time that they really, really valued. So, yes, on one hand they bemoaned their commute, they were really frustrated that they were doing this, they would rather be doing something else, but at the same time, they were saying that they really valued that time. Which I think is fascinating, because it shows how a contradiction can actually be lived out. We live our lives in tangles of tensions and contradictions and for me the commute is a perfect example of that.

Steve Grimwade
Doesn't that show the people are willing to embrace the necessity of the commute? If they're given the choice, they may prefer the London of the 1800s and the 50-metre walk down the road, but they realise that if I'm going to buy a house in Cranbourne I'm going to have to deal with a 50-minute commute and I'm willing to accept that. It may not be a happy acceptance but it's a reluctant necessity.

David Bissell
It's a really hard one. A couple of the stories - a couple of the commuters whose stories really moved me were ones where they had actually decided to shorten their commutes, or in one case one woman had finished her commute and retrained and got a job closer to her, and a lot of the conversation was actually a reflection, a really melancholic reflection of how much she missed the journey.

Yes, there were aspects of her life that she was reflecting on now have improved so she wanted to spend more time with her son, but actually, she said that this was - I got a real sense of someone that was almost struggling with missing this commute. She'd spent years trying to reduce it, retraining for a new career and yet this is something that she looks back on in an oddly fondly manner, and that for me was fascinating.

Steve Grimwade
It's amazing, because you do get into the lives of people and quite deep, and I don't know if it was this woman or another and her son whereby I think they were together when you interviewed them and there was almost that relationship and talking about the fact that she was missing time with her son at points, and that was very poignant.

David Bissell
Absolutely, and she said that her son and his father, who was still doing this very long-distance commute, they were not so close, and she said to me, I put that down to the commute. So, the commute is not just changing us and who we are, but it's also changing our relationships in really profound ways as well.

Steve Grimwade
Melbourne, where we're recording this talk, the City of Melbourne, and politicians have spoken about I think the 30-minute city - so they arrive at a time that they think is an acceptable commute time for anyone in the city. That's an interesting way of approaching it, saying well, this is approximately what people should do. Is that a profitable way or a positive way of approaching the problem?

David Bissell
I think when you're developing policy from a governance perspective you have to come up with policies that have definitive numbers. I think that 30 minutes is kind of a condensation of a whole series of things that are talked about in the book about longer travel times for example being really depletive. But of course, what those generalities miss are a whole series of exceptions, and there are people who I spoke to that commuted for much longer and absolutely wouldn't give up that commute.

One lady, who had an incredibly long commute from the Central Highlands of New South Wales into Sydney, took me through her journey that starts at I think it was 4am or so, half four, and she gets to northern Sydney hours later, and she was not negative at all. It was just incredible; she was speaking in such fond ways. I think obviously it's great that transport policy is being developed that's really attuned to people's pain and suffering and discomforts but at the same time there's such diversity there and I think that's what my book is trying to really get at.

Steve Grimwade
Did you hope to uncover anything in particular and were those hopes met, or were you surprised?

David Bissell
Every interview is a surprise. I know that sounds really slushy and cliché-ridden and it kind of is, but it's funny, when I've been asked about the book before, one of the questions that I've been asked time and time again is have you found a train carriage where people play cards or have a kind of travelling community. It's really interesting that there's this romanticised idea that on these longer-distance trains there are these little fluffy communities of people that would preserve these social arrangements.

Whilst I didn't find those, much to the distress of people I've talked to, at the same time what I did get is so many situations where people are actually looking out for each other in all kinds of ways. There is so much I suppose kind of light-touch interactions and responsibilities where people are looking out for each other, where people actually do know a lot about each other but it might not be of the sort that we would like to translate into a documentary or soap opera.

Steve Grimwade
It's funny, because you were talking before about playing cards and sipping tea. It sounds terribly old-fashioned but people didn't know how to commute back 150 years ago when trains were hitting - when trains made commuting a thing.

David Bissell
It's true, it's true. I talk in the book about this delightfully-named publication, 'The Railway Traveller's Handy Book'. I think the subtitle is something like 'Tips and Hints for before the Journey, During the Journey and After the Journey', as if you'd need tips for after the journey to recompose yourself, possibly.

Steve Grimwade
Debrief with your partner, that's my tip. Before, it's underarm deodorant; during, quiet on the phones.

David Bissell
Absolutely, but I think it tells us something really interesting about all the things that we take for granted now about social responsibilities and about the commute is something that of course everyone can do. All of those things are things that we embody and they're skills that we develop over time.

Steve Grimwade
Do you find commuting is accessible to all?

David Bissell
In terms of?

Steve Grimwade
I am actually thinking just general accessibility requirements. Did you encounter that?

David Bissell
It's a really good question, and in the later part of the book I talk about - and this goes back to your point about the sorts of policy-making, decision-making practices. I talked to someone who is part of this group called the Sydney Alliance and they're advocating for transport to be made more inclusive and public transport especially to be made more inclusive for a range of differently-abled bodies. One of their biggest frustrations that they shared with me is that so much money is pumped into these legacy grand schemes such as the WestConnex.

We hear about the East West Link or the various big infrastructure things in this city and in Sydney, but actually what really would make so much difference to people are small incremental things like having step-free access to platforms for example. The person I talked to about that was saying that one of the frustrating things is the opaqueness of the decision-making practices around which stations, for example, get chosen to be step-free. Often, their suspicion and certainly hesitation around that was that sadly this is very often politically motivated. We need to curry favour with a particular seat; that's where we'll put in the step-free access as opposed to where actually those people are living, for example.

Steve Grimwade
I live near Sky Rail in Melbourne which was a total political beast, so yeah, let's not go there. Mind you, in my head I'm just shaking - my head is shaking because we argue over step-free stations. I'm sorry, aren't they all step-free?

David Bissell
In Sydney they're really not, absolutely.

Steve Grimwade
Oh god.

David Bissell
Even tram access here, it's great that there are step-free trams but when I catch the tram north and it says that Lygon Street, this is the last accessible platform, it always makes me take a deep in-breath and think really, wow, is that where we're at?

Steve Grimwade
Yeah. How are people using their time commuting?

David Bissell
What are people not doing, I think that's the question [laughs]?

Steve Grimwade
Oh, okay. Is there anything they're not doing?

David Bissell
With few exceptions, I think what was really fascinating from the people I talk to is that people are experimenting with their time, so they're not doing the same thing all the time. One woman I talked to said that she decided to change to public transport commuting so she could work because she wants to get stuff done. Then she sat on the bus the first day, got her laptop out and thought oh god, I can't fit the laptop, oh.

Steve Grimwade
Where's the desk?

David Bissell
Where's the desk? Oh, I'm feeling a little bit motion sick, oh. She said from then on, she had to do other things, but it was fascinating that that's what she wanted to do. Actually, a lot of the debates around autonomous vehicles, for example, are filled with this kind of productivist impulse, if only we could use that half an hour to work, to do office-based stuff, and I sit there thinking oh well, for a start, is that actually really what this space should be, a spread of work-based capitalist, dare I say, activity, surely we should actually be almost revering that you can't work sometimes in these places.

Steve Grimwade
Cards and cups of tea; come on. You already know what we want.

David Bissell
That's it, exactly [laughs]. Policy around cups of tea and cards.

Steve Grimwade
Sorry I interrupted but it's just brought me back to the reality of what we really want. How do you hope that we can redesign these journeys to provide more positive experiences? Is it around the step-free platforms, is it around providing opportunities to connect with other passengers or to be there for each other? What would you hope?

David Bissell
It's a really tough question, actually, because I think one of the starting points of the project was my frustration around hearing politicians and the counsellors and the like declaring what people want is dot-dot-dot, and of course, the diversity of stories in my book suggests that what people want is actually not only very, very different between people but actually changes over time, so suddenly that question of what people want becomes a lot more complex.

I suppose first and foremost, what I hope the book does is that it actually for readers raises questions for themselves about what their commute is doing to them. Rather than it being something that we do semi-consciously, rather than being a practice that we begrudge and bemoan, actually, hopefully these stories might raise questions in terms of experimenting with our own journeys, doing different things, for example.

Maybe it takes reading a book like this to really think, hang on a minute, this commute is really killing me and I need to do something about it. First and foremost, it's to commuters themselves but also, I think it's a wake-up call that there are so many different sites of responsibility.

Yes, it is about transport companies, it's about governments investing in infrastructure, but it's also about having conversations with employers about whether, for example, a commute gets treated as work time. Is it appropriate to be commuting at peak hours? Could people shift their commute to different times of day to make their commutes more bearable?

There's a whole set of conversations with employers about making this bit of our lives more bearable. There are many sites of responsibility, I guess is what I'm saying.

Steve Grimwade
As I alluded to before when I was speaking about that long journey from the outer suburbs, I think it is a question about society, capitalism, Marxism. I believe that some people are less privileged in their commute if they're two hours away and they're forced to be two hours away.

David Bissell
Absolutely. It's a site of real social difference. Put simply, for example, car drivers, people that are travelling in for longer are spending more on fuel, they're spending more on cars, they're disproportionately affected by their commute than people that live closer to their place of work. For me, that does raise an interesting question that strays into the domain of really city planning, for example.

Do we need - where should jobs be located? If this is a functional question about where people are located and where jobs are located, can we think more inventively about designing cities and thinking about creating city futures that don't presume that all jobs take place in the CBD? Of course, the reality is that of course they don't take place all in the CBD. Certainly, cities like Sydney are becoming a lot more attuned to creating multi-node cities. The new thing about the airport out at Badgerys Creek in the west of the city, they're using it as an opportunity to create a whole new airport-focused city out there so it will be Sydney's third centre as well as the CBD and Parramatta. It's fascinating.

Steve Grimwade
Everyone from the North Shore is going to be moving there shortly.

David Bissell
[Laughs].

Steve Grimwade
Given the subtitle of the book is 'How Commuting is Transforming our Cities', I have to ask how is it transforming our cities?

David Bissell
[Laughs] I think my slightly dull social science answer would be that it's transforming them in all kinds of complex ways that we can only begin to scratch the surface of.

Steve Grimwade
I don't want to hear the word myriad or intricately-patterned or anything like that, I want some facts [laughs].

David Bissell
Damn these poststructuralists, exactly. It's transforming who we are. It's transforming how we relate to each other, it's transforming our sense of who we are, it's transforming our relationships to our workplaces and it's transforming what we want from our cities. So, by doing all those things, it's forcing us to really grapple with questions, those big, weighty, existential questions that make us who we are. I think that if my book can just start to raise some of those points, I'll be a very happy person.

Steve Grimwade
The next time I jump on the tram on my way to work, what do you want me to think about?

David Bissell
I want you to think about how this strange, liminal time of day can really work for you. Whether that is about using that time to do some work or whether it's about using that time to work through maybe some existential crisis that you might be dealing with at the moment. I know that so many of my commutes seem to be of that flavour. I think it's showing that even in the most constrained situation there is always a bit of wriggle room.

Steve Grimwade
Listeners, if you see me with a furrowed brow on my next tram ride, you know I'm just thinking about my existence. David Bissell, thank you so much for joining us.

David Bissell
Thank you so much.

Chris Hatzis
Thanks to David Bissell, Associate Professor at the School of Geography, University of Melbourne.. And thanks to our reporter Steve Grimwade.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on August 21, 2018. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website.

Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Dr Andi Horvath and Silvi Vann-Wall.

Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2018, the University of Melbourne.

If you enjoyed this podcast, drop us a review on iTunes, and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive.

I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.