Eventually we’ll go back to work, but commuting can never be the same

Afew weeks before lockdown began, I was standing on a Victoria Line Tube platform, trying to get to work. I had already watched four trains come and go without me on them because they were too stuffed to the gills for another human being to fit on them.

As I struggled to keep my balance, I tried not to dwell on the fact that the platform was so rammed with commuters vying to get on the next train that the yellow line on the floor, behind which we were supposed to stand, was all but useless. All it would take, I remember trying not to think to myself, focusing instead on not toppling over the edge of the platform on to the tracks, is one person accidentally shoving me as the train pulled in, and I would be toast.

I look back now and marvel at how unfussed I was by that idle speculation. I was so inured to the pressures of rush-hour Tube travel that I was impervious to the fact that, in travelling to work, I had to consider the possibility that today might be my last. I accepted the cheek-by-jowl nature of the commute as a necessary evil.

Not everyone takes their life into their hands to get into work, of course. But I have heard precisely no one mourning the loss of their twice-daily commute to the workplace. While the journey into work offers (I now realise) a useful mental transition space, it gobbles up time like nothing else; in my case, an hour either way. I always deliberately prevented myself from asking what I might otherwise do with that time spent packed into a sardine can surrounded by other bodies but, believe me, the list is endless.

And if my commute reflects the average, that means that people who work five days a week have clawed back 170 hours in the 17 weeks since most offices closed their doors. That amounts to seven days; a whole week.

I know Boris Johnson wants us all to go back to the office now. And I can see the economic logic. Also, I miss having colleagues. And in an ideal world, we wouldn’t all be stuck at home for the foreseeable future, not least because now that work has moved in with us as a new family member, it has become harder to ignore. Most people I know say they are working more – not less – at home.

But there are some indisputable upsides in no longer having to start and end the day in battle with a tightly packed army of out-of-sorts commuters; time, mainly.

And when we do eventually find ways to go back to work, we know now that something must change. The advent of coronavirus has presented a new spectre associated with public transport that has forced a drastic rethink about how we are going to move around from now on. We will find ways to travel more sensibly, at staggered times, by bike, on foot, and in a more considered way.

But in the meantime, we work from home. And that gift of time – the last silver lining I have to offer – is perhaps the best one of all.

I have heard no one mourning the loss of their twicedaily commute