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The American commute is getting longer.

It takes the average worker 26 minutes to get to work, according the U.S. Census Bureau. That's the longest it's been since the bureau began tracking this data in 1980. Back then, the typical commute was 21.7 minutes. The average commute has gotten nearly 20 percent longer since then.

According to the Census, there were a little over 139 million workers commuting in 2014. At an average of 26 minutes each way to work, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that works out to something like 1.8 trillion minutes Americans spent commuting in 2014. Or, if you prefer, call it 29.6 billion hours, 1.2 billion days, or 3.4 million years.

Of course, not all of us have 26-minute commutes. Roughly a quarter of American commutes are less than 15 minutes one way. On the other hand, nearly 17 percent of us have commutes that are 45 minutes or longer.

People hate their commutes more than just about any other activity in their lives.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and economist Alan Krueger asked 900 Texas women to rate how they felt during various daily activities and found that the morning commute came in last in terms of positive emotions, behind work, child care and chores.

There's a massive body of social science and public health research on the negative effects of commuting. Longer commutes are linked with increased rates of obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, back and neck pain, divorce, depression and death.

At the societal level, people who commute more are less likely to vote. They're more likely to be absent from work. They're less likely to escape poverty. And they have kids who are more likely to have emotional problems.