Tightening your commuter belt

This morning, in a radical experiment that's set to make my life both better and more expensive, I took a different route to work. I live in Brighton (where my wife works) and work in leafy Bloomsbury, so a reasonable amount of my week is spent in transit: about four hours a day by the "old" route, of which three hours pass within one of the crowded, decrepit trains that service the railway between Brighton and Farringdon. This morning, however, I alighted onto one of the shiny machines that service the line between Brighton and Victoria and, 59 minutes later, hopped off onto the Tube, and was at work on time some 20 minutes after that. I have bitten the bullet, put comfort above cost, and feel better for it.

Travelling to and from work like this is deadening but hardly dreadful in the grand scheme of schemes—a safe, warm few hours of unpaid, unpleasurable time. Yet the toll it takes is hard to quantify. I was, for a while, employed as a reader of the manuscripts of would-be novelists for a publisher's in London, and remember the whiff of hate that rose from numberless pages as soon as commuting was mentioned—which it was astonishingly often. Manuscript after manuscript of thinly-disguised autobiography landed on my desk, within which a protagonist would spend up to fifty sides (in one bewildering case) lambasting the soul-destroying inferno of their journey to and from work. Here was a demon receiving plenty of exercise.

Less anecdotally, commuting is gaining more and more of a grip on more lives across the world—an inevitable product of population growth, urbanisation and development. Many developing world cities exist in a state of near-continual gridlock; many first-world cities exist in a state of such eye-watering expensiveness that ordinary employees need to live at least an hour's travel outside of them. Wasn't technology supposed to enable us all to work from the comfort of whatever homes we choose to live in? Yet, at the moment, almost everyone who can least afford it is being sucked towards the urban centres for work, and towards the dim peripheries for life. Cities, one of humanity's most remarkable creations, are doing remarkable things right back to us.

As I learn from Phaidon's grimly handsome new tome The Endless City, based on the findings of the Urban Age Project, ten per cent of the world lived in cities in 1900. 50 per cent lived in cities in 2007. 75 per cent will live in cities by 2050—and this 75 per cent will be more than equal to the world's entire current population of six billion. By 2015, there will be 33 "mega-cities," with more than 10 million inhabitants each. 27 of these will be in the developing world. Have you ever tried travelling across Beijing in rush hour, starting outside the distant fifth ring road and heading inwards; or across Accra, Chennai or New Delhi? These are journeys I've made only once or twice each, but I hold them close to my chest as I glide through green southern England each morning, thinking how lucky I am, and wondering how long it can last.