Ever Feel Like Your Crowded Bus and Train Journeys Take Longer Than Usual? New Study Explains Why

If you feel understood, it turns out you're not alone. Many people perceive time to have somehow slowed down to curse their daily commute, and new science says there's an excellent reason for it. It has everything to do with our psychology.

When researchers put a bunch of people on a virtual reality New York subway trip, the virtual commuters felt like the same trip took significantly longer when rush-hour conditions were emulated. The kicker was the fact that the rides took exactly the same amount of time, therefore the only factor that changed was the commuters' mental states when they observed crowding around them.

When these travellers took five simulated subway trips of different durations and levels of crowding, they felt like crowded voyages took about 10% longer than the least crowded ones, on average. The researchers also found that the participants felt the rides took 20% more time if they had more unpleasant experiences during the ordeal.

We've already known that how we experience time — even though it might realistically be moving linearly and steadily for us — can differ vastly due to social context and the perceiver's individual lived experiences. Thus, if someone feels like some form of public transit takes too long, they may even be dissuaded from availing them. Now, crowding has been added to the mix.

In a city like Delhi which observes about 43 lakh commuters daily, or the Mumbai local trains that transport more than 37 lakh passengers every day, this phenomenon can have a considerable impact on the city dwellers’ everyday state of living. In addition, since public transit usage is a major proponent towards the net-zero emission target, we must remove as many roadblocks as possible, even if it is a mental one such as this.

"This study highlights how our everyday experience of people, and our subjective emotions about them, dramatically warps our sense of time," co-author Adam K. Anderson explains. "Time is more than what the clock says; it is how we feel or value it as a resource."

The findings of this research have been published in Virtual Reality and can be accessed here.

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