Nearly a quarter of South Africa's workers leave home before six in the morning. Not because work starts then, but because the journey does.
A train takes an average of 107 minutes to get to work, one way. A bus takes 84 minutes, a taxi 63 and a car 44.
Those are averages, so many people spend considerably longer travelling, and their journeys keep getting longer.
What this takes out of a day is a list of things that did not happen. The homework that got a glance instead of an hour, the meal eaten standing up or not at all, the conversation postponed to a weekend where it joins a queue of other postponed things.
Researchers at Harvard's Growth Lab have put a price on it. Fares and fuel account for about 17% of take-home pay. They then valued the travelling itself, counting each hour in transit at what that worker's hour is worth at work. So someone who travels three hours a day and works eight has put in eleven hours for eight hours of pay. Together, that's 57% of what the job pays.
The money is the smaller half of that bill. The hours are the larger half, and nobody invoices for them.
Nor do those hours vanish. The gap between the average train commuter and the average car driver is a little over two hours a day, which, across roughly 250 working days, amounts to more than 500 hours a year. That is the raw material of a qualification, a side business or the part of a childhood a parent is present for. One person has those hours to invest; the other spends them sitting still, and the gap widens every year without anyone deciding that it should.
It loops, too. Looking for work costs money and time, both scarcer the further out you live. So people take the job they can reach rather than the one they could do, which holds income down and keeps them where they are. The International Monetary Fund found in March that where the usual journey runs over an hour, unemployment is more than 20 percentage points higher than where it runs under 15 minutes.
Distance doesn't just make work harder to get to. It makes work harder to get.
None of this is natural. The distances were designed. Under the Group Areas Act of 1950, people were removed from the parts of cities where the work was and resettled in townships on the far edges, with strips of industry and open veld left between the two to keep the groups apart. Distance was not a by-product of that plan. It was the instrument of it.
What gets said less often is what happened next.
Since 1994, the state has built around two million houses, overwhelmingly where land was cheap, and cheap land sits on the edges of cities, far from work. This time, the motive was not ideological. It was budgetary, reinforced by targets that count units delivered rather than distance from a job. But a house is not only a structure. It is also a location, and the location decides what a life costs. So a programme meant to undo a spatial injustice reproduced its geography, for reasons that looked sensible on a spreadsheet.
It is worth being fair. Nobody set out to repeat what was done before, and policy changed repeatedly and in good faith. What did not change was the price of land. Near the city, it is dear; on the edges, it is cheap, and a budget judged by how many houses it delivers will always drift towards the cheap.
Having placed people far away, we pay every year to move them back and forth. Next year, close to R10 billion goes into subsidising commuter rail and over R8 billion into bus contracts, while the human settlements budget, which might shorten the distance instead, declines for three years running.
Meanwhile, the cheapest ride quietly disappeared. Rail carried about 49 million passenger journeys in a single month in 2013, and by 2022 the figure had fallen to roughly one million, with those who had used it moving on to taxis costing nearly twice as much.
Nobody pays double by choice. Where trains run, people use them. Ours stopped running. Lines closed, carriages were stripped, timetables became a suggestion, and what was left felt unsafe. Nearly two-thirds of train users told Stats SA they were dissatisfied with security on board, and more than seven in ten with security on the walk to the station. A service that is neither reliable nor safe is not cheap at any price.
Which tells you what the choice is. The cheap option doesn't work; the one that does costs more than many people earn, and reliability here is something you buy. The further out you live, the more you need it and the less you can afford.
People have not waited. The informal settlements and backyard rooms nobody planned are often better located than the houses the state built, because those who put them up chose closeness over tenure, giving up a title deed for an hour a day. It took until the mid-2000s for policy to treat that as a rational trade and start upgrading those settlements where they stood.
In July, the Constitutional Court said as much. The judgment reads: "Spatial inequality has burdened many South Africans with tremendously lengthy commutes requiring hours of travel each day, often before dawn." It held that a housing system that builds only on the edges of cities falls short of the Constitution. Where a house is put, the Court said, is not one consideration among many. It is a necessary one.
Every government in the country is now bound by that, and it does not move a single house.
What it does is settle whether any of this was inevitable. For more than seven decades, we have treated distance as a feature of the landscape and the commute as the cost of living far out, when someone built the distance on purpose and then, for three decades, rebuilt it by accident.
Whether that changes will not show in a judgment. It will show in where the next houses go up, and in whether the person leaving home tomorrow before six is doing it because of a map somebody drew, or a map nobody got around to redrawing.
Yusuf Bodiat is a chartered accountant, certified director and former chief financial officer. He is the founder of Pragmatic Thinking, an independent strategic advisory firm, and serves as a non-executive director on several boards. He is the author of The Bottom Line: A CFO's Blueprint for South Africa's Turnaround, published in February 2026.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or post.co.za