Most people would know that the most important part of a “study†is the methodology, even if the results are the easiest to publicise—especially expressed as a single number, and in list form, as this article does.
This study’s methodology as described in the article was “Regus surveyed 10,000 businesses to rank the seven most annoying aspects of travelling to work.â€
Anyway, an average is just a mid-point of a distribution: some have very long commutes, and some have shorter. It’s a nice headline, and I have no doubts about the ability of survey-holders to do simple math. But it’s just one number, which I don’t think is unreasonable; keeping in mind the missing methodology, and missing results describing the width of the distribution, or even the raw data.
Quick Google search suggests the same “study†being done in multiple cities in the last month.
http://www.regus.presscentre.com/conten ... wsAreaID=2