Lost in transportation : commuting and wellbeing in Mexico City

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Lost in

Transportation:

Commuting and Wellbeing in

Mexico City

Ciara Quinn

MSc. International Development

Studies

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Abstract

In Mexico City challenges associated with daily mobility affect different population groups to different extents: the pattern of land pricing and social housing development has pushed many of the city’s poor and lower middle classes towards the peripheries while jobs have remained concentrated in the centre. In addition to this, the privately-run transport under concession which constitutes the only form of collective transport in peripheral areas is notorious as a hotspot for armed robbery.

Long and dangerous commutes are a daily reality for many. This thesis proposes to explore how such commutes affect the wellbeing of commuters, arguing that this is vital for our understanding of urban life and the processes through which the structures of the city manifest themselves in lived experience.

This research relies on qualitative methods: interviews and “go-alongs” with commuters from various peripheral areas of the city, in order to examines the processes through which

commuting in this context may challenge the wellbeing of commuters. It approaches states of being not from a psychological standpoint but from the point of view of recent geographical scholarship which grounds the emergence of emotional states in context and the situated ability of bodies to affect and be affected. It takes the concept of commuter pain and extends it, using it as an umbrella concept to capture the multiple reinforcing threats to wellbeing which emerged both through experiences during the commute itself and as a result of the time-scarcity that these commutes produced. It found that commuting in this context

challenges wellbeing and health: commutes were spent in a condition of stress and alertness, while through the spillover effects, these long commutes contributed to the physical

deterioration of commuters bodies through sleep deprivation. The concept of commuter pain as a way to capture the various threats to wellbeing emerging through, and in relation to the commute, could provide a framework for investigate the wellbeing impacts of commutes in other contexts.

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Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor Frank Mueller for his valuable guidance through the process of writing this thesis. I would also like to thank my local supervisor Cristina Bayón for acting in that role and providing advice while I was in the field. There were also certain people I met while in Mexico, without whom I could not have done the research I did. Thank you to Lucy Nelly Gonzales for offering me an amazing amount of support, helping me set up interviews and opening many doors for me. Thanks also to Clara Salazar for

introducing me to various people in Colmex, including Lucy, and Esther Maya for putting me in touch with respondents. Thanks also to my roommates in Mexico who made me feel very welcome and were always willing to help me figure out parts of my recorded interviews which I couldn’t understand. I would also like to thank my second reader Julienne Weegels, for contributing her time at the end of the process. Finally, I would like to thank my mother for her love, support and proofreading.

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1 Table of Figures

Figure 1: Map of city showing Los Héroes Tecámac and Cuatro Vientos ... 15

Figure 2: Combis. Source: MARIORD59 FLICKR ... 16

Figure 3: Microbus. Source: Javisbg61 FLICKR ... 17

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1.1 List of abbreviations

ZMVM Metropolitan Zone of the Valley of Mexico SWB Subjective wellbeing

CBD Central business district

CIDE Centre for Research and Training in Economics UNAM National Autonomous University of Mexico Colmex College of Mexico

SEMOVI Department of mobility

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1 Introduction

At 4:00 am every morning, millions of residents from the peripheries of the Zona

Metropolitana del Valle de México (ZMVM) are already beginning their day, walking

through dark streets to the stops where they wait to be collected by small buses. By 5:00 the traffic is already building up on the roads leading towards the central city and metro stations are becoming crowded. In some areas, the average commute length is over two hours each way(see map in appendix 4). Many of these people won’t be home again until well into the evening, not even getting enough time at home for full nights’ sleep. As the city keeps expanding, and the number of cars on the road keeps increasing1_{, traffic gets slower and}

slower and commutes get longer (SEMOVI, 2018: 11).

The commute, that most “mundane” of mobilities, is one crucial way that we inhabit and interact with the urban environment in which we live. Commutes also play a key role in the temporal structuring of everyday life (Corvellec and O’Dell, 2012: 237). This has led Bissell (2015) to argue that “everyday life in cities is increasingly defined by commuting.”

It has also been recognised that commutes can act as a site for the perpetuation of

inequalities. For example, lower income people can be forced to endure longer commutes when land prices push them out of the city centre (Strazdins et al., 2011). Deficient or dangerous public transport systems may also perpetuate inequalities since they lead those with the means to do to seek alternatives, while those that cannot afford the alternatives are subjected to an uncomfortable, overcrowded or unsafe environment on a daily basis (Jirón, 2007: 51).

Both of these processes can be observed in the case of Mexico City: high land prices in the centre and the construction of social housing in very distant locations have pushed the lower and lower middle classes towards the peripheries, despite the continued concentration of jobs in the city centre (Escamilla et al., 2016); while the public transport which these people rely on for their daily commute is often inefficient, uncomfortable and even unsafe.

The experiences of public transport users in Mexico City have received some academic attention: Miguel Angel Aguilar’s exploration of the embodied experience of metro travel (Aguilar, 2013); Meraz’s (2004) examination of the significance of the metro as a space of

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urban life; and studies focusing on the phenomenon of female-only carriages on the metro (Dunkel-Graglia, 2013; Villagrán, 2017).

Academic work dealing with urban experiences in Mexico City in a more general sense also touches on the experiences of public transportation users. For example, Clara Salazar’s work on the experiences of women in two colonias populares2_{in the city examines how gender} roles shape mobility patterns (Salazar-Cruz, 1999); Duhau and Giglia’s (2008) exploration of how the socio-spatial configuration of the city shaped the experiences of its inhabitants examined the different mobility patterns of various groups; Finally Capron and Esquivel’s (2016) study on peripheral social housing developments brings the issues of long commutes and time-scarcity into its discussion of the physical isolation of these areas.

However, there has been less attention paid to the experience of long commutes in public transport or to the impact that the daily reality of these long, unpredictable and often unsafe commutes had on the lives of commuters. Therefore, in this research I aimed to understand commuting as an aspect of urban daily life for those living in peripheral areas who travelled in public transport. I argue that understanding this is crucial for adding to our understanding of the processes through which inequality is perpetuated in this context.

I took an inductive approach to data analysis, conducting interviews and shadowing commuters, gathering information on the experience of the commute, attitudes towards commuting and the impact that spending so much time commuting had on respondents lives in a wider sense. What emerged was a sense that these commutes constituted a challenge to respondents’ wellbeing and that this was occurring through a variety of interlinking and reinforcing processes. Therefore, this thesis proposes to unpick these processes in order to come to a better understanding of the ways in which commuting may challenge wellbeing in this context.

Literature on the relationship between commuting and wellbeing is mainly grounded in a psychological understanding of wellbeing, focusing on how different variables: such as commute length (Stutzer and Frey, 2008), mode of transport (Smith, 2017) or the gender of the commuter (Sandow et al., 2014) affect this relationship. Therefore, the understanding of wellbeing in this psychological body of work has been as wellbeing as an internal

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achievement and less attention is paid to the role of place and context in the emergence (or not) of wellbeing during the commute (Gordon-Murray and Bissell, 2018: 232).

The understanding of wellbeing adopted in this thesis, on the other hand, is informed by the literature on wellbeing as situated and relational, emerging through the interaction of people, things and places (Atkinson, 2013: 137). This more contextual, place responsive

understanding of wellbeing is used, since it allows for a greater focus on the role of environment in the emergence (or not) of wellbeing. An exploration of the link between wellbeing and urban daily mobility (commuting) also goes some way to answering Kwan and Schwanen’s (2016: 251) call for a greater interrogation of the way that different forms of mobility affect wellbeing in ways which are context dependent.

Though certain respondents did manage to mobilise the resources available to them in order to tap in to a sense of wellbeing during their commute, the stressful and threatening

environment to which they were exposed limited their ability to do so. This exposure to threats and stressors also profoundly shaped the emotional experience of the commute, though respondents had developed various strategies to try to mitigate their impact. In

addition to this, the duration and timing of commutes left respondents severely short on time. Therefore, the sense of being which I saw emerging through, and in relation to, commutes in this context was not wellbeing, but a state of being physically and mentally ground down. I have used the concept of commuter pain to describe this sense of “anti-wellbeing”.

1.1 Thesis outline

Chapter 2, will elaborate on the research question and sub-questions that guide this thesis. Chapter 3 will then go on to delve more deeply into the context, examining patterns of city development and transportation in the city. Particular attention is paid to the privately run transport operating under government concession which constitutes the majority of collective transport in the ZMVM as a whole and particularly in peripheral areas. Chapter 4 lays out the theoretical framework which has informed this thesis, first picking apart various

understandings of the wellbeing concept, then explaining the concept of commuter pain which I have used as a means of describing the overall state of being which emerged through commutes, then suggesting various direct processes through which commuter pain may emerge (the within-commute emotional experience) and finally picking apart the time-effects which I saw as an indirect way in which commutes may challenge wellbeing. Chapter 5 deals

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with methodology and methods. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 are the empirical chapters. They each deal with a different aspect of the processes which I saw as contributing to the emergence of commuter pain. In chapter 9, the discussion, I explicitly address each sub-question. Finally in chapter 10 I answer the main research question, discuss the issue of policy recommendations and provide recommendations for further research.

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2 Research Questions:

How does commuting challenge the wellbeing of public transportation-using commuters living in peripheral areas of the ZMVM?

2.1 Sub questions:

SQ1. When and how did commuters experience wellbeing during their commutes? SQ2. Under what conditions do these commutes take place?

SQ3. How can exposure to such conditions lead to the emergence of commuter pain? SQ4. What strategies do commuters adopt to mitigate the effects of these exposures? SQ5. How does time operate as a link between commuting and wellbeing?

SQ6. How can commuter pain be seen as emerging through the interaction between experiences within the commute itself and its spillover effects?

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3 Context

The Mexico City metropolitan area (ZMVM) comprises not only Mexico City but also the larger State of Mexico which surrounds it. Land prices and social housing development have pushed the lower and lower middle class towards the State of Mexico while (formal) jobs remained concentrated in the city (Escamilla et al., 2016; Suárez and Delagado, 2009; Villareal and Hamilton, 2009, see also appendices 5,6,7,9). As one respondent put it: “although the city expels people towards the peripheries… the work (in the city) is done by the kinds of people that live in the periphery.”3

3.1 Spatial mismatch in Mexico City

This phenomenon of the concentration of employment in the centre coupled with the peripheral location of poorer municipalities have led certain commentators to suggest that there is a “spatial mismatch” (Kain, 1968) between the location of poorer residents and the location of centres of employment (Vignoli, 2008). This would suggest that there are additional spatial, temporal and financial barriers to inclusion for poor residents, and that those residents from poorer peripheral locations who do travel in to the city are burdened with long commutes. This is supported by the finding that those from the poorest

municipalities have the longest commutes. The maps in Appendix 4 outline the average lengths of journeys from the peripheries into the centre. In some of the most peripheral areas of the state of Mexico, average one-way journeys in public transport exceed two hours. 3.2 Social housing in ZMVM

In 1992, the Mexican government, under pressure to reduce subsidies as part of its structural adjustment program privatised the provision of social housing. INFONAVIT (the state housing agency) which had previously determined the location, architecture and price of social housing development was transformed into a purely financial semi-state institution and the construction of social housing was delegated entirely to private developers (Peralta & Hofer, 2006). The government simultaneously passed a law allowing for the sale of ejido (communal land) which freed up large amounts of cheap land in peripheral areas (Gilbert & de Jonge, 2015). These changes in the model of social housing provision led to the

construction of huge-scale social housing developments in remote areas of the State of

Mexico which often lacked the facilities and infrastructure to support such developments (see

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appendix 8). Social housing in Mexico is not rented but consists of low interest loans, provided through (formal) employers. Credits are awarded on the basis of salary, and the price of a house in a social housing development gets lower the further away it is from the central city.

Out of the 30 respondents interviewed, 20 lived in social housing, others rented or lived in homes that they or their spouse had inherited. Most respondents discussed moving away from the city not as a choice, but a trade-off that had been necessary in order to obtain a house of their own. Two of the respondents who rented homes in relatively peripheral areas, continued to do so because were they to apply for a social house, their salary meant that they would be given one in an even more distant location.

Similarly, many respondents did not see working in the city as a choice- many described a lack of jobs in the neighbourhoods where they lived and described what work there was there was very poorly paid. Additionally, since social housing mortgages were paid through

employers, people living in social housing needed to work in the formal sector if they were to keep their house and there were far fewer formal jobs available in peripheral locations. 3.3 Los Héroes Tecámac and Cuatro Vientos, Ixtapaluca

Of the 30 respondents interviewed, seven lived in Cuatro Vientos, a social housing

development in Ixtapaluca in the south-east of the State of Mexico, while eight lived in Los Héroes Tecámac, another social housing development in the North of the State. As I will discuss in my methodology chapter, the rest of the respondents also came from various areas of the State of Mexico.

Los Héroes and Cuatro Vientos are similar in many ways: they were both constructed in the 2000s, they are similar in appearance and sociodemographic makeup. Cuatro Vientos is slightly more isolated due to its greater distance from the city centre. Both are serviced by

combis which connect to transport hubs on the periphery of the city: Cuatro Vientos to

Gomez Farías or La Paz and Los Héroes Tecámac to Indios Verdes. The map below indicates the location of these housing estates. ˙

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3.4 Modelo Hombre-Camión

Small and medium capacity vehicles operating under government concession, combis and

microbuses, constitute the main form of collective transportation in the ZMVM4 and often, in peripheral areas, the only form. These vehicles are generally owner-operated or leased out by drivers from the main concession holder. They operate under a model referred to as the

modelo hombre-camión, loosely translated the “man-and-his-bus” model, in which the

driver’s income depends on the number of passengers transported. Combis are smaller vans with approximately 17 seats while microbuses (or micros) have about 30 seats.

This model has repercussions for passenger safety and comfort: drivers modify buses to increase the number of seats “squeezing (the passengers) in like sardines”5_{many vehicles are}

old and unsafe, since it is in the driver-owner’s interest to delay investing in newer vehicles until absolutely necessary; and they are sometimes driven at breakneck speed in an attempt to get the journey done as quickly as possible.

4_{67% of public transport journeys in the Federal District (city proper) and 82% of journeys in the state of}

Mexico take place on these kinds of vehicles. (SEMOVI, 2019)

5_{Paula, aged 40, (interview: 15/03/2019)}

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Figure 3: Microbus. Source: Javisbg61 FLICKR

Despite the poor conditions on the microbuses and combis, these privately-operated

collectivised transport vehicles serve a very important function: in many areas, they are the only kind of collective transport available and therefore they are a crucial provider of access to the labour market in the city. Each morning millions of commuters pile into such vehicles and move from the peripheries in to the city.

3.5 Mass transit in the city

The city also has various forms of mass transit: the metro, the metrobus, a bus rapid transit line which began operations in 2006, the older trolebus, an electric bus, and the suburban train. However, I limit myself to discussion of the metro here, since it was, by far, the most commonly used form of mass transit among the respondents that I interviewed.

The city’s metro system more-or-less stays within the confines of the city proper. However, the busiest stations in its network are those at the end of metro lines, and just within city limits. A huge network of combis and microbuses connect neighbourhoods in the state of Mexico to these metro terminuses- Indios Verdes, Pantitlan, La Paz, Ciudad Azteca- meaning that these stations, dotted around the perimeter of the city proper, see an enormous volume of traffic every day. The city’s metro system is considered to be reasonably safe and efficient. However, it becomes severely overcrowded at peak times, something which was mentioned by many respondents.

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4 Theoretical Framework

4.1 Wellbeing

The question of what it means to live well has long been a preoccupation of philosophy. However the “happiness turn” which has brought this preoccupation to the fore in both academic social science and policy research is a more recent phenomenon (Smith and Reid, 2018: 804).

This preoccupation with wellbeing has also emerged as a central theme in international development scholarship. Gough and McGregor (2007: 4) argue that the goal of international development, in its most utopian conception, is to create the conditions that make it possible for all people in the world to achieve wellbeing. In the past, the focus among economists and development scholars was limited to an understanding of wellbeing as material wellbeing, which resulted in a focus on economic growth above all else. However, since the 1960s there has been a growing proliferation of “quality of life” indicators which attempt to capture a more complete picture of wellbeing than GDP alone (White, 2017: 124). The idea of wellbeing has also been explored by psychology, most notably the positive psychology movement in the United States which focuses on subjective wellbeing. This brings us to the first central debate regarding wellbeing: whether it should be assessed objectively, for example through the examination of living conditions, or subjectively, based on an individual’s self-assessment of their wellbeing (subjective wellbeing, or SWB)

A second debate revolves around hedonic versus eudemonic understandings of wellbeing, which stems back to positions espoused by Aristippus of Cyrene and Aristotle respectively (Smith and Reid, 2018: 809). Aristippus of Cyrene’s hedonic philosophy saw only that which brings pleasure as intrinsically good. The hedonic idea of wellbeing, therefore, sees wellbeing as happiness, the amount of pleasure that an individual experiences. The hedonic approach with its focuses on wellbeing as a state, and as an outcome lends itself to measurement, and it is the most common way of measuring SWB (ibid: 810). The second approach relates to Aristotle’s eudemonic philosophy which sees a good life as one not just of pleasure, but also of meaning. Therefore, eudemonic approaches to wellbeing are concerned with what it takes to live a life of meaning self-fulfilment and purpose. Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to human development links wellbeing to the positive freedom to live a flourishing life and can therefore be seen as presenting a eudemonic understanding of wellbeing (Fleuret and

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are actually able to do and to be, (Nussbaum, 2003: 33) rather than narrowly understanding wellbeing as the resource they have (commodities) or the pleasures they derive from them (utility) (White, 2017: 124). Sen is notable for his refusal to define what these capabilities may be, arguing that: “To have such a fixed list, emanating entirely from pure theory, is to deny the possibility of fruitful public participation on what should be included and why”, though he acknowledges that “some of the basic capabilities … will no doubt figure in every list of relevant capabilities in every society” (Sen, 2004: 78). Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach, in contrast, does provide a minimal list of the capabilities necessary to achieve human flourishing, though she acknowledges the need to adapt the list according to context (Nusbaum, 2003: 42). As these many different strands of wellbeing literature illustrate, there is no one coherent conceptual framework through which to understand wellbeing (Fleuret and Atkinson, 2007: 108).

As this thesis is concerned with exploring the ways in which a particular mobile environment (the commute) affects commuters’ states of being, I have drawn much inspiration for my understanding of wellbeing from recent geographic scholarship on wellbeing which present it as “situated and relational” something which “flows” and “emerges” through interactions between people and with their environment (Atkinson, 2013: 141; see also Gorman-Murray and Bissell, 2018; Fleuret and Atkinson, 2007, White 2017; Smith and Reid, 2018). Work in this vein has focused on breaking down the individualising nature of the wellbeing concept, looking at the emergence of wellbeing through flows of affect between humans and their environment. Wellbeing in this conceptualisation is not something which individuals can possess, but something which emerges through “social, material and spatially situated relationships” (Atkinson, 2013: 142). It has been suggested that putting greater emphasis on the role of context in shaping people’s wellbeing is a necessary politicisation of the wellbeing concept, counteracting conceptualisations of wellbeing as a purely individual attribute

(Schwanen and Atkinson, 2015: 99). White (2017) argues that when wellbeing is grounded in context in this way, it becomes evident that its emergence is patterned by structures operating on a higher scale: the collective institutions of state, market and society (though not in a straightforward way). The focus on wellbeing as an embodied experience is also useful for breaking down any dualistic sense of body/mind since how the body feels will shape how receptive it is to positive or negative affect.

Schwanen and Atkinson (2015) argue for the need to embrace the theoretical messiness of the wellbeing concept. They suggest that understandings of wellbeing as a state and wellbeing as

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a process are both abstractions that may serve different purposes. While examinations on the situated emergence of wellbeing may allow for a useful grounding of wellbeing in context, “components approaches” may allow us to understand how, over time certain factors lead to stability in states of being. Therefore they advocate an understanding of wellbeing, not as either/or, but as both/and.

4.2 Urban daily mobility and wellbeing

The relationship between commuting and wellbeing has been well explored in psychological studies. Long commutes have been linked to lower levels of SWB (Stutzer and Frey, 2008), and increased mortality (Sanlow et al., 2014). There have been various explanations proffered for this relationship: the direct effect, the fact that commuting was considered an activity with high levels of reported stress and sadness and low levels of meaning (Stone and Schneider, 2016); and the indirect effect that commutes had on wellbeing by reducing time dedicated to health-promoting activities (Christian, 2012; Strazdins et al., 2011). Therefore I propose to look at the wellbeing impacts of commuting from these two points of view: firstly, the emergence of wellbeing (or pain) during the commute itself; and secondly the ways in which respondents’ long commutes had indirect impacts on their wellbeing by creating time

scarcity. Finally, I also focus on the interaction between challenges to wellbeing during the commute itself and these spillover, time-effects to look at how these two sets of threats interacted with, and reinforced, one another.

4.3 Commuter Pain

Overall, what emerged in my research was the idea that the commute was not the site for the emergence of wellbeing, but its opposite. When wellbeing is understood as situated and emerging out of interactions between people and their environments, it begins to make less sense to discuss challenges to wellbeing, I felt that I needed an additional concept to capture a sense of being worn out by one’s commute which many respondents seemed to identify- a kind of anti-wellbeing. Commuter pain is the concept that I have used to describe the emotional experience that emerged through respondents’ commutes6_.

My use of the concept of commuter pain concept was influenced by Bissell (2014) who uses the term as a way to understand and describe commuting stress from a more holistic point of view, situating it in the wider “daily grind” of which it is a part. The survey which inspired Bissell’s use of term “commuter pain” was conducted by IBM in 2011 in which Mexico City

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emerged as the most painful city in the world in which to commute (IBM, 2011). Commuter pain, in this survey, was essentially a synonym for stress and it was measured by variables, such as commute length, congestion and experiences of stress or anger during the commute. Commuter pain, in my analysis, is a way of bringing together the indirect and direct

challenges to wellbeing outlined above, understanding how respondents were affected by a mutually reinforcing bundle of threats during, or in relation to, their commutes. In this sense I understand it as a form of commute-specific anti-wellbeing. Below, I will outline the various theoretical frames which I used to inform my discussion of the various dimensions of

commuter pain and the processes through which people were affected by them. 4.4 Direct effects: Exposure to threats and stressors

4.4.1 Exposure

The concept of exposure, which I have used as a way of understanding the impact of

commuting conditions on commuter pain, comes from the literature on environmental factors and health where it is generally used in reference to pollutants and toxic substances (for example exposure to asbestos, Selikoff et al., 1964). Applying the concept of exposure to my discussion of the relationship between environment and emotion was a way of capturing a sense of the potential negative consequences of inhabiting a certain environment without making assumptions on how such an environment would affect individuals.

4.4.2 Affect

Since I was not exploring the physical health impacts of the commute, but the relationship between environmental factors and the emergence of commuter pain, I needed an additional theoretical lens through which to consider the process through which certain environments could be experienced by commuters as “painful”. I found that the non-representational notion of affect provided a useful theoretical lens through which to consider this process. The use of affect in much recent geographical scholarship on wellbeing as emerging out of the

interactions between people and their environment (Andrews et al., 2014; Atkinson, 2013; Smith and Reid, 2018; White, 2017), informed my exploration of commuter pain.

Affect can be understood as flows of energy which circulate between human and non-human bodies in an environment and is experienced on an individual level as emotion (Anderson, 2009: 79). Andrews et al. (2014: 214) describe affect as “a mobile energy; an intensity which is the result of the relative movements and interactions between things”. They describe it as arising as a physical, non-cognitive event (heat, light, body movements), it is first felt on the

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individual level as a pre-cognitive feeling state (atmosphere or “vibes”) which is processed by the individual and then sparks emotions or reflection (ibid: 214). Since affect is always experienced through the lens of our own cognitive judgement, our experience of an affective atmosphere is always conditioned by our “personally, socially and historically anchored thoughts and emotions” (ibid: 216).

4.4.3 Slow creep transformations

However, I was faced with a challenge: how to understand emotions as constantly emergent through interactions between people and their environment without overlooking the ways in which these interactions had lingering effects. Atkinson and Scott’s (2015) study of a dance education program at a UK school uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages to suggest a mechanism through which emotional states become stable through habituation. They describe how habit and routine constrains our everyday experiences, inhibiting the flows of affect and stabilising emotional states. Bissell’s (2013) discussion of commuter pain also turns to Deleuze for an understanding of how over time, experiences change embodied capacities to affect and be affected. He describes how repeated experience of certain contexts (for example the commute) could lead to “slow creep transformations” and the wearying out of the body. Bissell links the “slow creep transformations” of commuter pain to Lauren Berlant’s (2007) concept of slow death of certain population groups under capitalism: “a condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing life” (ibid: 759).

The idea of slow creep transformation is interesting to look at in relation to the idea of exposure. Psychological studies have shown that despite people’s apparent ability to adapt to adverse environmental stressors, such as noise or crowds, chronic exposure to can still cause long term damage to psychological and physical health which suggests that even as one’s capacity to be affected seems to diminish, these slow creep transformations wear the body and mind down in other ways (Novaco and Gonzalez, 2009).

4.4.4 Stress

Though commuter pain is not a commonly used expression, it is closely linked to the idea of “commuter stress” which has been described as “one of the most serious physical and mental health implications of commuting” (Legrain et al., 2015: 141) and has been well explored in psychological studies (Evans et al., 2002; Legrain et al., 2015; Novaco and Gonzalez, 2009). Many of the respondents described the stress that they felt during events of “infrastructural disruption” (Bissell, 2013: 191) in which they felt a lack of control during delays or failures

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of transit. Stress is often liked to evens of this kind in the psychological literature on commuting and stress, however, Legrain et al. (2015) outline the additional role of comfort factors (heat, noise crowding) in creating commuter stress. Therefore, I propose to explore commuter stress as it emerges through a combination of physical (discomfort) and cognitive (a sense of a lack of control) events and to explore how it manifests itself in the bodies of commuters.

4.4.5 Fear and Violence

Insecurity and the fear of crime were key elements of the commuting experience for the respondents that I interviewed. As Berents and ten Have (2017) outline, violence causes damage outside of the direct human suffering that it is responsible for, it also has an emotional component, in that it creates fear and undermines people’s sense of security. Therefore, fear of crime can be understood as an event which is linked to, but to a certain extent, independent of the event of crime itself (Solymosi et al., 2015). In this vein, Brands and Schwanen (2014) see people as generally existing in a state of carefree “absorptive coping” (ibid: 68) which can be disturbed by changes in the environment as people shift to a mode of alertness. What can cause a disturbance varies from person to person according to past experience, socialisation processes and genetic factors (ibid: 69).

As Berents and ten Have (2017) argue, violence may be a part of everyday experience in certain places, however it never becomes normalised. Therefore, I was interested in exploring how states of absorptive coping and being on the alert were experienced in this context in which violence is a reasonably common, though not a “normal” experience.

4.4.6 Navigating the commute: strategies

The ideas of affect and emotion as emergent through person-environment interactions, point towards the idea that it is not just a case of certain environments and interactions producing a certain kind of emotion, we also act on our emotions and our emotions act upon our

surroundings. For example, Tironi and Palacios (2016) illustrate how affect and emotions shape people’s travel choices. In addition to this, as Tenorio et al.’s (2019) analysis of commuting stress in Manila illustrates, people’s emotions shape the way that environments are experienced, and people in turn act upon themselves to manage these emotions (calming themselves down or letting their emotions out). The ways in which emotions are “kept in” or “let out” will in turn shape the emotional experiences of other passengers.

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However, beyond affective interactions with their surroundings, respondents had developed a variety of preventative and reactive strategies (Schwanen, 2004: 7) through which they attempted (with varying levels of success) to deal with the threats and stressors and to

minimise their exposure to same. I found the concept of “navigation” (originally Vigh, 2009, used by Berents and ten Have, 2017) useful for capturing a sense of how people interacted with their mobile environment, skilfully dealing with the exposures they encountered. “Navigation” captures a sense of acting within the constraints of the social and spatial environment which I felt was an accurate way of understanding these strategies. 4.5 Indirect impacts: time-effects and wellbeing

4.5.1 Time scarcity

As outlined above, time has been suggested as the indirect link between long commutes and health. The time that one spends commuting is linked to the material structure of the city, the location of jobs and the location of affordable housing, therefore it is inevitably shaped by economic and political forces operating on a number of scales. As outlined in the context chapter, in the ZMVM, the lower and lower middle class are increasingly being pushed towards the peripheries by land prices and the privatised system of social housing while jobs remain concentrated in the centre. Therefore, the time spent commuting can be understood, as Jarvis (2005) presents it, as a contingent relation linked to the material urban structure. Strazdins et al. (2011) make the argument that in contexts such as this, where people who cannot afford to live in central locations are forced to commute long distances every day, long commutes exacerbates existing health inequalities by decreasing engagement in activities which are necessary for health- sleep, exercise and food preparation.

However, there is a further link between time and wellbeing beyond the fulfilment of bodily needs: as Marx argues, people are human beyond their basic animal sustenance (Shippen, 2014: 43). Therefore, not only should people be afforded enough time to physically recover from the day of work, they should also be allowed time for self-development (ibid).

Similarly, Kasser and Sheldon (2009: 244) suggest, time is the “stuff” needed to engage in activities that promote personal growth, connection with others and community involvement.

4.5.2 Temporalities, timing

Sharma (2011) explores the link between daily schedules, power structures and wellbeing. Bringing a Foucauldian lens to her analysis, she argues that different bodies are forced to synchronise their body clocks to various external temporalities (the 9-5, the factory shift, the

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night shift) in ways which may come at a cost to their physical and mental wellbeing. She presents these temporalities as a grid in which people occupy different positions of power. As the concept of commuting demonstrates, these temporalities are also linked to space and to the material urban environment. By adding a significant amount of additional time either side of the working day, these long commutes constitute an additional external relation to which people were forced to synchronise their body clocks.

The idea of synchronisation points to the idea that there are forms of temporal disadvantage which “time-scarcity” doesn’t grasp. As Barbara Adam (2000, cited in Schwanen and Kwan, 2012), Fine (1996, cited in Southerton, 2006) and others have illustrated, there is more to time than just duration, minutes on the clock, time also has other significant dimensions. Sharma’s analysis reveals the importance of timing (when something happens) for wellbeing. Commutes which cause people to return home late at night or to leave extremely early in the morning could lead to a reduced sleep or prevent them from seeing family members or socialising, constituting a form of temporal disadvantage (Warren, 2003).

4.6 Concluding remarks

In this theoretical framework I have positioned myself in the literature on commuting and wellbeing. I argue that there is a need to better explore the role that context plays in this relationship. I have adopted an understanding of wellbeing as situated and place responsive in order to better explore how the particular context of public transport in the ZMVM shapes the emergence (or not) of wellbeing. However, once this processual understanding of wellbeing is adopted it no longer makes sense to speak of challenges to wellbeing as if wellbeing was a stable “thing” which people can possess. Therefore, I have used the concept of commuter pain to capture the sense of anti-wellbeing which I saw as emergent through and in relation to respondents’ commutes. Commuter pain in my understanding encompasses both within-commute experiences and the spillover effects that long within-commutes have on wellbeing by creating forms of temporal disadvantage. I suggest that both of these aspects of commuter pain interact with and reinforce each other to create a more general sense of being worn out by one’s commute.

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5 Methodology and Research Methods

5.1 Unit of analysis

This research attempts to explore the challenges to wellbeing that arise through and in relation to people’s daily commutes. However, I argue that these commutes cannot be

understood independently of the lives of which they are a part. Therefore, the unit of analysis is twofold. Firstly, respondents’ commutes as sites for the emergence (or not) of commuter pain, and secondly, the lives of the commuters I interviewed in my exploration of the spillover effects.

5.2 Methods

5.2.1 Semi-Structured Interviews

The vast majority of the data used for this study comes from the 30 semi-structured

interviews that I conducted with public transport using commuters living in peripheral areas of the ZMVM. Interviews were chosen as a suitable method to gain insight into the lived experience of the commute and its wider impacts on the lives of respondents, though I was mindful of the fact that, as Rapley (2007: 20) points out, interviews are not merely a transparent window on the experiences of the respondent, both interviewer and respondent co-construct the interview’s content through their interactions.

Interviews revolved around two main themes: the (emotional) experience of the commute itself, and how commutes and working hours shaped respondents’ daily routines. Interviews were conducted with the help of an interview guide which I modified as the research went on and I began to hone its focus. The questions were quite open-ended, an approach which facilitated the emergence of insights from the respondents themselves .The extent to which I used the interview guide depended on the direction which the interviews took: in some interviews, particularly where the respondent did not give long or detailed answers, I relied heavily on the guide to keep the flow of discussion going. However, where respondents opened up interesting lines of discussion, I would abandon the guide so as not to lose the flow of conversation, only checking it again as the conversation came to a close to see if there were any important issues that we had not yet discussed.

All interviews were conducted in Spanish and all participants consented to having the interviews recorded. I transcribed 20 of the 30 interviews myself and hired a research assistant to transcribe the final 10.

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5.2.2 Props for interviews: time budget worksheets and printed maps

I brought daily routine worksheets and printed maps of the city with me to interviews to act as visual and conversational aids. Depending on the setting of the interview, and on whether I was interviewing more than one person at a time, I either asked respondents to fill out the worksheets before the interview or had them fill them out as they discussed their routine. These worksheets provided material for the conversation on daily routines and gave me something to refer back to when people were discussing the various ways in which the duration and timing of commutes affected their daily lives. They also facilitated a transition towards discussing daily routines without it seeming overly invasive, when respondents were aware that I was looking at the way that the commute fit into their everyday life they were more open to discussing the private details of waiting up for family members, or rushing to get dinner on the table.

The maps were less helpful, and I eventually stopped using them because they seemed to cause more confusion than anything else. As my familiarity with the layout of the city improved, I found that I could better visualise the routes that people were describing- for example I had a good idea of where the big metro hubs were, and which lines ran from them.

5.2.3 Shadowing

While the interviews were a convenient and economical (both in terms of time and money) means of gathering data on this topic, the three go-alongs which I conducted gave me much deeper insight into the experience of commuting than the interviews alone. Since experiences of mobility are “embodied, multi-sensory and emotional” (Jirón, 2011: 42), actually moving with people and shadowing them as they travelled to and from work allowed me to approach a better understanding of the commuting experience. I carried out three shadowing days in total: one with a woman who lived in Cuatro Vientos, Ixtapaluca; another with a woman who lived in Los Héroes Tecámac and finally one with a man who works in the Centre for

Research and Training in Economics (CIDE) and lives in the north of the city. I based my shadowing method on that outlined by Jirón (2011: 42), which involves “accompanying participants individually on their daily routines, observing the way

participants organise and experience their journeys, sharing and collaboratively reflecting on their experience on the move”. Jirón emphasises the importance of shadowing respondents movements throughout the day (ibid). However, both in order to minimise the interference to participants’ routines and since the respondents I shadowed commuted to work and did not

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travel again until their trip home at night, I limited myself to accompanying them on their commutes, to and from work.

Moving with people allows the researcher to witness and share everyday mobility practices (Jirón, 2011: 37). Meeting someone at their house and accompanying them on their commute allowed me to feel the bleariness of waking up so early, the crush and the heat of people in busy metro hubs and to observe respondents as they navigated their well-trodden routes with unconscious “know how” (Jirón et al., 2016): placing themselves where they knew doors would open, weaving through crowds and pulling lines of pre-bought metro tickets from their wallet to avoid queues at busy times.

However, I was not just an observer, I also interacted with the respondents as I shadowed them, “collaboratively reflecting on their experience on the move” (Jirón, 2011: 42). I found that this reflection provided some interesting insights which had not emerged through the interviews. The event of being shadowed could prompt people to reflect on the mundane daily practice of commuting and I found that these reflections tended to be less negative and more nuanced than the attitudes that people had displayed in their initial interview.

5.3 Sampling

My aim was to interview people who lived in the new peripheries of the ZMVM and

commuted to work or study in the city centre on public transportation. Sampling was carried out purposively, I sought respondents with a particular profile of residential location

(peripheral), work/school location (relatively central) and mode of transport used (public/collective). The group interviewed was generally middle to lower-middle class. Within this group I sought to interview respondents with a range of ages and genders since I felt that it was necessary to try to understand how experiences of wellbeing and fear varied according to these social categories.

A professor at the UNAM put me in contact with two students who lived in social housing estates in the north of the city (Los Héroes Tecámac) and south-east (Cuatro Vientos, Ixtapaluca) of the ZMVM. These students became my first interviewees. I then selected further respondents through a process of snowball sampling, asking these initial interviewees if they could put me in contact with friends of family from their neighbourhoods who also had long commutes in to the city.

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I was also lucky to have been introduced to a PhD student who worked in the CIDE, a research institute in the city. She put me in contact with the human resources department of the CIDE who had plans to conduct some internal research on whether employees were benefitting from an expansion in their private bus service for staff and students. The human resources department organised for me to conduct a series of interviews with some staff members who commuted from peripheral locations. It was arranged that I would ask a set of questions provided by the institute and send them on a report on this data following my return from the field, which I did. Participants were informed as to the dual purpose of the

interviews and their anonymity was protected in the report that was provided to their employer.

In total I conducted 30 interviews: seven with respondents living in Cuatro Vientos, Ixtapaluca; eight with respondents living in Los Héroes Tecámac; and 15 with staff in the CIDE.

Shadowing was conducted with people whom I had already interviewed. Therefore, I did not have to conduct additional sampling for this.

5.4 Methodological Reflection

This research is entirely qualitative and constitutes my particular representation of the experience of commuting in the lives of those I interviewed and observed. The findings do not claim to be generalisable to a wider population, nor do I claim that this is anything more than one of many possible representations of this particular social reality. Therefore, rather than judging it against the (traditionally quantitative) quality criteria of reliability,

generalisability and replication (Bryman, 2012: 46), I have judged this research against Guba and Lincoln’s (1994) alternative quality criteria: credibility, transferability and dependability (as presented in Bryman, 2012).

5.4.1 Credibility

Credibility concerns the believability of research findings. Bryman (2012) outlines two ways through which researchers can ensure the credibility of their findings: through triangulation and by resubmitting findings to members of the social world under study for confirmation (Bryman, 2012: 390). Examining the perspectives on transportation in news reports, policy documents and academic literature, in addition to those put forth by respondents allowed me to understand how these narratives related to a wider picture. I also attempted to confirm my

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preliminary findings with respondents while still in the field, insofar as was possible. One way I did this was by discussing some of my observations with respondents after the “go-alongs” I carried out with them. This gave respondents the opportunity to challenge these observations and to point out where their insider knowledge of the experience of commuting caused them to see things in a different light than I had.

5.4.2 Transferability

This research is not intended to be transferable in that one would not expect the findings to hold true in different contexts, however the conceptual scheme as a means of understanding commuter pain as commute-specific anti-wellbeing could be explored in other contexts. As Bryman (2012: 392) outlines, qualitative researchers are encouraged to produce thick description so that others can make judgements about the transferability of findings to other settings. I have attempted to provide these kinds of thick descriptions on the relevant aspects of the context: the socio-spatial configuration of Mexico City, the different forms of transport available in different parts of the metropolitan zone and the conditions of these forms of transport.

5.4.3 Dependability

I attempted to ensure that this research met the quality criterion of dependability by being as transparent as possible about the research process at all stages, keeping a list of respondents which I submitted to my supervisor and being open about the limitations of the research in the final written thesis.

5.5 Limitations

All interviews were conducted in Spanish. Since I am not a native Spanish speaker, this posed something of a challenge, particularly given the level of language skill which I found was required in order to carry out interviews. My main concern was that I would miss some of the details in interviewee’s responses and would therefore miss the opportunity to ask follow-up questions. I attempted to deal with this challenge by asking respondents to clarify or repeat things when I felt that I had missed something. However, while transcribing

interviews, I did come across certain occasions on which I had misunderstood what someone had said or had missed certain details. As I went through the recording, I would sometimes have to listen to certain parts many times, where I couldn’t decipher the meaning I would jot

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down the point in the recording and go back through the parts I hadn’t understood with my very patient Mexican roommates.

I did not begin interviews until late into my fieldwork due to changes in my research focus. This meant that I conducted the interviews in a very short period of time. I feel that trying to cram so many interviews into this period of time affected the quality of my data. On one day I conducted nine interviews and I noticed while transcribing these, that by the end of the day I am less engaged, and often repeat questions. I also do not succeed in building a rapport with respondents in these interviews and they suffered as a result.

This rush to get things done also meant that I did not manage to do as many go-alongs as I would have liked. The go-alongs were complicated to coordinate since I needed to get to participants homes very early in the morning and travel home from them late at night. In addition to this my local supervisor asked me not to travel to any go-alongs unless

accompanied by a known and trusted driver due to the “dangerous” reputation of the areas where respondents lived and the times of day that I was travelling there, which brought in an additional scheduling issue. In addition to this, I managed to lose two go-alongs that I had organised due to lack of communication or bad timing. I arrived late to one woman’s work place and missed her journey home, while another respondent had sent me a google maps link to his home address which I realised had expired the evening before the planned go-along. He didn’t see my follow-up message until the following morning at which point it was too late for me to travel to his house.

This lack of go-alongs is a serious limitation given the fact that I ultimately chose to look at this issue through the non-representational concept of affect which focuses so much on situated embodied experiences. I hope that by focusing on the ways in which respondents discussed emotional experiences and particular events in interviews I have managed to capture some sense of the affective emergence of emotions. However, I recognise the limitations of relying so heavily on interviews when using a concept such as affect. 5.6 Ethical Reflection

This research which forms the basis of this thesis was designed and carried out according to the ethical criteria laid out in Bryman (2012): ensuring no harm comes to participants, voluntary participation and informed consent, anonymity of participants and avoiding

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deception. Finally I discuss how I gained the trust of participants and navigated my positionality as a researcher.

5.6.1 Voluntary participation and informed consent

The respondents accessed through snowball sampling were sent a text message which clearly laid out the purpose of the interview, the kinds of questions I would be asking and how long it would take. Therefore I am confident that with this set of respondents I took all of the necessary steps to ensure that participation was voluntary. In the case of the CIDE

employees, this issue was slightly less clear cut. I was concerned that if respondents were being asked to participate by their employer they may feel like they have little choice. Since not all of the employees suggested by the CIDE consented to being interviewed I was reassured that those respondents which did participate did so voluntarily

Before beginning all interviews I briefly re-stated the purpose and general focus that the interview would have and obtained verbal consent to record the interview.

5.6.2 Safety of Participants

During the “go-alongs”, one major concern I had was that my presence would draw attention and put the respondent that I was accompanying at greater risk of mugging because I drew attention as white foreigner. When I brought this concern up before my first go-along the respondent felt that this would not be an issue. I attempted to dress as inconspicuously as possible and to always follow cues from the respondent I was travelling with in order to draw as little attention as possible. As a further element of protecting the safety of participants I have given all participants pseudonyms.

5.6.3 Avoiding deception

One issue that International Development researchers may come up against in the field is that participants may believe that participation in the research is going to lead to some tangible benefit for them or their community. I felt that there was a risk of this occurring during the research I conducted in the CIDE. I strove to avoid deception by explaining to each

participant that the CIDE had simply asked me to provide feedback on their bus service and that my role was to provide information, not to make improvements.

5.6.4 Trust

My first participants were two Master’s students in the UNAM with whom I found it easy to develop trust and rapport due to our similar position as master’s students. Beginning my

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snowball sample with these students, who then introduced me to family and friends was very helpful for gaining the trust of the other participants.

I had some interviews where participants asked me a lot of questions- they wanted to know about Amsterdam, or Ireland and how they differed from Mexico. These parts of the

interview, though not necessarily relevant to the study, made the interviews feel more like an exchange or a conversation that an interrogation which ethically I felt more comfortable with, while also helping me to gain the participants trust.

5.7 Data analysis

This research took an inductive approach to data analysis. It began with the desire to discover more about the experience of commuting in public transportation in one of the most

congested cities in the world. I carried out interviews about general aspects of the commuting experience, narrowing my focus as I went to look at the emotional experience of the

commute and its effect on participants wider lives. Due to the push to collect as much data as possible as my fieldwork came to an end I did not have time to (formally) begin the process of data analysis until getting back from the field. Therefore, I returned to Amsterdam with a pile of transcriptions, fieldnotes and recordings, still lacking the exact term for what exactly I had been researching. However, as I made my way through my data transcribing, re-reading and coding, it become clear that there was a strong theme emerging- that commuting in this context involved exposure to a bundle of mutually reinforcing threats to overall wellbeing. I found that the threats involved in commuting were not restricted to those experienced within the timespace of the commute itself, but also stemmed from the spillover effects of such long working days and commutes.

As I dived deeper into the wellbeing literature and began to link this body theory to my research, I realised that I needed a term to capture the sense of anti-wellbeing which I saw emerging through respondents exposure to these multiple threats. This is what lead me to the concept of commuter pain, a concept which I use to bring together the various ways in which commuting challenged wellbeing, leading to an overall feeling of being worn out.

This data is structured under three main themes which form the basis for the empirical chapters which follow.

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Chapter 6, deals with “Exposure to threats and stressors during the commute”. It uses the concept of affect to explore how exposure to threats and stressors shapes the emotional experience of the commute. Chapter 7: “Navigating the Commute” examines the various strategies through which commuters both navigated the threats which they were exposed to during their commute and engaged in activities which allowed them to open up spaces for the emergence of wellbeing within their commutes. Chapter 8: “Commuting, Time and

Wellbeing” turns to the spillover effects of such lengthy commutes, focusing on the ways in which long commutes combines with other factors to create time-scarcity and exploring how such time scarcity affected respondents’ wellbeing .

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6 Exposure to threats and stressors

This chapter presents the particular conditions that commuters living in peripheral areas of the ZMVM are exposed to during their commute in public transport. I take the concept of exposure as a lens through which to examine the non-uniform, non-deterministic way in which a threatening or unpredictable daily reality affect wellbeing. Though this daily reality poses certain physical safety risks- road accidents, crowd crushes in the metro or bodily harm as a result of violence- the focus here is not on these risks. Instead, I examine how these exposures shape the emotional experience of the commute. In the first section I look at the “stressors”-traffic, delays and overcrowding- and examine the processes through which exposure to such conditions manifested itself as stress. In the second section I examine how the threat of insecurity shaped the everyday experience of the commute. It looks at how past experience, second-hand experience and the media all shaped respondents’ perceptions of threats. I then go on to explore the emotional experiences stemming from this exposure: fear and alertness.

6.1 Stressors: congestion and overcrowding

Stress was a recurrent theme in respondents’ discussions of the emotional experience of the commute. Respondents linked this stress to the factors which slowed down commutes- traffic, delays and disruptions. Exposure to traffic and disruptions is a common experience of all commuters in Mexico City. However, in this section I argue that for public transit users, the stress caused by delays and traffic was aggravated by related exposures- the

uncomfortable material conditions of waiting spaces and vehicles and the crowds in the metro. I then turn to the topic of pushing to get in to the rush hour metro, arguing that respondents’ implication in creating that particular exposure complicates the concept of exposure as merely context.

My discussion of stress is based mainly on interviews, since during the three go-alongs, the respondents and I did not experience traffic and delays of the kind that people described. Furthermore, two participants had me arrive at their house before they would usually begin their commute to ensure that I would not delay them, which meant that they left earlier than usual and were therefore under less time pressure.

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6.1.1 Rush hour: congestion

Every day millions of people travel from peripheral areas of the ZMVM towards the centre for work. The one-way movement of such huge numbers of people clogs up the roads that lead towards the city, and as the many combi-passengers alight at metro terminals to continue their journey, the metro system also gets flooded with people. Movement slows to a crawl and any disruptions- flooding, or a road accident for example- has the potential to bring things to a halt.

Ximena’s account illustrates the slowing down which occurs at rush hour:

At 6 I’m leaving the house […] you have to queue up to get on to the combi and there’s already a massive queue especially on Monday when everyone leaves late, so if you leave even five minutes late you ruin the entire journey: first of all it takes you half an hour until you can get on a combi […] it takes another 15 minutes for the

combi to leave the estate and get on to the motorway […] so you’ve already spent 45

minutes until you’re on the road, and then that avenue where Zaragoza begins is chaos because it’s not just people from Ixtapaluca, but from the municipality of Chalco where there are also lots of estates, and also people from Chimalhuacám and it’s the only way to enter [the city] and everyone needs to get to work that way.7

Moving slowly because minibus drivers were making stops to collect passengers or because of traffic was described as tedious, frustrating or stressful, particularly when respondents were under pressure to get to work on time. Armando describes how frustrating it is to be stuck in traffic on the way to work in the morning in very physical terms: “the traffic, that’s what drives me mad, I watch the clock, with my heart in my mouth, hoping that I’ll make it in on time. It makes me very stressed.”8

6.1.2 Material conditions, discomfort and stress

Material conditions and discomfort often featured in respondents’ descriptions of commuting stress. As mentioned in the contextual chapter, combis are often modified by drivers so that they can transport a greater number of passengers. An extract from my fieldnotes from one of my go-alongs gives an idea of the physical experience of travelling in a combi on a hot day:

7_{Ximena, aged 29, (interview: 11/03/2019)} 8_{Armando, aged 52, (interview: 14/03/2019)}

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My knees press up uncomfortably against the seat on front and I am wedged between Guadalupe and the man on my other side. A man gets on to collect our fares and the driver starts the engine. It is very hot. There is a lot of traffic so we move slowly, no breeze comes in through the windows.9

The discomfort of travel was one factor that added to added to respondents’ sense of frustration during their commutes:

The traffic stresses me out, and there’s also the fact that the combis aren’t very

comfortable ... The heat, the noise and the seats are too small, they want lots of people to fit, so you’re really squashed.10

The heat in metro stations and carriages at rush hour was also linked to the stress of being in that space at that time. There is no air conditioning on the majority of metros and during rush hour, the heat is exacerbated by the huge crowds of people: “they don’t open the windows on the train, so there’s no ventilation to deal with the heat of all those people, and on top of that there’s the heat from the train, from the metro.” Roberto also links heat to feelings of stress: “you get irritated, tired because there’s a lot of traffic… and sometimes the metro is delayed and with the heat in the metro you get fed up… you get stressed.”11

9_{Fieldnotes (19/03/2019)}

10_{Luis, aged 26, (interview: 01/03/2019)} 11_{Roberto, aged 59, (interview: 14/03/2019)}

Lost in transportation : commuting and wellbeing in Mexico City

Lost in

Transportation:

Commuting and Wellbeing in

Mexico City

Ciara Quinn

MSc. International Development

Studies

Abstract

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

1

Table of Figures

1

Introduction

2

Research Questions:

3

Context

4

Theoretical Framework

5

Methodology and Research Methods

6

Exposure to threats and stressors