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Tea and Buttered Crumpets, To Take Away

This morning's office is a cafe overlooking a fairly ordinary street in Brighton, a small city on the South coast of England. I've been sitting here, perched on a raised stool at the window since it opened at 7:30 am, in an effort to warm up - having been pacing the streets for a couple of hours already. To view the street I'm required to wipe condensation away the window every 5 minutes or so. There is a constant stream of teas, coffees, buttered toast and crumpets* being served to the morning rush-hour commuters.

I'm here to research something out there, but it's cold and the draw of toast and crumpets is enough to bring me in here. And anyway there things that can be learnt from being on either side of the glass. The time between ordering and the arrival of food and drink is long enough to be considered a micro break - enough time to take out a mobile phone check messages, perhaps send one or two. But no-one does. Why should they?

A 3 minute walk uphill from here is Brighton station. A 60 minute or so train ride and the passengers will dis-gorging from London Victoria and London Thameslink stations to join the fun that is London's rush-hour. I can't imagine anyone going from home to office in less than 90 minutes which means 15 hours a week spent on the activity known as commuting. Commuting to work in central London from London's suburbs can easily take an hour so for many of these people Brighton is a practical alternative.

Commuting habits are of interest to anyone who provides content or builds devices that are used to access content - whether it's web based, radio or mobile TV. These commuters have 90 minutes or commuting boredom to kill, enough time to listen to a lot of music, watch a feature length movie, read a newspaper from cover to cover, read a novelette. It's probably enough to write the first draft of novel. But how much of those 90 minutes do they really have? What does it mean to commute? How does commuting differ between cultures? And how will the commuting experience evolve with the availability of a wider variety of devices and content formats?

When the 90 minute journey is broken down to sub-tasks - leaving the home space, walking to the station, finding a seat on the train, the train journey itself, negotiating the station at the other end, using pubic transport at the destination and the eventual walk to the building. The longest uninterrupted part of the journey is likely to be the long distance train journey, and actually that's far from uninterrupted. Announcements occur every time the train pulls into a station, pulls out of the station, and when one is available - to notify passengers of the buffet car. We can't assume the commuter automatically finds a seat - many people spend part of their journey keeping an eye out for seating and in some contexts to relocate to better seating. Every time people get on and off lighting conditions, ambient temperatures and noise levels will vary - not optimal conditions for watching a movie if one is available.

How does a commuter differ from one-off travelers? They have in-depth understanding of the nuances of the journey they are taking - knowing which exit can shave a few steps off the journey time, where they are most likely to get a good seat, being able to prepare a ticket or card sufficiently prior to reach a ticket barrier.

The commuting experience varies significantly between cultures - whether its a single person driving a car in Las Vegas, a motorbike seating a family of four in Ho Chi Minh City or standing on the Yamanote subway Line in Tokyo. Is the culture one of early risers? Getting up early in Jakarta or Delhi provides an opportunity for avoiding the heat. Japan has more of a culture of (starting and then) working late.

[The cultural connoisseurs amongst you may enjoy the subtle but important difference between buttered crumpets and, well, buttered crumpet]

Writing from Brighton | February 9, 2006 | Permalink