Liverpool vs Philadelphia: The Cities You Commute Through, Not Merely Into

In some cities you commute to your employer.

In others you commute through somewhere that feels, in some complicated way, like yours.

Liverpool and Philadelphia are both port cities. Both are cities of strong neighbourhoods, strong accents, strong loyalties, and a complicated relationship with a more dominant city down the road — London in one case, New York in the other. Both have spent a long time being defined by people who do not live in them. And both, on a weekday morning, send their workers on a journey that is not merely a trip to the office but a passage through a place they recognise.

This is the most quietly distinctive commute in the series. The question is not really how long it takes. The question is what it means to travel to work through a city that you feel belongs to you.

Ports, and what they leave behind

A port city is never quite like a capital city. Capitals are built to impress; ports are built to move things. The architecture is functional, the streets follow the water rather than the planner, and the wealth — when it came — arrived in cargoes rather than decrees.

Liverpool grew on the Atlantic trade, which is a polite way of describing a history that includes both extraordinary commercial ambition and the Atlantic slave trade that helped fund it. Philadelphia grew on the Delaware, as the workshop of the young republic and a port through which a continent's goods moved. Both cities carry the memory of that origin: in the warehouses converted to flats, the docks turned to museums, the ferry terminals that still work.

What ports leave behind, long after the cargoes stop, is a particular kind of civic identity. Port cities are accustomed to arrivals — of people, of goods, of ideas — and they tend to be places where the question "where are you from?" is asked with genuine curiosity rather than suspicion. The commute through such a city is a commute through a place that has always understood itself as a point of connection.

The city you commute through

Here is the difference that makes Liverpool and Philadelphia worth pairing.

In London or New York, the commute is often a journey from a suburb you sleep in to a centre you work in, with the city in between experienced largely as a tunnel. In Liverpool and Philadelphia, the journey is more likely to take you through neighbourhoods you know, past landmarks that mean something, along routes your parents or grandparents travelled. The commute is not a blank corridor between two halves of a life. It is a familiar street seen at the same time every morning.

This sounds sentimental, and it is, a little. But it is also a real and measurable thing. A commute through a place you belong to is a different psychological experience from a commute through a place you merely pass through. The first is grounding. The second is dead time. The same number of minutes can be either, depending on whether the streets outside the window mean anything to you.

In some cities you commute to your employer. In others you commute through somewhere that feels, in some complicated way, like yours.

Sport, music and the texture of belonging

Liverpool and Philadelphia are also, famously, cities that care intensely about two things: sport and music. Both are places where the local team is not a leisure activity but a civic institution, and where the soundtrack of the city is something people can name.

This is not a transport statistic. But it is part of the commute, because the commute is not only transport. The morning a person spends on the Merseyrail line into Lime Street, or on the SEPTA line into Center City, is a morning spent in a city whose sounds and symbols they share with the stranger opposite them. The journey is public in a way that goes beyond the ticket. You are travelling with your own people, even if you never speak to them.

Merseyrail's third-rail commuter lines thread under the Mersey and through the city region; SEPTA's network of buses, trolleys, subway and regional rail carried around 198 million rides in the 2024 financial year, across a system of more than 150 regional rail stations. The numbers matter less than the fact that both systems are woven into the daily life of the city in a way that a purely commuter rail line, dropped from above, never quite is.

The shadow of the bigger city

Both cities live, a little, in a shadow.

Liverpool is not London. Philadelphia is not New York. Both have watched their more dominant neighbour hoard the attention, the investment, the headlines — and both have responded not by imitating the capital but by doubling down on being themselves. Philadelphia's accent is not New York's. Liverpool's is not London's, and is, to put it mildly, considerably more distinctive.

This is the quiet gift of the second-tier port city. It does not need to perform for the centre. It is already complete, in its own mind, on its own terms. And the commute through it is a daily rehearsal of that completeness — a reminder, twice a day, that the place you move through is a real place with its own weather, its own history, its own way of being in the world.

Neighbourhoods, and the walk that knows where it is

The other thing both cities share is a fabric of neighbourhoods dense enough that the walk to the station is a walk through somewhere specific, not through generic city. You pass the corner shop. You pass the school you went to. You pass the pub that is, depending on the hour, either the heart of the community or a threat to the rest of the evening.

This matters because the commute begins before the train. It begins with the walk, and the walk in a city of strong neighbourhoods is a walk through identity — through the evidence of who you are and where you are from. The stranger on the platform is not entirely a stranger. You may not know their name, but you know their accent, their football team, the street they probably live on. The public commute, in a city like this, is a more intimate thing than the same commute in a city of strangers.

Does it change the journey?

Yes. A commute through a city you belong to is shorter than the same commute through a city you don't, even if the minutes are identical. Time spent in familiar territory behaves differently from time spent in neutral space. It is noticed rather than endured.

This is the argument for treating the journey to work as more than logistics. The half-hour between home and work is not just a cost to be minimised. It is, depending on the city, a daily encounter with the place that made you — and, if you are paying attention, a chance to notice that it is still making you.

The best commute is not the shortest one. It is the one that takes you through a place you recognise.

Free tool

The Commute Exchange

Your journey through your city.

What does the time between home and work add up to over a year?

One-way commute (minutes)Days per weekWorking weeks per yearHow do you usually travel?DriveTrain / SubwayBusWalkCycleMixedOther

We've used 46 as a starting point to allow for leave and other time away from work. Change it to suit your actual year.

Your commute adds up to

approximately 230 hours a year.

That's about 9 days and 14 hours in transit.

If even 10% became useful reading time, that's enough for approximately 276 five-minute Briefings.

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My commute

30 minutes each way
5 days a week

About 230 hours a year.

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The Atlantic Shelf

Four books for the city you belong to

• UK · Female authorThe Lonely Century — Noreena HertzWhy it belongs here: Hertz argues that modern life — including the way we work and travel — is pulling us apart, and asks how we restore real connection. For a piece about whether the commute can be a daily encounter with a place you belong to rather than an anonymous transit, it frames the right question.
• UK · Male authorLights Out for the Territory — Iain SinclairWhy it belongs here: Sinclair is the master of the idea that a city becomes yours by reading it as you move through it — that belonging is built from attention, not from a postcode. It is the literary argument for the commute as a way of knowing a place.
• US · Female authorWanderlust — Rebecca SolnitWhy it belongs here: Solnit's history of walking is also a history of how we come to belong to a place through the body — by moving through it slowly enough to notice it. The walk at either end of the commute is where the city stops being scenery and starts being yours.
• US · Male authorThe Power Broker — Robert CaroWhy it belongs here: Caro's towering life of Robert Moses asks the question that sits beneath every commute: who does a city belong to — the people who move through it, or the powers that design it? For two port cities shaped as much by decisions as by geography, it is the deepest book on the shelf.

From the imprint

Britain Is Better Than Twitter

James Allen

Because the argument of this article — that a city is something you travel through with other people, not merely to — is the same argument this book makes about a country: that real community is built from small, ordinary encounters, and that the spaces between us matter more than the screens in front of us.

Buy on Kindle — £4.99Read more →

Cross the Atlantic

More city-to-city journeys

• London vs New York: Who Has the Better Commute? →The Tube and the subway move two global cities every morning. The similarities end considerably later than either city might like to admit.
• Birmingham vs Houston: What Happens When a City Expects You to Drive? →Two major working cities, two very different scales — and a morning increasingly shaped by the car.

Explore the full Atlantic Commute →

Make the journey useful

Three small ways to spend the time

Commuter Concierge →Find me something worth reading for the journey.The Arrival Briefing →Something to say when you arrive among your own people.

Your commute

Which city should cross the Atlantic next?

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People also ask

Quick questions, honest answers

• How long is the average Philadelphia commute?

  Around 31.7 minutes one way for Philadelphia County, according to the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey five-year estimates for 2024. The wider Philadelphia metro area averages nearer 30 minutes. Both are longer than the US national mean of 27.2 minutes.

• How long is the average Liverpool commute?

  Around 28 minutes one way for the Liverpool City Region, according to Centre for Cities analysis of UK transport data — in line with the Great Britain average and shorter than London, Manchester or Birmingham.

• What public transit does Philadelphia have?

  SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, runs buses, trolleys, subway and a 13-line regional rail network of more than 150 stations. It carried around 198 million rides in the 2024 financial year, recovering to roughly three-quarters of pre-pandemic ridership.

• What public transit does Liverpool have?

  Merseyrail's third-rail commuter lines run under the Mersey and across the city region, supplemented by buses and the Mersey ferries. The network is closely woven into the city's neighbourhoods rather than running above them.

Sources & methodology

Where the figures come from

These figures are useful for broad comparison but come from different national surveys and should not be read as a perfectly like-for-like league table. UK city-region averages are drawn from Centre for Cities analysis of UK transport data; US figures from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Methods, years and the precise populations counted differ. Where a number is approximate, it is marked.

• Centre for Cities — Integrated transport: the size of the prize for mayors (Liverpool City Region average commute 28 minutes; 49 per cent within a 30-minute public-transport journey of the city centre)
• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) — Mean Commuting Time for Workers, Philadelphia County, PA (ACS 2024 five-year estimate ~31.7 minutes)
• US Census Bureau — Commuting (Journey to Work), American Community Survey 2024 (mean travel time 27.2 minutes; Philadelphia metro ~30 minutes)
• SEPTA — ridership and network (FY2024 annual ridership 198.3 million; 13 regional rail lines, 150+ stations; transit fare $2.90)
• Merseytravel — Liverpool City Region public transport information

Explore more British and American commutes →