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One in five Swedes has two-hour commute

The Local Sweden
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One in five Swedes has two-hour commute

21 percent of Swedes spend more than one hour getting to work, and more than two hours commuting daily, according to new figures released by European job-seeking agency StepStone.

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Experts warn that such long hours can have distinct disadvantages on people’s daily lives.

“Going by public transport can be stressful if you have to make a lot of changes and if it is overcrowded. But if you don’t have to stand up on the bus, some experience it as quite relaxing. It depends how you use the time,” explained Kristoffer Mattisson, a PhD student from the Medical Faculty at Lund University, to the Metro newspaper.

“You lose any time you might otherwise have had for physical activity and for seeing people,” he continued.

The survey revealed that 6.1 percent of Swedes travel more than two hours each way, compared with a 5.4 percent average across the seven European countries that took part in the survey.

Meanwhile, 38.7 percent of Swedes travel for between thirty minutes and one hour each way, and 40.4 percent commute for thirty minutes or less.

The Germans have the shortest commutes, with 44.2 percent travelling less than thirty minutes each day, and the French are most likely to be in transit with 7.0 percent taking more than 2 hours each way.

StepStone linked long commutes with the desire to seek new work opportunities, but warned that commuting can be a real source of stress if people have to spend a significant amount of time travelling every day.

"When a long commute is combined with long working hours, this can be an important factor in making people look for another job,” StepStone CEO Ralf Baumann said in a statement.

The survey included 9,800 respondents from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.

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