Long Distance Commuters: moving beyond displacement

The book by Bruna Vendemmia focuses on a mobility practice - the Long Distance Commuting - at the core of a small body of research in the last years. The interest in focusing on these forms of mobility - despite the fact that these daily mobility practices remain still quantitatively insignificant compared to daily commuting flows - is twofold. First, by analysing LDC we can read the way in which changes in working patterns increase the complexity of mobility patterns in terms of frequency, time devoted to displacements and distances covered, as well as the combined effects of socio-economical and lifestyles changes. Second, such mobility practices pose interpretative and operational challenges. They question two key principles of the traditional ‘utilitarian approach’ in transport planning, such as the concept of travel as a derived demand and the understanding of users’ objective as travel cost minimization.