Gizmodo: Rise of the Aerial Commuter

Over at Gizmodo, Alissa Walker investigates the “rise of the aerial commuter.” Alissa was kind enough to ask for evidence, and I was more than happy to provide it. Read the whole thing at Gizmodo, but you can start here:

Last month, a blog post by Sam Cookney captured the imagination of anyone who pays a little too much money for the convenience of living near work. He reasoned that, for the same price he paid for his one-bedroom London flat, he could live in a three-bedroom flat near the beach in Barcelona and fly to work in London four days a week. And he’d still have 387 Euros left over at the end of the month.

If you put it that way, extreme jet-setting scenarios like this sound like a pretty amazing idea. Even if it’s really just a fancy way of commuting to work, the thought that we could be sitting at our desk in London and then, just hours later, be sipping rioja on our balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, is still impossibly awesome. Who wouldn’t want to make enough money in one city and be go home to a place where you can actually enjoy it, even–or especially–if it’s a few hundred miles away?

Of course, there are two factors here that make Cookney’s math specifically feasible. First, London is a catastrophically expensive city–just check out this depressing London rent calculator by the Financial Times that shows the percentage of your salary you’d have to spend on rent–so living practically anywhere else would save you money, comparatively. And, second, Ryanair, the airline Cookney used in his calculations, is a ridiculously cheap carrier notorious for being heavily subsidized by European airports.

But Cookney’s proposal is not altogether unrealistic. The book Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next traces how these low-cost airlines changed the commuting patterns for Europeans. A study by Future Forum predicted that, by 2016, there would be 1.5 million people who work in the U.K. but commute by plane from their homes overseas in cities like Tallinn, Marrakech, and, yes, Barcelona. Cookney’s fantasy is a reality for a growing breed of supercommuters–dubbed aerial commuters–who take planes to work.