Source: Wendell Cox Consultancy (2001), www.demographia.com.

Average Journey to Work Travel Time, 1990

Through history, the time spent commuting has remained relatively constant, with about 90 minutes per day. This is known as Marchetti's constant in the name of the physicist who established the relation. Because of its high level of motorization, the United States has the lowest average commuting time in the world, around 25 minutes in 1990 (one direction) with a global average in the range of 30 minutes. The commuters of Western Europe and Japan, which are more dependent on walking and public transit and in spite of more compact cities, have longer commuting times. There is thus an inverse relationship between the level of public transit use and commuting time as passengers tend to spend more time waiting and transferring within the transit system. However, the last decade has shown growing commuting times, mainly due to increasing congestion levels in metropolitan areas.