I did a lit review on bicycle commuting & worker well-being. Here's what I learned:

1. People who hate their commutes are less productive & report lower well-being [1/n]

2. People with long commutes hate their commutes; secondarily, people who experience high variability or low control are also miserable. [2/n]

3. People who bike are the only ones who like their commutes; everybody else is just different shades of unhappy. This doesn't prove that cycling caused them to be happier, tho. [3/n]

4. There's a bit of evidence that people are happier w/ their commutes after they switch from driving to biking, but it's only observational & correlational; we can't say the switch caused the happiness bump. [4/n]

5. There's no direct research showing (or disproving) that people who bike to work are *more* productive, but given that miserable commuters are less productive, and bike commuters aren't miserable, I feel it's defensible to say so. [5/n]

6. Businesses should care about this - miserable commuters cost them money (via low morale & engagement, and high turnover and absenteeism). But it's hard to shift commute modes, esp. for long commutes. [6/n]

7. Likewise, I think the options of convincing/helping employees to move closer to work will have low ROI. People no longer expect to stay w/ same employer for life anymore. Plus, most households are two-earner. And moving is costly. [7/n]

8. HOWEVER! I see a huge untapped opportunity for businesses to recruit much more visibly w/in, say, 5-10 miles of their offices. A qualified candidate w/ a short commute is a much better investment for them. Why don't we see more of this? [8/n]

BTW the list of studies re: cyclists love their commutes is bananas long & I'm sure I didn't even get them all: Willis et al 2013; Wild & Woodward 2019; Legrain et al 2015; Ye & Titheridge 2017; St‐Louis et al 2014; Singleton 2019; Chatterjee et al 2020; Zhu & Fan 2018. [9/n]

Oh - and revisiting that "ppl with long commutes are miserable" point - long car commutes will only be longer by other modes, in most N American cities. They're already miserable - good luck convincing them to switch to another mode. [10/n]

BUT this just makes cycle superhighways and dedicated transitways all the more important, so cycling and transit have a chance of being *faster and more reliable* than the car commute, even for long commutes. [11/n]