 Commuting is a huge worldwide issue. With urban populations increasing there are more people commuting to and from work than ever before. Now we know a lot of statistics about commuters. We know where people are traveling from and to. We know the times involved and we know what mode of transport people are taking. The problem with these sorts of statistics though is that they don't tell us very much about the impacts that these journeys are having on people's lives. And that's where this study comes in. For the last three years I've been doing in-depth fieldwork with commuters in the city of Sydney, Australia. Now Sydney signers have the longest average commutes of any city in Australia and a study released a few years ago indicated that commuters in Sydney experienced more stress than commuters elsewhere in Australia making it a really apt field site. So I've been conducting in-depth interviews with a range of different commuters who traveled by car, by public transport and by bicycle. I've been doing participant observation in the city. I've also conducted a range of key stakeholder interviews with people whose professional lives are about the commute in some shape or form. Now what the study has found is that commuting is having profound impacts on people's lives and it's changing people in all kinds of ways. And this is significant because previous research has emphasised the relative stability of people's commutes understood in terms of the mode of transport that they take or the times that are involved. So what this study has shown is that commuting is changing us. It's changing our behaviours towards each other. It's changing our tolerances and what we can cope with. It's changing what we desire from our home and work lives and it's changing what we desire from our lives in the longer term. Now on an everyday scale a stressful commute in the morning can have impacts on how we are at work and this obviously has impacts on workforce productivity. But a stressful commute in the evening can also impact negatively on home and family life, making it difficult for people to relax at the end of the day. Now what the study has also found is that over longer time periods a build up of little events every day during the commute can lead to large tipping points where people make much more dramatic decisions about their lives. People might retrain into different jobs. They might move house. They might even leave the city of Sydney precisely because of the commute. Now commuting isn't all bad and many of my participants commented on how commuting can be a positive experience. For a lot of people it was the only time of the day that they can actually get to themselves outside of the demands of home and work responsibilities. But I think taken together what this study shows is that commuting is changing us in very, very profound ways. It's changing our relationships to the cities that we live in and it's changing what we want from life. So what these findings give us is a bit of a wake up call. It's a wake up call firstly to governments in terms of providing better investment in transport and also for providing more affordable accommodation nearer to workplaces. Secondly, it's a wake up call to employers in terms of providing more innovative solutions for working possibly through more remote working or through more flexible practices. And lastly, it's a wake up call for commuters and for all of us in terms of appreciating how experimenting with our commutes for making little changes to our commutes can have really positive impacts on our sense of self and on our everyday routines.