Which Cities Sleep in, and Which Get to Work Early

It varies a lot more by country.

I once rode a long distance bus in Vietnam that arrived in a remote part of Danang late at night. One of the people I'd met on the bus invited me to stay at his house for the night. Awesome experience, until he woke me up at 5:00 am.

He was in his suit, waiting for me to get up and leave so he could go to work. He'd already given me an hour to be polite, but now he was quite late for work and really needed to get going.

Contrast that to my experience trying to find somebody to sell me a cup of coffee at 9:00 am on a Monday in Finland. Nobody was even planning to open until 10.

SF starting at 8:17 a.m. caught me a little by surprise. I work in SF and have a few friends who work at different companies (20-somethings and 30-somethings, working in tech).

Almost everyone I know comes in to work sometime from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. The Caltrains reaching SF from 9:05 to 9:30 are generally packed, so are the N and KT muni lines; so I am guessing it isn't only my social circle that starts their day early.

Of course I know a few people who start their day at 8:00 a.m. but it came to me as a complete surprise that the average is 8:17 a.m.

The place I have seen with the strongest custom about work hours is Japan. I spent a few days in Tokyo, and everyone always talks about the famous "Tokyo Rush Hour", so we got up early and went for a walk through the city. My wife and I went and looked at the fish market at about 7:30, and had breakfast around 8 and the streets were empty. At about 8:20 there were a few people out, but not many. Then around 8:30 it started to get crowded. By 8:40 the streets were packed, people were cramming cheek to cheek on the subway, and we had to find an out of the way place to watch so that we didn't get trampled.

Then, at 9am, everything went silent. The intersections that were filled with people a few minutes earlier were vacant, and you could see just one or two other people on the street, like a women carrying her shoes and sprinting down the sidewalk, for example.

Japan has a very strict society, and it appears that part of that is 90% of the people have to show up at work at exactly 9am, and not a minute earlier or later. I would much rather show up a half hour early and enjoy one of the easiest commutes of any major city.

Interesting anecdote living in Sydney Australia. I'm from Canada, and was speaking to a friend who moved here from the UK. Going to work here people say "what did you do this morning?" seems like a strange question in most other places I've lived as the answer would be "I brushed my teeth and stumbled into work", but here, everybody is out doing something in the morning. Running, swimming, surfing, apparently even shopping. A very different beast in deed.

At my workplace in Helsinki, Finland we have a flex time. You can come in between 7.00 and 10.00 in the morning and leave between 15.00 and 18.00. Meetings are allowed only between 10-15 if otherwise not agreed with the participants. The time spans are set by Finnish law which says that you need to be working at least 5h per day and max 10h, overtime must separately be agreed with your manager. Some of our coders come in at around 8 in the morning, others at 10.

New York is all the way to the east of its timezone, which may explain why it starts "late". There are two effects at play here. 1)the official time, which affects hours of operations for businesses 2)the mean solar time, which affects sleeping cycles

What you'd want is to predict starting time as a function of the difference between these variables and then rank the cities by their residuals.

I thought it would be interesting to see what the commute time trends look like for cities on each end of the arrival times (early vs. late), so I grabbed some data from the Census Bureau and guessed at rough metro areas (since Nate doesn't clarify what each one consists of, could be MSA, could be city limits, etc.) using county-level data.

I only took the top 5 metros on each end because I had to do a fair chunk of this by hand and I wasn't feeling doing any more. I also threw in a bar of relative densities just for fun.

Here are those results (pardon my excel, for it was not worth opening IDLE): http://imgur.com/a/qCmwB

A couple notes:

1. Big cities are certainly skewing this, both in terms of traffic issues and population density.

2. My metro areas could be totally wrong.

3. This is only calculating the commute of people within the areas I defined, while the article is talking about arrival time at work in (hopefully) the same areas.

4. Yes, I have the word "Average" too many times in the title of the first graph, sorry.

Still, I think the graph paints a neat picture of opposite trends.

You could likely better understand this by looking at electricity consumption data. i.e. people use less electricity when they are asleep.

I know a lot of this data is publicly available for the UK (http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php). Presumably you could get something similar for the USA, perhaps via https://www.smartgrid.gov/

There wasn't really any evidence provided in this article that the late-start cities 'sleep in'. Perhaps people in SF just enjoy a leisurely breakfast on the balcony, watching the Sun rise, rather than rushing into the office?

Personally I have to be up at 05:30 to take care of the dog / kids / housework / exercise / have some personal time but don't start work until 11:00.

Better to have the bright mornings to myself than the dark evenings when I'm tired.

It's be interesting to compare these results to apparent time, e.g. the offset between what the watch says and the position of the sun. I'd wager these distributions would overlap a lot more if you based them on apparent time, and I'd suspect a strong correlation between the outliers in this study and the offset between apparent time and wall time.

Too bad this is only US centric, I would have liked to see a similar kind of comparison between major cities around the world.

I wish the article went more in depth on potential causes.

I suspect the dominant factor is the expectations of the largest industries in the city, but that's only mentioned for military towns.

To give an example: as a Seattleite, I was initially surprised to see how much earlier the average starting time is compared to San Francisco or San Jose. However, I think the relatively early start times at, say, Boeing are an effective offset to the later start times at Microsoft and Amazon, and this likely accounts for most of the difference.

Interesting that it mentioned Bakersfield California as one of the early risers... I lived there for a while and worked in the oil industry, and the parking lot was full by 7:30. I had a ton of meetings at 7:00, and 6:00 ones too. My boss started work at 5:00 and left by 2:00. I figured a lot of it was because the operator shift change was at 6AM, so people were just used to the idea that the work day starts early. Plus it gets darn hot in the afternoons in Bakersfield :)

Those hours sound horrible. Over here (UK), 9 is fairly common, 8 is an 'early' common start, and many other people have 8.30, unless you work in retail or something. No way I'd do anything before 8 as that is a struggle enough.

Most jobs occur during the day, but would data on night workers reveal anything? It is still a significant slice of the workforce, often in vital areas:

  Medical staff working long shifts
  Firemen
  Security guards, military personnel and police
  Bar and pub staff
  Cleaners
  Heavy industry such as car manufacturing
  Astronomers and astronauts

My grandfather worked as a steeplejack at Port Talbot in South Wales. The steel mill there followed the European shift: 06:00 - 14:00, 14:00 - 22:00, 22:00 - 06:00. There would have been very little variance in starting times, the work load was simply too high. Sometimes my grandfather would spend a whole shift working in the furnace, wearing a hot, sweaty protective suit. After the shift, if the pubs were still open, he would line up four pints of beer on the bar and down them all within about five minutes.

EDIT: made the list more, readable.

A lot of new yorkers owe their life because they did not get too early to work on 9/11. This number includes a friend of mine that was in a subway train on the way to the towers when the attack happened. Luckily the train stopped short of its destination.

I always thought only the Germans are crazy to start work (and school) extremely early in the day. Turns out it's the same in the US but I've only lived in two of the top 5 cities on that list (Ithaca, NY and SF Bay Area)...

10 to 4 with a one hour lunch is my preferred working hours if I'm going to be selling my labor to someone else at least. Unfortunately, American culture doesn't agree with me. Perhaps I should move to France :)

I'd like to see this adjusted for types of work. Comparing the people sitting in offices to the people working in the service industry, flipping eggs or handing out newspapers, can probably skew things considerably.

I bet the industry makes a lot of difference too. I worked in an MDF factory in North Carolina for a while, and everyone there agreed on 0700 to 1530 for the standard work day. My impression is that people with desk jobs like to sleep in a little later.

Now, as a graduate student in Boston I get in by 0730 every day mostly to avoid traffic. If I sleep in by a half hour it takes twice as long to get to work.

I wanted to point out out that the source of the data is pretty limited. There must be a better way to do this -- eg. looking at sybway traffic, internet searches? I dunno, something that would pick up signals from more people and do so on a global scale rather than the national scale. Surely we think the global variation is more interesting than the national one.

Oddly relevant is a city that's explicitly designed around sleep:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2014/02/town-s-build...

How many of these people get to work early and then talk over coffee for three hours?

SF sounds so great ... get up late to a leisurely breakfast served to you by others before communing with nature. The rest of the world is really missing out.

7:30am...?! fuck that

I know he's talking about averages but his story can confuse you when he talks about when people start work and when they arrive.

I'm immediately suspect of his numbers when he says the typical starting time in St. Louis is 7:50AM. I've lived in St. Louis all my life and only had one short-lived job that started before 8AM. Every other job I had started at 8AM to 8:30AM. I don't know anyone who has a normal, every day job that starts earlier than that and I wouldn't even think to call someone at their business earlier than that.

Why on earth does the time you start work matter? Are we showing up in suits and ties, too? Or is this about actually getting business done?