You wouldn’t want to say it out loud on the concourse of King’s Cross at 8am on a Monday morning, but the British commuter is profoundly lucky. Bothered by the invasion of your personal space? In Tokyo 70 per cent of schoolgirls told one survey that they had been abused on the city’s preposterously overstuffed subways by chikan, suited fetishists who spray teenagers with mayonnaise and worse. The vice has bred its own genre of pornography, norimono poruno.

Fed up with exorbitant fares? One of the first season tickets issued in mid-Victorian Britain cost £50, a year’s wages for the average worker of the day. It sold out anyway. Bored of plasticky food? Victorian commuters endured famously awful railway sandwiches — “the real disgrace of England”, according to Anthony Trollope — and what Charles Dickens called “a class of soup which enfeebles the mind, distends the stomach, forces itself into the complexion, and tries to ooze out at the eyes”.

We are safe, too. Travelling by train in the early days of steam was often dangerous. In 1865 ten people died when a train racing to London from Folkestone ran downhill at 50mph into a viaduct that had been closed for repairs. Six carriages fell into the riverbed below and the seventh, in which Dickens was a passenger, was left balanced over the precipice. He climbed out and passed his hip flask of brandy to other survivors. Today ten people still die each day on the commuter railways of Mumbai.

The history of the journey to work is in large part the history of modern society. With the frantic spread of railways, trams and omnibuses in the 19th century, as the working class began to enjoy the same mobility as City stockbrokers, it became hard to ignore their political will. In 1867, the year of the Second Reform Act, the political journalist Walter Bagehot suggested that there was no better place to take the pulse “of the ordinary mass of educated, but still commonplace, mankind” than “the opinion of the bald-headed man on the back of the omnibus”. This insight later found its way into cliché as “the man on the Clapham omnibus”.

Rush Hour, an entertaining study by the corporate lawyer turned historian Iain Gately, falls into three parts. The first and longest is a lively account of the stress, overcrowding and social awkwardness that have dogged travellers since the first railway lines opened. Then comes a survey of the shape of things today, tapering into a not entirely convincing argument that commuting generally makes people happier and healthier.

The book is best in the last section, where Gately indulges in some futurology. Telecommuting, HS2 and maglev lines that could take travellers from Dover to Aberdeen in an hour are studied and discarded before he settles tentatively on driverless cars as the likeliest next widely adopted technology.

Rush Hour is never less than interesting, pacey and rattling with trivia. The only big disappointment, apart from Gately’s reliance on secondary sources, is the lack of attention dedicated to cycling as a solution to clogged motorways and crowded trains and buses. In 1939 twice as many British commuters cycled to work as drove a car. Three quarters of a century on, getting back to that ratio would be something almost like progress.

Rush Hour: How 500m commuters survive the daily journey to work by Iain Gately. To order for £14.99 including postage visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call The Times Bookshop on 0845 2712134