One commuter, Anna Roberts, who works in Victoria, south-west London, was stuck on a Brighton to London train well after 11am.
You see it in the physical infrastructure: all those new flyovers sprouting up around the city to enable the chauffeur driven classes to get about more easily, even while the commuter trains are still bursting; the crowded, chaotic public hospitals that get by while gleaming new private hospitals open up.
Carswell, whose father, Wilson, was one of the first doctors to identify HIV/Aids in Uganda in the 1980s, also made it clear that he was not at ease with the declaration by Farage that he felt uncomfortable when he could not hear English being spoken on a commuter train.
"For a time the freesheets, as they call them in the UK, became very successful at capturing a commuter market," McNair says.
Rush-hour passengers on a trouble-hit commuter route in the south of England have faced more disruption, with delays and cancellations because of a broken rail.
The announcement by UK Oil and Gas Investments (UKOG), a small independent explorer, is certainly dramatic: the discovery of a vast supply of oil 3,000ft below the commuter belt landscape.
Lumley said the new bridge would provide more than just a river crossing for the weary commuter.
Soames, an MP for Mid Sussex, the heart of the commuter belt, said he was horrified by the travesty of the railway industry's performance over Christmas, adding he was sure the transport secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, felt a similar sense of outrage.
But over the past two years, prices in Chelmsford, a commuter town a 40-minute train ride from London, have risen significantly.
Last week News Corp announced that mX, its free commuter paper in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, would cease publication on 12 June, resulting in the loss of 30 journalists' jobs.
"The market for commuter journalism is still there but they now have their own phone and their own iPad so why then bother with a piece of paper?
