Sharing the commute: making social connection a daily habit

How carpooling can have a powerful impact on well-being by allowing us to create social connections on our way to work.

In September 2020, things were almost back to normal on French roads. While France stopped moving in April, with the number of travels down to 20% of February levels, mobility indicators were close to pre-Covid figures after the summer holidays, some days even exceeding them.

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, French citizens were impatient to get back to their usual way of life. Whereas in New York, London or Berlin, public transport ridership was below 50% of its pre-Covid level, according to the transport App CityMapper, Parisians and Lyonnais were victoriously using their metro as much as usual. Freed from their attestations and curfew, the French were ready to use their liberté like they always have.

Most of this traffic was coming from employees returning to work after weeks in forced confinement. But part of it was also supported by homeworkers choosing to go back to the offices. Asked in September by French pooling company Odoxa, less than a third of homeworkers still wanted to work remotely, down from more than 50% just after the first confinement.

This is hardly surprising. Staying at home for 3 months is taking its toll on mental and physical health. We miss informal yet meaningful contacts. We feel trapped and powerless, exhausted from not knowing how the situation will evolve.

But this feeling is not as new as we think.

We might have forgotten it after a year of semi-confinement, but going to work also has its fair share of detrimental effects. Before considering going back to our normal habit of commuting, it’s worth wondering how good for us that habit really was.

Stress adds up to our body, one commute at a time

In 2004, psychologist Dr. David Lewis monitored several health indicators of English workers on their typical way to work. He discovered that, in case of congestion or unexpected situations, the heart rate of a commuter can double its normal level, drumming at a dreadful 140 beats per minute. In such events, our hormonal stress responses sometimes exceed those of pilot fighters or riot police facing hostile mobs. Those extreme body reactions stem from the lack of control we have over the situation. Our body doesn’t know when traffic will finally start moving, when the train will arrive — so it enters a danger mode, prepared for uncertainty.

While properly trained fighter pilots and riot police have to deal with such environments several times a month, many of us are commuting twice a day. Aggregated, it represents a slow-burning risk for our body, especially in big cities, where commute often feels more stressful than work. By using their car in one of the most congested cities in the world, Parisian workers are exposing themselves to more than 160 stressful hours of traffic per year.

This permanent exposure to stress during a commute is detrimental to our health. And it is not just about the heartbeat or the stress hormones: commuting is known to have long-term effects on our sleep quality, anxiety, blood pressure and psychological health, among other things.

Then how can we do it almost every day without noticing it?

Commuting stress is a blindspot

As upsetting as a single commute can be, it’s not an awful event to remember. It is easier to recognise and tackle a very traumatic event, but not so much something changing all the time like a commute trip. We usually forget about it the next day and carry on with our routine, ignoring the long-term impact it has on our body. In the same study on English commuters, Dr. Lewis describes this coping mechanism of forgetting the stressful experience as ‘Commuter Amnesia’.

By doing so, we effectively turn the commuting stress into blindspot and fail to compute it into our life decisions.

To make matter worse, we usually define our new commute when settling for a new job or a new place. In that process, we can easily be blinded by the many details of this choice, forgetting about the importance of the commute. The problem is, we quickly adapt to our new place and job, but not to the commute, which ends up affecting our wellbeing in the long term, this time negatively.

The pursuit of happiness is not a long commute

That is exactly what a study in Germany and Great Britain showed. Those research found how workers with longer commuting end up being less satisfied in life. Just as we are damaging our body by constantly exposing it to stress, we are lowering our wellbeing by dedicating too much time of our day travelling.

Sadly, it is not only impacting our satisfaction, but also the one of those around us. In the study analysing German households, the authors discovered that when workers have a long journey to work, it also affects the life satisfaction of their partners.

This last point highlights how commuting impacts your life outside of the trip itself. When we have a long journey back home, we are more eager to leave work early, being anxious about how much time it will take, and less likely to enjoy our free time, all stressed out by our commute. As we have to spend more time on the road, we get less enjoyment from both our work and leisure and this can affect the quality of our relationship with colleagues, spouse and neighbours.

This might be one of the biggest challenges of commuting: it isolates us.

Commuting impairs our drive for social interactions, especially if we are alone in a car, physically separated from others. In France, almost ¾ of commutes are done in a car, in 90% of the cases alone. The sociologist Robert Putnam, who dedicated a good part of his career documenting the decline of social ties in the US, partly blames suburbanisation and commuting for it. As he put it simply: “There’s a simple rule of thumb: every 10 minutes of commuting results in 10% fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

To grow wellbeing, feed your relations

The link between happiness and social connection is nothing new: throughout the years, studies on wellbeing regularly underlined the positive and important impact of personal relationships on wellbeing. The longest of them, monitoring for 75 years two groups of men, one composed of students at Harvard and another one of boys coming from poor neighbourhoods in Boston, found exactly that: perceived social connections have a significant and long term effect on wellbeing, no matter your life situation.

If you want to have a clearer idea of how much, another study found out that having at least one good friend, someone you can count on, has the equivalent effect on wellbeing as tripling the salary. Good social connections and trust are valuable.

In 2006, Kahneman and Krueger asked women in Texas to rank their activity of the day according to how pleasant they were. Commute came by far as the least pleasant activity of day, ranking behind work and housework, while activities like social encounters and sex came first.

Strikingly, while working on wellbeing, those researchers found something important about commuting: when travelling with someone to work, commuting was a rather pleasant activity for the respondents. Even if you don’t know the person, talking to someone new during your commute can help make you feel better.

So… What if there was an easy way to add social interactions to your daily commute? What if we could turn commuting into our favorite activity of the day?

Carpooling as a remedy

With all of the challenges commuting presents, carpooling offers a positive relief from the burden of commuting and an opportunity to meet new people.

There are already many benefits to carpooling. It reduces the cost of transportation (the transport sector represents 30% of French households' expenses). It allows you to cuts your CO2 emissions (transport represent 30% of total CO2 in France). But carpooling also provides a good opportunity to create meaningful social interactions.

A 2018 survey by BlaBlaCar, the world’s leading carpooling platform, found that almost 80% of interviewees had an enriching interaction while carpooling. Strikingly, more than 1 in 5 respondents reported having discussed something personal that they had never shared with their relatives while carpooling, showing a high degree of trust and understanding between the carpoolers.

Applied to commuting, it is not hard to imagine how carpooling can help make the commute a pleasant moment and enlighten the day. Even if commuters mainly decide to share their trips for economic reasons, most of them find carpooling to be a convivial experience. Repeated and compounded, those simple friendly interactions can influence how we interact at and outside of work and can improve our wellbeing in the long run.

This might be why there are so many users sticking together when carpooling with BlaBlaLines, the BlaBlaCar carpooling app for commuting to work. When looking for a new trip, around 75% of them decide to contact someone they have carpooled with in the past. After a month of carpools, more than ¾ of users regularly travel with their main carpooler, someone they spend most of their trips with. When commuting, carpoolers prefer to maintain contact with each other and build a frequency of interaction.

They just need to find a person to keep carpooling with. According to a survey from March 2020 by Ile de France Mobility, the authority responsible for mobility in the Paris Region, more than ⅔ of respondents declared using an app because it helps them find carpoolers. In addition to helping carpoolers maintain contact and frequency of carpools, applications can help users find a suitable person to share the costs of commuting with.

By doing so, carpooling apps focused on commuting help their users to face the stress of the trips together. This does not only reduce the effect of stress on our body but gives us a chance to create new social ties and improve our wellbeing at work and outside of work, attenuating the danger of anxiety and isolation we often underestimated and never desired.

Back to normal?

Carpooling is not only an opportunity for wallets and our planet, it is also a powerful way to create social connections and affect our wellbeing. Before the pandemic, an increasing number of people were normalising carpooling and adding it to their daily routine. Now that Covid-19 has disrupted our habits, there might not be a better time to change our behaviour.

A pandemic is always a challenging and delicate time to push for a mobility solution. However, carpooling allows for a lower number of contact with other people than in trains or buses — especially for carpoolers who are used to traveling with the same person. As travel restrictions are lifted and we continue to manage the sanitary crisis, carpooling will be there as a safe, cost-effective and friendly solution.

While mobility indexes in France were less than 25% of pre-Covid levels in early November, they are already getting closer to pre-Covid levels, showing how eager the French are to return to normal.

But before we really go back to normal, we might consider how much ‘normal’ we’re willing to keep. Just like we are now understanding the negative effects of not being at work, we should confront the negative effects of going to work. Normal might just mean enjoying your ride home as much as your coffee with colleagues, chatting with your favourite carpooler while again stuck in traffic, because some problems just take longer to solve.

Thanks for reading, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments or reach out. If you want to know how an app can help you carpool to your work, you can check out BlaBlaLines or download the App on your App store to find out!

Special thanks to Jonathan Colak and Olivia Gambelin for their honest feedback on the first draft of this article and for proofreading it. Thanks to Emilie Baliozian for helping me edit and publish the article and to Benjamin Dupont, Adrien Tahon, Adrien Tordjeman, Nicolas Michaux and Edouard Prévot for reviewing it.