The commuter's paradox: why it takes longer to get home than to get to work

Abstract. We examine a simple model of public transport where under certain conditions, there is an asymmetry in the traveling time between two nodes in the two different directions. This asymmetry is surprising at first sight, as it may also occur when every individual line is symmetric with respect to direction — although only when line changes are made during travel. The time-irreversibility of the journey is caused by the asymmetry of waiting times when there are several possible ways to reach the destination. We analyze the phenomenon under different assumptions made on the waiting times and parallelism in the transport graph.