James James in the comments here:
"According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals’ utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we find that people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective well-being."
There are endless studies by estate agents showing that each extra minute's walk from the nearest Tube or train station in London = £A off the rent or £B off the price of a home; that each extra minute's commute time from London overground stations = £C off the average rent or £D off the price of a home etc.
It's a bit presumptuous of these psychologists to say that all this numbers are "too low". Nearly half of people in London rent and most new arrivals rent; the rental market is very fluid so if people were really so hacked off with commute times, they can move somewhere else in six months' time. We have to assume that £A, £B etc. are roughly correct.
We can reasonably assume that if we have two same aged people with same amount of savings, who both start a new job at the same place in central London with the same pay and working hours will make that difficult trade-off between walking time, train time, ticket cost and rent. This tells us the value in £'s per hour that people place on shorter commute times.
But you can bet a pound to a penny that the psychologists haven't equivalised for all these factors.
So on the whole people with longer commute times will probably be younger people on lower pay with high rents; and those with shorter commute times will be older people with a small or no mortgage who had the luck to buy nearer the center more than fifteen years ago. So the latter group has shorter commute times, lower effective housing costs and lower travel costs and it's hardly surprising that the former group has a systematically lower sense of well-bring.
(And we also know that plenty of people who move out of London into the Faux Bucolic Rural Idyll end up bitterly regretting it; they just can't survive out in the real world any more, just like zoo-raised animals released into the wild.)