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Comment by philipps | Hacker News Reader

I wish more people would respond to this comment rather than debate the benefits of putting solar on a ferry. Is there data on the avg commute distance in different cities? 50km seems like a significant distance and could cover a large number of commuters.

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cars are used around 10000 km per year in Germany by what I found online. That’s around 30 km per day.

I use my car for 6km per day, but I do 700km in a day on motorcycle on a weekend day.

Americans drive around twice that much. The latest number I could find was 13,476 miles per year for the US.

Anecdotally 140km between Glasgow and Edinburgh (round trip) so it seems like inter-city commuting is probably out.

That’s an extremely specific single example. Can we really usefully generalise from it? Maybe some cities are closer than these two?

The vast majority of people don't commute 140km a day.

That seems on the high end of a traditional commute; given traffic that takes, what, nearly two hours each way?

It's closer to an hour, than it is to two.

I used to do 80miles (128km) a day with harsh traffic and that was 1.5 hours each way(40miles). so yes you are right it's much closer to 2hrs than 1hr.

Virtually no one in the UK is doing this, this is an absurd answer.

80 miles (128km) a day is a pretty harsh commute I used to do, the vast vast majority are doing significantly less than this.

When I used to regularly visit Bristol, I got to learn quite a few that used to commute to London from Bristol and Bath surrounding areas.

Anecdotally I live 8km from work (same city, Europe), making a 16km/day commute.

Glasgow also has only 1201 annual hours of sunshine, less than 3.5/day. What a strange example to choose...

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