Travelling hopefully

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work. By Iain Gately. Head of Zeus; 378 pages; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

TO THOSE who don’t do it and to many who do, commuting is joyless: dead time, a limbo between home and work. Not for Iain Gately. In “Rush Hour” he argues, vividly and largely convincingly, that commuting is to be celebrated, not lamented. “For the last century and a half”, he writes, “it has given countless people the opportunity to improve their lives.”

The book is in three parts, covering commuting past, present and future, from Britain’s Victorian railway boom to Elon Musk’s vision of a “Hyperloop” whisking Californians the 380 miles (610km) from San Francisco to Los Angeles in merely half an hour. Mr Gately points out the changes in landscapes, manners and entertainment (from drive-time radio to “The Jetsons”) that commuting has brought about.

People were eager to commute as soon as they had the chance. Early railway entrepreneurs expected to make their money from freight, but soon found that humans were more lucrative cargo. The railways’ mainly middle-class customers had no choice but to work in the stinking city; but, if they could afford the fare, they could move to fresher air in the fast-spreading suburbs. They have been doing the same ever since, getting to and fro by train, car, bus and bike.

A few take commuting to extremes, travelling even when they don’t have to. David Barter, a cyclist, started when his training partner began riding to work 18 miles away. Now Mr Barter cycles there with him—and back—before settling down to work at home. More conventional types spend their commutes reading, listening to music or just thinking: thanks to modern information technology, the time need not be wasted.

Of course, there are costs, even horrors. With no room to move in “super-crush- loaded” metro carriages, Tokyo schoolgirls are targets for chikan—salarymen in search of frottage. On the Mumbai Suburban Railway, Mr Gately writes, 97% of trains run on time, even during the monsoon. But crowding is even more extreme than in Tokyo (“super-dense-crush-loaded”); and more than 36,000 people have died in the past decade. Those who grumble about delays and overcrowding on trains into London (like this reviewer) should count their blessings.

One quibble is that too few references for the many statistics in “Rush Hour” are easily found in the otherwise meticulous endnotes. But the choice of Johnston Sans, the typeface of the London Tube, for chapter headings is a lovely touch. And Mr Gately is a good travelling companion—especially if you can find a seat.