Linked Lives: Consequences of Long Commuting for the Health of All Family Members

Passive commuting-regularly recurring travel between home and work by a motorized vehicle or public transportation-is an integral part of our lives. Commuting may take a toll on the health of commuters and their family members. Current research offers a limited understanding of whether commuting's health impacts are socially patterned. Information about whether long commuting affects family members is scarce. A comprehensive inquiry into this topic is needed to understand what commuting means for population health. COMFAM's main objectives are: 1) to investigate the impact of long commutes on commuters' physical health, 2) to investigate whether long commutes have adverse effects on non-commuting partners' health and well-being, 3) to assess the effects of parental long commutes on children's health and social outcomes, 4) to examine whether changes in commuting during and after the COVID-19 pandemic have brought any changes to the health and well-being of the family members, and 5) to examine whether the health effects of long commutes differ across population subgroups, and whether these effects are short- or long-term. COMFAM is ambitious and highly innovative. It will use high-quality Nordic register data, enabling us to examine comprehensive objective indicators of health, investigate the heterogeneous health effects of long commuting, and employ novel methods to address endogeneity and help establish a causal pattern. We will also leverage rich survey data from the UK, US, and Germany to investigate mechanisms that may underlie commuting-health relationships and assess health declines not yet requiring medical treatment. COMFAM is also important. In addition to impacting population health, the negative health effects of commuting may reduce employee performance, induce premature exits from the labor force, and set children on problematic trajectories. Thus, the findings will have far-reaching public health, social, and economic implications across nations.