Visualizing the Brutal Commutes of Colombia's Poorest

They say money can’t buy happiness, but it can definitely purchase some of the basic ingredients. Take, for example, a livable commute: In many cities, those at the lower rungs of the income ladder tend to lack access to the neighborhoods and transportation options that make for saner trips to work. Longer commutes eat away at hours spent sleeping and being with family—key coefficients in the happiness equation. Charted across the space of a city, the workday rhythms of the rich and poor can reveal two very different worlds.

That’s the portrait that emerges of commuters in Colombia just published in Royal Society Open Science. Using recent citywide mobility survey data, a team of Colombian and Spanish transportation engineers plotted commute patterns in the cities of Medellín and Manizales according to residents’ class. (Colombian law actually assigns all households to one of six socioeconomic strata, based on their income, home value, and family size, and other factors.) The researchers looked at the geographic distribution of the start and end points of workers’ commutes, as well as the times of day at which they made those trips and the modes of transportation used.