Is Your Commute Killing You? On the Mortality Risks of Long-Distance Commuting

Abstract

There is a general belief that expanding labour-market regions, triggered by increased commuting, have positive economic effects on individuals, firms, and society. Recently, however, scholars have reported possible negative outcomes related to health and well-being. Based on these findings, this study addresses the association between longdistance commuting, and mortality. Using longitudinal individual data from between 1985 and 2008, focusing on 55-year-olds in 1994, we model mortality through propensity score matching and Kaplan-Meyer estimates of survival among long-distance commuters and matched controls from the population travelling short distances to work. The results indicate that women who have experienced long-distance commuting face a significantly higher mortality risk compared with women with short commutes to work. This seems to be driven by variations in income and education: for example, for women with longdistance commuting experience, substantially lower survival rates are found among those with low education and low income. A very different picture emerges for men, for whom mortality risks do not seem to be associated with long-distance commuting. Our findings suggest that men and women are subject to different mechanisms regarding the nexus between commuting and mortality.

The commuting behaviour of self‐employed workers: Evidence for Spain

“…For example, Ross and Zenou () and Van Ommeren and Gutiérrez‐i‐Puigarnau () point out that commuting leads to increased absenteeism, and authors such as Koslowsky, Kluger, and Reich (), Evans, Wener, and Phillips () and Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, and Stone (), among others, show the negative psychological effects that commuting can induce by raising worker stress levels. Similarly, Gottholmseder, Nowotny, Pruckner, and Theurl (), Hämmig, Gutzwiller and Bauer (), Hansson, Mattisson, Björk, Östergren, and Jakobsson (), Roberts, Hodgson and Dolan (), Sandow, Westerlund and Lindgren () and Palomino and Sarrias (), explore other harmful effects of commuting on health, in dimensions such as obesity, insomnia and increased likelihood of accidents and mortality, among others. Many of these studies point to the existence of variables that moderate these effects.…”

Beyond Commuting: Ignoring Individuals’ Activity-Travel Patterns May Lead to Inaccurate Assessments of Their Exposure to Traffic Congestion

“…Transportation and health researchers have thus considered traffic congestion exposure as a critical factor that influences individuals’ physical and mental health. For example, a number of studies revealed that higher exposure to traffic congestion may be associated with escalated heart rate and blood pressure [6,7], heightened urinary catecholamine (a stress-related hormone) [8], and negative health outcomes [9,10,11]. In addition to these physical tolls, studies have also shown that exposures to traffic congestion may be linked to psychological stress [12,13,14,15,16,17] and reduced well-being [18,19].…”

“…To accurately assess the effects of traffic congestion exposures on human health, it is important to accurately measure individual exposures to traffic congestion. Specifically, in terms of measuring traffic congestion exposures, most previous studies used area-based aggregate data (e.g., [9,21,22]) or focused only on commuting trips (and thus disregarded non-commuting trips) (e.g., [11,18,19]). We argue that these approaches in previous research may lead to erroneous assessments of individual exposures to traffic congestion, which may in turn lead to erroneous evaluations of the health impacts of traffic congestion because they did not consider individuals’ unique activity-travel patterns.…”

Commuting and Sickness Absence

“…Furthermore, commuting has been shown to be associated with increased heart rate and blood pressure (Novaco et al, 1979;Schaeffer et al, 1988). Further, commuting translates into shorter sleeping times and sleep disorders (Costa et al, 1988;Walsleben et al, 1999;Hansson et al, 2011), a lower social capital and participation (Mattisson et al, 2015), which has in turn been associated with health outcomes (Putnam, 2000;Lindström, 2004;Besser et al, 2008), negative mood (Gulian et al, 1989), emotional arousal (Hennessy and Wiesenthal, 1997), lower well-being and life satisfaction (Stutzer and Frey, 2008;Roberts et al, 2011;Olsson et al, 2013) as well as higher levels of workplace aggression (Hennessy, 2008), poor concentration levels (Matthews et al, 1991) and a higher risk of mortality (Sandow et al, 2014).…”