com·mute

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin commutare to change, exchange, from com- + mutare to change — more at mutable

Date: 15th century

Commuter

n.

1. One that travels regularly from one place to another, as from suburb to city and back.
2. An airplane or airline that carries passengers relatively short distances and often serves remote communities and small airports.

Business Dictionary:
Commuter

Individual who frequently travels between two places. A person who lives in a residential suburb and works each day in the city is a commuter.

Origin: 1865
Americans did not invent the suburbs, but they did create the commuter--someone who shuttles from a home in the suburbs to a job in the city and back again every day. Residing at a considerable distance from work was made possible by the invention of the railroad, and the name for someone who did so was made possible by the invention in the 1840s of a ticket good for multiple rides, the commutation ticket. Here commutation means "an exchange of one thing for another," especially if the new thing is a consolidation or reduction of the old. That is what the commutation ticket did: it exchanged individual tickets for a collective one at a lower price. The holder of such a ticket, being involved in the commutation, was thus called a commuter. Here is an 1865 exerpt from the Atlantic Monthly about railroads: "Two or three may be styled commuters' roads, running chiefly for the accommodation of city business-men with suburban residences."

In that statement we already see the modern connection of commuter with a lifestyle rather than a kind of ticket. Soon it no longer mattered whether the person held a commutation ticket, only where the person lived and worked. A commuter could ride a trolley, subway, cable car, or ferry as well as a train. In the twentieth century the commuter turned to the bus and automobile. While public transportation still carries commuters, the modern image of the commuter has become the lone driver on the freeway (1930), expressway (1944) or interstate (1968), enduring gapers' blocks and Gridlock (1980), talking on a cell phone (1984) to a drive-time talk radio (1985) host.

http://www.answers.com/topic/commuter

The term “commute” derives from its original meaning of “to change to another less severe.” In the eighteen-forties, the men who rode the railways each day from newly established suburbs to work in the cities did so at a reduced rate. The railroad, in other words, commuted their fares, in exchange for reliable ridership (as it still does, if you consider the monthly pass). In time, the commuted became commuters. In New York, and in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, railways begat reachable and desirable suburbs, so that, by the time the automobile came along, patterns of development, and a calculus of class and status, had already been established. It was this kind of commute—the forty-minute train trip, bookended by a short drive or walk or subway ride—that people grew accustomed to, and even fond of. Here was a measure of inconvenience that could be integrated into daily life, albeit with certain bleak side effects, as chronicled by John Cheever and Richard Yates. Commuting by rail became a kind of gateway drug.

Commuting makes people unhappy, or so many studies have shown. The source of the unhappiness is not so much the commute itself as what it deprives you of. When you are commuting. , you are not spending time with other people. The two hours or more of leisure time granted by the introduction, in the early twentieth century, of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.

“People with long journeys to and from work are systematically worse off and report significantly lower subjective well-being,” -Stutzer. Commute time should be offset by higher pay or lower living costs, or a better standard of living. “They have to trade off social goods for material goods,” Stutzer said. “This is very difficult for people.

There is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side.

The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

, Alan Pisarski calls commuting “the interaction of demography with geography,” and the nuances are legion. (Hispanics drive alone less; women leave home later.) But the average travel time keeps going up.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_paumgarten?printable=true

New Yorkers look to mass transit as their mode of choice. Nearly one-third of the 8.8 million workers in the New York metro area use the system, by far the best rate in the nation. In New York's densest pockets, some 80% of commuters use mass transit. The Big Apple and outlying suburbs are home to nearly half of the nation's 7.5 million mass-transit commuters.

New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is the largest in the nation, with 422 rail lines and bus routes and 2,057 track miles throughout the region. The MTA's Web site boasts that the transit system removes some 3 million drivers from the roads each day, absorbing more carbon emissions than 648,000 acres of forest could.

Commuter-wise, New York City is an anomaly. New Yorkers have the highest average journey-to-work times (thirty-nine minutes) of any city in the country, but are apparently much happier with their commutes than people are elsewhere. It could be that New Yorkers are better conditioned to megalopolitan hardships, or that public transportation ameliorates some of the psychic costs. Or maybe they’re better at lying to themselves.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/21/clean-commutes-cities-lifestyle-america-public-transportation.html

The average daily commute to work is taking longer now than it has in the past, according to Commuting in America III. CIA III reports that the average one-way travel time for a commuter in 2000 was 25.5 minutes. This represented a 3-minute increase in travel time over the average in 1990—a substantial change, considering
that from 1980 to 1990 the increase was 40 seconds. The trend is even more noteworthy because from 1980 to 1990 the nation added approximately 23 million solo drivers to the commute, yet from 1990 to 2000 the number of solo drivers grew only by 13 million. This indicates that the transportation capacity inherited by this generation is being used up and that the investments in the system for future generations also are not keeping pace.

Sample Findings
 The number of new solo drivers grew by almost 13 million in the 1990s.
 The number of workers with commutes of more than 60 minutes grew by almost 50 percent between 1990 and 2000. Those who had a commute of more than 60 minutes in 2005 traveled an average of 80 minutes.
 Men make up the majority of commuters in the early morning, from midnight to 7:30 a.m. Women tend to commute later and make up the majority of commuters after 7:30 a.m.
 In the 1990s the number of Americans who commute from the city to the suburbs constituted a 20 percent share of all metropolitan growth, exceeding the increase in the number of people commuting from the suburbs to the city. Travel from city to suburbs now accounts for 9 percent of commuting activity.
 The percentage of African-American households without vehicles dropped from 31 percent to 24 percent between 1990 and 2000 and was close to 20 percent in 2005.
 Although the population over age 65 grew by only 12 percent from 1990 to 2000, the number of workers over age 65 increased by 21 percent.
 Thirty million vehicles were added to households during 1990 to 2000, and 13 million of those were added to households that already had two or more vehicles.
 Approximately 4 percent of workers live in households with no vehicle.

http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/trnews/trnews247CIAIII.pdf