Life’s a beach: Commuters in Nice enjoy the lowest cost of travel relative to earnings

Cuenca flies the flag for South America

Cuenca, located in the highlands of Ecuador, makes a surprise appearance in the top 10 given the relatively poor performance of other cities in the region.

The city gives a good account of itself across the board, with cheap travel, short journey times and even shorter waiting times. Most commuters live a hop, skip, and a jump from the office, travelling on average just 3.8km each way — only workers in the Brazilian city of Campina Grande have it better in this regard.

Like Nice, Cuenca has a metropolitan population of less than a million, which is an indication that size really does matter when it comes to commuting.

In fact, the average population size of cities in the top 10 is 1,120,265 — over eight million less than that of cities in the bottom 10.

Leicester leads the way for UK cities

First the Premier League and now this. It really has been an exciting few years for residents of the East Midlands’ largest city, and surely the people responsible for transport at the council deserve to be immortalised alongside Ranieri, Vardy, Mahrez and co. in Leicester folklore. It’s only fair.

Commuters typically enjoy a hassle-free journey to work, with only 32% having to make more than one change in a single journey.

A monthly travel card will set you back a Bullseye, which, for the benefit of anyone living north of Watford, is Cockney rhyming slang for £50. Compare this to the eye-watering sum of £132 paid by Cockneys for the luxury of using public transport in their city and it’s clear who wins this battle between the Midlands and the South.

The bottom 10

The worst cities for commuting Rank Country City Score 65 UK London 68.18 66 USA Miami 72.87 67 Colombia Cali 75.96 68 Brazil Brasilia 77.52 69 Canada Toronto 78.56 70 Brazil Salvador 78.71 71 Turkey Istanbul 81.78 72 Brazil Sao Paulo 83.71 73 Colombia Bogota 84.12 74 Brazil Rio de Janeiro 86.26

It’s official: London is rubbish for commuting

And in other news: the Pope is Catholic and a bear does indeed defecate in the woods.

It won’t come as a surprise to many people that the UK’s capital fared badly in our study. As we touched on above, the average cost of a monthly travel card is £132. This accounts for the highest percentage of monthly earnings (5.63%) in any of the European cities we looked at, with the exceptions of Istanbul and Saint Petersburg.

Rail fares have risen year on year for the last eight years, and they show no sign of levelling off. But steering clear of the trains won’t help you either; motorists spend around 74 hours stuck in traffic over the course of 12 months.

If there’s one crumb of comfort that Londoners can take from all this it’s that people in Birmingham and Manchester spend on average five and 10 minutes longer commuting each day. Small victories, eh?

Honestly though, all things considered, the only sensible thing to do if you live in the capital is to pack your bags and move to Nice. Fast. Before all this Brexit stuff goes down.