Apologies, I should have made this clearer (and will probably edit the original to do so). Commuting is terrible for the happiness of the commuter. The rest of the post should be interpreted in light of this.

As for the Freakonomics research - it seems quite implausible that the marginal commuter has a bigger impact by taking transit rather than a car (I seem to remember listening to an episode of Freakonomics radio about this discussion, and being disappointed by the lack of marginal analysis).