People worldwide spend nearly the same amount of time on daily travel

Every city pulses with movement. Streets shift with people heading to work, running errands, or stepping out for a quick breath of air. The reasons differ, yet a deeper pattern hides beneath the rush.

Human travel follows a steady rhythm, and new research explains why that rhythm stays locked in place, even when transport technology races ahead.

Humans travel similarly

A team from ICTA UAB and McGill University studied travel in more than 40 countries. The numbers look almost uncanny at first glance.

Most people spend around seventy eight minutes traveling each day. Income does not move this number.

Culture does not move it. Faster vehicles do not shorten it. A person in a high speed train and someone walking through a village end up giving similar chunks of time to movement.

Bodies resist long daily travel. Minds also crave some motion. Those two pressures settle on a narrow window that resurfaces across the world.

Faster travel increases distance

Transport technology has become cleaner and more efficient. Engines burn less, electric cars reduce waste, yet global transport emissions still climb. The study shows why.

When travel becomes faster, trips stretch. Energy savings per kilometer get replaced by longer routes and bigger daily ranges. The important number turns out to be energy used per hour, not per kilometre.

“The most important finding is that people don’t travel less when speed or efficiency increases; instead, they travel farther,” said study co-author Eric Galbraith. Time stays steady, but distance balloons.

Same travel time globally

The dataset includes both personal travel and paid travel. That means delivery workers, pilots, bus drivers, and sailors sit inside the same frame as office workers and students.

Even with this mix, total travel time hovers around the same narrow range. Places with high speed rail networks land near the same duration as regions built around walking paths. Greater wealth does not shrink the daily travel window.

More advanced vehicles do not change it either. The only clear difference lies in how far a person ends up going in those minutes.

Big energy differences

Different transport modes burn energy at wildly different rates per hour. Walking uses little energy. Cycling uses only a bit more.

Electric buses stay on the low end as well. Cars powered by combustion engines sit much higher on the scale. Large cars at highway speeds burn energy at levels hundreds of times above walking.

When people rely on high energy modes, total daily travel quickly becomes expensive in energy terms, even though the time spent moving stays the same.

A pedestrian city must power far less movement than a rail oriented city. A city built around cars uses more than a hundred times more energy than one built around walkable streets.

Rising future demand

Self-driving cars may nudge these patterns. A relaxed passenger who can read or work during a trip may accept longer travel without feeling worn out.

If global travel time rises even slightly, energy demand jumps. A rise from 1.3 hours to 1.6 hours per day could create a sharp increase in global transport energy use.

Yet the biggest shift would come from widespread dependence on low occupancy gasoline cars. That alone could double world energy consumption.

Without careful planning, faster and easier travel can quietly inflate demand faster than efficiency gains can catch it.

Using less energy to travel

Urban design holds real power here. Walkable layouts, safe cycling routes, and electric public transport keep hourly energy use low. Streets shaped for high speed, single passenger vehicles push energy use in the opposite direction.

“Since total travel time is nearly constant, policies that enable people to choose low energy per hour modes of transport will be the most effective for reducing transport energy demand,” said study co-author William Fajzel.

The steady daily travel window is not something planners can shrink, but they can shape what fills it.

Human movement turns out to be more predictable than it appears from a busy street corner. Most people give the day a small, fixed amount of time for travel. Technology changes the distance, not the duration.

The study shows that the world cannot rely on faster engines or cleaner cars alone. The key lies in making every hour of travel use less energy. Once that happens, the natural rhythm of daily movement becomes an advantage, not a challenge.

The study is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

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