The key emotion in the morning is a combination of lack of energy, sense of senselessness of the activity and fear of being late. So people are rushing to work.
To you this should look absurd, but this is part of city culture. Somehow people can not plan their time well to be in correct places in correct time. Why it is so, is a mystery.
Only after listening to Bashar, and only after taking him seriously, I acknowledged that he is right that we don't have to rush.
The choice of rushing versus taking your time is made based on the worldview. It is the prospective that makes materialists to rush and spiritualists to take their time. I will explain in a bit.
How wide spread is the habit of rushing? Very wide. I am pretty sure people in all cities are rushing in the morning to work. I have seen morning rush in Russia and America. I have noted that Italians drive like racers. In movies, I have seen British to be speeding. Israeli are very risky drivers, speeding much. I am not sure about Asia. I would assume, there is much hurrying involved. I have seen Koreans doing cleaning work - they worked like robots at 10x speed of Russians. So I assume, there is much hurry everywhere.
Morning rush hours are about 7a-9:30a of people going to work and 4p-6:30p of people returning from work.
When I was driving in Maryland I was always upset about road workers. It seemed very irrational that road workers would have working hours at the same time as other people. While people driving to work were waiting nervously in traffic jam, road workers were lazily setting up their work place blocking the traffic. I wondered how many human hours were wasted in traffic jams - there were thousands of cars in jams created by road workers. Every day they were killing people this slow way by wasting their time in jams. Some of these people were well paid, so this was even more irrational. As I learned more about what people do, it became clear that what they do at work is equally senseless and inefficient. As some of them were working for military, wasting their time maybe was most rational thing to do (this is irony, but it makes a lot of sense).
Road works of course are needed, but it would be so much more efficient to do them at other times when this would not be causing jams. Almost every big city has human made troubles of this sort. Compared to wars it is less negative but still is killing people but slowly. Amount of suffering people have in jams is substantial. With time I learned to listen to Teaching Company's recorded lectures while driving and these times became happiest times during my day. I was actually looking forward to these hours and felt a happy emotion anticipating the time of listening. Sapolsky was among lecturers of the Teaching Company.
Interestingly, the people of highest classes of the society don't hurry. Often they have a pretty relaxed schedule which they plan as they wish. They don't have to rush anywhere to make their living. Some of richest people of the world are rich exactly because they figured out that they have to get out of wicked circle of hurrying and that they have to dictate their own game. They rarely act in defensive mode, that is they don't react to circumstances. They act in proactive mode. They create their own momentum.