Transcript: What the rise of ‘supercommuters’ tells us about work

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘What the rise of ‘supercommuters’ tells us about work’

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Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick. Experts predicted that the pandemic might put an end to commuting for good. But according to new analysis by the Financial Times, that hasn’t happened. The number of people travelling into work is inching up, and some people are going to extreme lengths to get into the office. A growing number have become “supercommuters” travelling huge distances to show face at work. But can you really stay relevant at work if you live hundreds of miles away? Won’t you miss out on all the best office gossip? And is anything worth a five-hour commute? I’m going to hear from two supercommuters a little later to find out. Mo Marikar is a senior director of digital engineering at RBC Wealth Management, and travels from North Wales to London once a week. Max Dawes is COO at Zappar, an augmented reality company, and he commutes from the Isle of Wight to London. Before I speak to them, I’d like to welcome my FT colleagues Andrew Hill and Emma Jacobs. They’ve just written a series of stories about how the commute has changed, and they’re going to give us the scoop. Andrew, Emma, welcome.

Emma Jacobs
Hello.

Andrew Hill
Thank you for having me.

Isabel Berwick
Andrew, you and Emma have just finished this big series on commuting. What has most surprised you about how people are commuting now?

Andrew Hill
I suppose what was surprising to me was how much it has come back, given all the predictions during the pandemic, that it will be changed forever. There were even some wild, exaggerated predictions that it would die off completely. In most cities around the world, it is back, short of where it was on public transport from before the pandemic but, you know, getting there, and I think the forecasts in a lot of cities — Manhattan’s one good example — is that actually, it will return. And indeed, more infrastructure may be needed to accommodate increased commuting.

Isabel Berwick
And when you say more infrastructure, do you mean it will be heavier on certain days of the week? Because Monday and Friday still look pretty dead to me.

Andrew Hill
Yeah, that’s true of London, certainly, and quite a lot of cities. So the shape of it has definitely changed. And indeed, some of the habits of commuters have changed. And since we published the article online, there’s been a number of suggestions, for example, that we could have looked at different modes of transport, cycling taking over in the UK, in London. But in a lot of cities, there’s this sort of hybrid day emerging where some people who are close enough come in for the first half of the day and then go home to complete their work, or they work remotely somewhere else. So part of the day is spent, and that’s definitely happening in New York and to some degree in London.

Isabel Berwick
And you write in one of your pieces that new commuting habits are bad news for some suburbs. I think you mentioned in New York. Can you talk me through that?

Andrew Hill
The change that’s happened in New York is that some of the middle-distance suburban areas seem to be losing out or are outside the suburbs because they’re just slightly too far away to do this hybrid day, where you come in during the day, but not far enough to make it worthwhile doing them more like a supercommuter or a longer commute. And so you’re getting Brooklyn, Queens, parts of New Jersey, around Manhattan favoured and also further out on Long Island or upstate New York also doing better, people wanting to say, I’m gonna come in for a proper day or a couple of days and then work for the rest of the time further out.

Isabel Berwick
So I’m really interested in the concept of the supercommuter, and we have a couple on the podcast today. Emma, what did you find when you were doing the research?

Emma Jacobs
I found that people were doing a shorter week in London. And there has been a nudge up for people doing a distance of 90 minutes to 120 minutes commute at least once a week. It is 2.4 per cent of the commuting population to just up to 4 per cent, and those doing commute of 120 minutes at least once a week has gone up from 2.7 to 3.4 per cent. So not massive, but things are still in flux. I did talk to a few people that said that they had moved during the pandemic, thinking that we were gonna have this glorious new future where you’d only come in a couple of days a week, you can stay at mum’s or whatever. And actually, now they’re being asked to come in so much to the office that they’ve had to sell their home in this sort of rural paradise and return back to the City.

Isabel Berwick
So we’ve got a shape of commuting now, which is people living quite close, people living very far, people coming into the office certain days of the week, or people coming into the office for part of the day, which I think is really interesting. I want to bring in our supercommuters because it sounds like the dream. (Laughter) In the studio, we’ve got Mo, who’s based in Islington in North Wales.

Mo Marikar
Yes, I live in North Wales, but I stay at my mum’s in Islington for part of the week.

Emma Jacobs
Where did you move from? You were in London before, weren’t you?

Mo Marikar
Yes. So in North London before. So I was in West Harrow before that.

Isabel Berwick
And what, did you move during the pandemic?

Mo Marikar
Yes. It was one of those post-pandemic life re-evaluation moves. Yeah.

Isabel Berwick
And what actually motivated your move?

Mo Marikar
It was partly financial. So, you know, we looked at the mortgage. We were looking to see, you know, could we go somewhere that could still be commutable at a push, but essentially reduce our cost of living? So I moved just over two years ago, and I would go to Chester, take the train into Euston, and it was about two hours, two hours and 10 minutes, something like that. And then our company had this green car scheme — essentially like a company car scheme where you sacrifice part of your salary to get an electric vehicle. At the end of October I kind of bit the bullet. And now I drive in.

Emma Jacobs
How long does that take you?

Mo Marikar
So if I’m lucky, three and a half hours. If I’m unlucky, four and a half to five.

Isabel Berwick
What are the upsides and the downsides?

Mo Marikar
The downside is, you know, driving for a long time. If you don’t like driving, you know, if you get bored of your podcast, it could be troublesome. If there’s an accident on the motorway, you could be stuck for a while. So those are risks. For some people, I guess that losing so much time is huge. And, you know, if they don’t like listening to stuff, that can be a problem. The upside is there is a significant savings. So before the rates went up, when, I think my mortgage was sort of like 1.5 per cent — the good old days, right? It was sort of like £1,500 a month roughly was going on that. That’s pretty much gone down to almost nothing now, right? So there’s significant savings there. My daughter is in a regular state primary school across the road from where we live. There are 13 other kids in her class, right? So you get a lot more space, cleaner air.

Isabel Berwick
It sounds great. Max, I’d love to bring you in here. Could you tell us your story and why you did what you did when you moved?

Max Dawes
Yeah, absolutely. So, Max Dawes, chief operating officer at Zappar. My wife and I had been living in London for 10, 12 years. We had always hoped to make it to the Isle of Wight. Eventually, my family are from here. But the pandemic fast-tracked things. We packed the car overnight when London schools started shutting. We thought we’d be here for a few months. We’re still here four years later. During the the height of the pandemic, we were working completely remotely. My company, Zappar, then introduced a “work where you work best” policy. I was a beneficiary of that. But after well, probably the start of this year, I felt like I was missing the benefits of in-person working at the office. So now my Monday, Tuesday, first half of Wednesday, working from home. I get the ferry across from the Isle of Wight to Southampton and then the bus, and then the train and then the Tube. Often that’s about a four-hour journey in total. And then I spend the Thursdays working from the office and then I get a late train back. I leave Waterloo at 7:30pm on a Thursday, and I’m home about 10pm on a Thursday night, and then I work from home on Friday.

Isabel Berwick
Brilliant. Thanks, Max. And Mo, how did colleagues react when you first moved?

Mo Marikar
I don’t think they noticed. (Laughter) You know, like you show up to meetings as normal. I don’t think anyone realises what’s happened, right? They were surprised when I mentioned it, though. And I was actually surprised how many colleagues actually sort of used to live nearby and moved to London for work — many, many more than I expected. Here, it seems quite shocking to people. You know, Tunbridge Wells is sort of acceptable, but, Birmingham maybe, but . . . (Laughter) Once you’re sort of more than 150 miles out, it looks . . . People are surprised.

Isabel Berwick
And I just wanted to clear up how you live the rest of the time when you’re not at work. So Max, how is your life different in the Isle of Wight from your previous life in London, just to give listeners a flavour of how things have changed. 

Max Dawes
My life post the move is pretty different and it’s been absolutely net positive for me and my family living in a rural area and access to the schools and space. So being able to bring up a family in the countryside, in a place that I know and love well, the Isle of Wight, as well as access to London, which is such a brilliant city and all the energy that comes from that. It’s been a real best of both worlds situation and I feel very lucky to be able to move.

Isabel Berwick
Do either of you miss the social elements of being in London, or can you still go out? Mo.

Mo Marikar
I do a bit, yeah. So a lot of my friends are still living, live in London. Sometimes they’ll organise something last minute and I’ll be like, oh God, can I drive 200 miles away? So, right. (Laughter) So I try and sort of remind people that I’m generally in the office sort of in the middle of the week, so try and do something like on a weekday, right? So I would say I’ve probably lost maybe about 20 per cent, I think, if I was to put a number on it, yeah, simply because you can’t make the impromptu meetups.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. And Max, do you miss the social aspect or do you still make time for it?

Max Dawes
It was one of the reasons that I decided to come up to London more regularly. The work, socialising and maintaining networks and those check-ins with people, maybe going out for drinks on Wednesday evening or lunches on Thursday can be really helpful for maintaining that. When we moved to the Isle of Wight, we thought maybe our social life would get quieter, but it’s been quite the opposite. Dinner parties all the time and everyone’s always keen to meet up, although plans tend to get made for the following evening rather than four weeks in advance, which is what social life is like in London.

Isabel Berwick
Yes. Sorry Max, that was very London-centric of me to assume you had no social life beyond the Isle of Wight. (Laughter) I’m really sorry. I think I’m gonna ask Andrew and Emma just to throw it forward. In five years’ time, are there gonna be more people like Max and Mo? Emma, what do you think?

Emma Jacobs
I think people will have the confidence to suggest these things, whereas before it was very much on a kind of case by case, you know, am I allowed to do something? Even the idea of coming in later, which — I have a very short commute, used to get incredibly stressed about this mythical time that I needed to turn up at.

Isabel Berwick
Even though no one was . . . 

Emma Jacobs
Even though no one cared as long as . . . 

Isabel Berwick
Your lovely boss, who’s not . . . 

Emma Jacobs
Exactly. Even though you were my boss (Isabel laughs) and all those kind of things. And so I think the point that you can do these things will strengthen people’s case for making it. Can I just ask my one thing, which is something that did come up with supercommuters, this idea that you’re missing Tuesday, Wednesday with your kids. So I just wondered whether you felt that there was any loss in that respect.

Mo Marikar
Not really. So, you know, if I compared to my role in 2019, by the time I got home, my commute was over an hour anyway, it was probably about an hour and 20 on an average day. And bearing in mind a lot of my colleagues are in North America, so it’s not like I can always sort of leave at five, right? So, yeah, I’d find I’d get home and my kids were younger then, so often there’d be, they’d already had dinner. They might be in bed already. Because I know I’m definitely gonna be at home at the beginning and at the end of the week now it can be a lot more involved. Whereas before it was, I felt like I was partly there, you know, throughout the week and only really present on the weekend.

Isabel Berwick
This has been a very inspiring discussion. I just have one question for you, Max. Do you miss the daily commute?

Max Dawes
Not one bit.

Isabel Berwick
Mo?

Mo Marikar
Not at all.

Isabel Berwick
(Laughter) Max in the Isle of Wight I think today. Thanks very much for coming on the show.

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Max Dawes
Thanks for having me.

Isabel Berwick
And Mo, thank you so much for coming in.

Mo Marikar
A pleasure.

Isabel Berwick
And Emma and Andrew, thank you for coming down three floors.

Andrew Hill
Very happy to make the trip.

Isabel Berwick
This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.

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