Short Commutes in South Dakota Mean Better Mental Health, More Bicycling Opportunity?

KXLG runs clickbait from an unreliable (“We will do anything to earn links at scale” says Storial Media’s website, to which I will not link) digital PR start-up claiming South Dakotans have the shortest commute times in the nation. The claim does fit with Census data showing that commute times are lower in places with fewer people. So there’s something else Kristi Noem will ruin.

Before South Dakota’s Great Face brings a million NASCAR fans here to clog our commutes, we should cherish the mental health advantage we get from not being cooped up in our cars as much each work day:

A new study conducted by researchers in Spain found that the more time and money people spent driving to work, the worse mental health outcomes they experienced.

The more time workers spent driving, the less sleep they got, the more depressed and under pressure they felt, and the worse their mental health was in general. Similarly, the more money they spent on commuting, the more sleep loss and depression they experienced.

…The study in Spain aligns with previous research on the impact of commuting on health and mental well-being. A major study conducted by researchers at the University of East Anglia in 2014 found that car commuters in the UK were 13% more likely to feel they were under constant strain or unable to concentrate than those who took public transport or got to work in other ways.

…Political scientist Robert Putnam, who wrote the book “Bowling Alone” about the decline of US civic life, found that longer commute times were directly correlated with fewer social connections and less happiness [Eliza Relman, “How Your Drive to Work Could Be the One Big Thing Harming Your Sleep, Fueling Depression, and Wasting Your Time and Money,” Business Insider, 2023.07.24].

Of course, if South Dakota already has the shortest commutes in the nation, then it should be even easier for more South Dakota workers to start riding bicycles to work and reduce their need for mental health prescriptions:

Approximately 400,000 people aged 16-74 living and working in the City of Edinburgh and Glasgow City council areas as at the 2011 census were included in our study. Of those, 1.85% of commuters in Glasgow and 4.8% of commuters in Edinburgh cycled to work. Amongst cyclists 9% had a prescription for mental health compared to 14% amongst non-cyclists. More than 50% of commutes in both cities are less than 5km. Using the instrumental variable in a bivariate probit model we estimate an average treatment effect of -16.1% (95% confidence interval: -15.1% to -17.1%) in mental health prescriptions amongst those who cycle to work compared to those who use other forms of transport [Laurie Berrie, Zhiqiang Feng, Tom Clemens, Lee Williamson, and Chris Dibben, “Does Cycling to Work Benefit Mental Health? A Natural Experiment Using Linked Administrative Data,” International Journal of Population Data Science, 2022.08.25].

But in a way, it’s too bad South Dakota has shorter commute times: it means we have less opportunity to boost our productivity by working at home and converting drive time to work time:

Several studies suggest remote and hybrid employees actually work slightly longer hours than their office-bound colleagues, findings echoed by an avalanche of anecdotal evidence gathered from millions of teleworkers in the past three years.

One of the most celebrated studies, which tracked more than 60,000 Microsoft employees over the first half of 2020, found that remote work triggered a 10 percent boost in weekly hours.

Remote employees are working more, in part, because they are commuting less. Another landmark study, based on data from 27 countries, found that remote workers saved 72 minutes in daily commuting time. On average, employees spent about half an hour of that extra time engaged in daily work: more than two hours a week [Daniel De Visé, “Remote Employees Work Longer and Harder, Studies Show,” The Hill, 2023.07.24].

Alternatively, if you have the pleasure of working at home, you could keep yourself to the same hours working and use the saved commute time to ride your bike to the grocery store.

Research still has to catch up with the very recent shift to remote work as well as all the confounding variables of a sudden shift brought on by a global pandemic, but getting rid of commutes is a big part of the satisfaction remote workers report:

One 2022 global survey of 12,500 people by the Tracking Happiness website found a direct correlation between remote work and happiness. Workers who toiled fulltime in an office rated their happiness the lowest: 5.9 on a 10-point scale, on average. For fully remote workers, the happiness rating jumped to 7 out of 10.

In a global 2022 survey of 28,000 workers, Cisco found that an overwhelming 79 percent of employees felt remote work had improved the all-important work-life balance. More than 80 percent said the ability to work from anywhere made them happier.

Pressed for specifics, workers say remote work brings flexibility: greater autonomy over how to allocate time between work and non-work, when to start the day, when to end it, when to walk the dog, when to hit the home gym, when to nap.

“Remote work is associated with greater feelings of control,” said Tammy Allen, distinguished university professor in psychology at the University of South Florida. “And that’s really powerful, because it’s one of the fundamental human needs, that we have some kind of control over our lives.”

Even more than control, perhaps, remote work is about time. In the Cisco survey, two-thirds of workers said remote work saved them four or more hours a week.

Thus, Allen and others contend, the single best thing about remote work is probably the absence of a time-consuming commute.

“And I think most people miss that,” said Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of the hybrid work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and author of a recent bookon hybrid and remote work.

On top of the wasted time, “we have extensive research showing that the commute is the most stressful part of the day,” Tsipursky said. “It’s the time you’re the most likely to get into an accident, to be hurt, to die” [Daniel De Visé, “Employees Love Remote Work, But Is It Good for Our Mental Health?” The Hill, 2023.05.24].

Why die on the highway, when you can live and work in South Dakota? Maybe we should wrap that on a NASCAR… or on Lotte Kopecky’s race bike!