For all things bikes

Nobody needs to be told that cycling is healthier than driving or being sat on a train - obviously, exercise is good for you. However, what not many people may know is that commuting by car or public transport could be actually "bad for your health."

Researchers in Sweden have found that those who use a car, bus or train on a daily basis suffer more stress, greater sickness absence, and poorer sleep than those who walk or cycle.

Erik Hansson from the division of occupational and environmental medicine at Lund University tracked for the research 21,000 people, ages18-65, who worked more than 30 hours a week and commuted either by car, train or bus and also active commuters who travelled by walking or cycling.

"Generally car and public transport users suffered more everyday stress, poorer sleep quality, exhaustion and, on a seven point scale, felt that they struggled with their health compared to the active commuters." Hansson said.

There is a curious finding in the study: the negative health of public transport users increases with journey time. But it seems like those who commuted by car for over an hour have better health than those whose drives lasted from 30 to 60 minutes.

This apparently incongruous behaviour - a Gaussian bell curve with distance and poor health as variables - is easily explained by Hansson: "It could be that these drivers tended to be men, and high-income earners, who travelled in from rural areas, a group that generally consider themselves to be in good."

The research, published in the journal BMC Public Health, although highly valuable for its findings cannot conclude that commuting causes ill health, stressed the authors.

According to the academics people who commute in different ways are likely to be drawn from different backgrounds, and this can be already a factor in health differences.

"More research needs to be done to identify how exactly commuting is related to the ill health we observed in order to readdress the balance between economic needs, health and the costs of working days lost," Hansson added.

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