Álvaro Villa’s (35 years old) workdays begin with a very long trip. He gets up around 6:40 in the morning and at 7:10 he takes the bus that takes him from Alcalá de Henares, where he lives, to the Adolfo Suárez Madrid Barajas airport, where he works. “It always goes to the top. One stop after mine you won’t sit down anymore.” He changes trains at Canillejas (at the entrance to Madrid) and arrives, if all goes well, around 8:40, twenty minutes before starting his day. “It’s just that either I leave almost two hours early or many days I don’t arrive. It’s disgusting, it pisses me off so much. It is work time that you do not get paid for,” he laments. On his return, in the afternoon, he “loses” another hour getting home.
Jorge Sánchez also works in Madrid, in the Sanchinarro area (north of the city), and lives in Parla (south of the capital). This 52-year-old engineer travels in his car. “It can take an hour and a half on the way there and another hour on the way back. There are days when I spend three hours on the road. Recently I don’t know what happened and the trip alone was three whole hours,” he explains. Unlike Álvaro and Jorge, Esmeralda Écija (34 years old) does not travel by road, but rather takes the Cercanías train to reach the Madrid neighborhood of Vallecas, where she works as a teacher. It takes around an hour one way in the morning. “There are many problems, many delays. It’s very tiring, it makes me very anxious to think that I might be late, that uncertainty, not being able to sit on the train, not being able to get out of all the people there… You look at people’s faces and everyone is just as angry. ”. For her, the return trip is worse (an hour and a half), after eating, when the frequency of the trains decreases.
These three workers, from very different sectors, with very different qualification profiles, share the same problem: they take an awfully long time to get to their jobs. Esmeralda is the only one who takes the train, in the spotlight in recent months for . They add to this. Like her and Álvaro, 16% of Spaniards go to work or study by train, bus, metro or tram. This is indicated by the latest data from the , with figures from 2021 (the next edition is published in 2026). By car, like Jorge, 62% travel. Far fewer are the lucky ones who can get to their workplace or study on foot (16%) or by motorcycle or bicycle (5%).
This INE study also details that 9.4% spend more than an hour and a half on the round trip, to which is added another 12.5% who spend between 60 and 89 minutes. Thus, one in five workers and students (statistics do not allow us to differentiate between them) spends at least an hour on the road. Another 22% between 40 and 59 minutes, another 30% between 20 and 39 minutes and 26% 19 minutes or less. These are national average data, which can be somewhat misleading.
The worst, in Madrid
The analysis by INE municipalities, which includes all those with , indicates that long trips are concentrated in the Community of Madrid. 47% of those over 16 years of age in Collado Villalba take more than an hour on their work or educational journeys, almost as much as the 45% who suffer the same situation in Parla, where Jorge lives. The next municipalities on the list, with between 40% and 38%, are Valdemoro, Leganés, Rivas-Vaciamadrid, Fuenlabrada, Las Rozas, Aranjuez and Móstoles, all of them Madrid municipalities, whose residents mostly go to the capital. After Madrid itself and six other municipalities in the same autonomy goes Sant Cugat del Vallès (33%), north of Barcelona.
These data show that the problem is concentrated in the surroundings of Madrid and, to a lesser extent, Barcelona. What’s more, the only municipalities with more than 22% (national average) that spend more than an hour on their journeys and that are not from Madrid or Barcelona are Santa Lucía de Tirajana (Las Palmas) and Utrera (Seville). In Torrent, the large municipality closest to Valencia, they are 19%. In Getxo, the equivalent compared to Bilbao, 22%.
The analysis by province further establishes the conclusions of the municipal data on the number of employees and students who take more than one hour. There are only four provinces above the national average: the aforementioned Madrid (37%) and Barcelona (29%), followed by Toledo (28%) and Guadalajara (26%). Both are bordering provinces of the capital region. They are experiencing a demographic explosion, largely supported by employees in Madrid companies who live in Toledo and Guadalajara, (although it rises more than the national average). It should be remembered that these INE data are from 2021, prior to the last explosion in housing prices in recent years, which has further enhanced this phenomenon due to the high prices in Madrid.
In 2023, according to INE data, 2.4% of workers lived in a community different from their workplace. It is almost the maximum recorded, only one tenth below the 2022 figure. In any case, they are figures higher than before the pandemic, with 1.9% in 2019. In 2010, the first data available, on 1, 6% of workers made this trip to work.
“Long times occur in large metropolitan areas. It happens in Spain and throughout the world due to the concentration of employment that has to do with agglomeration economies,” explains Professor of Human Geography at the Complutense University of Madrid, author of the doctoral thesis. Metropolitan areas, he explains, tend to expand as long as they continue to generate (and sometimes monopolize) employment. It identifies two workers in the worst possible situation: those who face very long car trips and those who are forced to make several transfers on public transport because the connection is not good. “That’s where the times skyrocket,” adds García.
We Spaniards spend an average of 25 minutes getting to work or study and returning home. It is exactly the same as the average of the Twenty-Seven. The situation is worse in Latvia (33 minutes), the United Kingdom (30) or the Czech Republic (29). The contrast is registered in Cyprus (19), Greece (20), Portugal or Italy (both 21).
“It’s time when I’m not productive.”
Álvaro asks “please” that the administrations act, “to improve communications so that it doesn’t take so long to arrive, whatever.” Another solution might be to move near the airport, but it begs the question: “Have you seen? Furthermore, my whole life is in Alcalá, my friends, my family. “I don’t want to move just for work.” Esmeralda, interim teacher, elaborates on this idea: “Last year I worked at a school in Alcalá, half an hour walk from my house. My quality of life was much higher.”
For Álvaro, who loads and unloads suitcases at the airport, and Esmeralda, an employee at an institute, teleworking would not be a solution, but for Jorge it would be. Already several days a week, but this does not stop me from thinking about the loss of efficiency that each trip to the office represents. “That time I’m on the road could be productive and I’m not. There is also the risk of something happening, of an accident. You end up resigning yourself, but it affects you, it stresses you out a lot,” he adds. In 2023, 8% more occurred (going or returning to work) than the previous year.
Carlos de Pablo, Secretary of Institutional Policies of UGT in Catalonia, addresses exactly that question: “With such long trips, workers arrive stressed, in a state that is not adequate to carry out work in optimal conditions. This increases.” This union member regrets the effect of these trips on “”, which leads to a “loss of productivity for companies”. He highlights the role of teleworking in this debate, how much it could help decongest traffic, “but it is not a substitute for the shortcomings of the system.” He believes that the “lack of investment” in infrastructure, especially in railways, “is making the lives of many people worse, including those of the professionals who provide the service.” “We need more material resources, more human resources. In Madrid and Catalonia the problems are very similar,” adds De Pablo.
García, for his part, regrets that people who dedicate so much time to their commutes “run out of time for other activities, especially leisure.” They are “lost times” that are made worse by “uncertainty”: “Traffic jams, failures in the public transport network, are problems that cause travel time to vary, adding stress for people.”
Urban solution
The specialist from the Complutense University believes that the key solution is to “recover the traditional city”, in which the uses of each area of the municipality are not so compartmentalized. That is, “a dense city, in which you can mix work-related and residential activities, more diverse cities.” He highlights that the traditional city “has a design that favors pedestrian movements and public transportation,” unlike exclusively residential areas, which have crystallized in recent years.
María Eugenia López-Lambas, deputy director of the Transport Research Center (TRANSyT) of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), believes that these developments encourage car use, which delves into the problem: “If we plan first the PAU and Then the transportation that will get there makes things worse. It must go hand in hand, there are aberrations that are difficult to understand.” Like García, López-Lambas defends that one of the main solutions is a greater integration of land uses, that there is no such separation between work and residential: “If the people of Majadahonda worked there there would be no problems. The conflict is in that imbalance.”
García believes that there are also solutions in the periphery, “as long as they are developments oriented around public transport stations, which generate a mix of uses in the same corridor.” Remember that “it is proven” that “increasing highways generates more dispersion, an induced demand for the car that leads to more congestion.” “The key is an integrated urban development and public transportation policy that enhances proximity,” he concludes. López-Lambas insists on the importance of the solution occurring on several fronts at the same time: “It is not enough to close the center to cars. You must provide alternatives to those who come from afar, public transport of sufficient quality, park-and-ride, HOV lanes (only for high-occupancy vehicles)….”
Álvaro has been waiting for this infrastructure for years, an HOV lane on the A2. The works, which will somewhat reduce the three hours he spends each day on the highway to get to work. “It’s exasperating,” he concludes.
