Commuting Takes Its Toll
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Being young and minimalist helped a lot with being able to pull it off, but I'd definitely recommend it for the benefits. Especially living downtown (Portland in my case) and having a short to medium sized stroll through the city to work, it's amazing what a difference it makes to your sanity compared to sitting in traffic for 45 minutes.
I would interview for jobs and the first thing I'd ask the recruiter was whether they were in Portland itself or out in the suburbs. They'd say "yeah, definitely Portland" then set up an interview and give me an address out towards Beaverton. I'd have to cancel.
Moving to LA, the difference was even more pronounced. I set up shop in a shabby little neighborhood in San Gabriel, the shortest distance across the sea of concrete that contained the office I was contracting at. They had guys driving in from the hills above Mission Viejo and even Yucaipa, 2.5 hours away. It was insane. Those guys never seemed overly happy with the situation. But I bet their houses looked nice.
Fortunately, we don't have to worry about this anymore. Enough shops have caught on to the benefits of having everybody remote that a fella can pick up a gig from anywhere in the world these days. I haven't commuted more than 50 feet in a decade.
You aren't "throwing money away", you are paying for, among other things, the privilege of being able to move quickly and cheaply.
For example, my commute from Sherwood to Wilsonville is 20-25 minutes. Since I'm not trying to drive through Portland proper, I'm able to use a back road that has 2-3 cards on it during 'rush hour'.
So I'm able to get the big house and the short commute at the same time by have a starting and ending destination that is not where everyone else is.
Super cheap, and plenty of stuff around to do. Just not overly walkable or as pleasant as living in the Pearl District.
Then again, just like a fella can make up for a lot of unpleasantness given an extra 1-5 hours a day in free time, the same can be said for paying half the rent of a downtown loft. They still let you drive in to town on the weekends if you get bored of throwing darts at a plastic board and drinking Budweiser non-ironically. And working a software job while living in the "first month free" apartments, you can certainly afford to do so.
I think there's a lot to be said for living close to work, but there's even more to be said for cities investing well provisioned, fast and inexpensive public transport. The intangible benefits from a happier, more flexible, mobile workforce are huge. Where I live I am extremely fortunate: I am 45 minutes away from work by train, but 95% of the time I can sit down and work on my laptop for 80% of that time. So I see my "effective" commute as about 15 minutes.
I don't think commutes are the problem, its the typical mode of transport humans choose is the problem.
Similarly I used to opt for a longer public transit commute than a car because of the active engagement that I needed with traffic in the car.
In my case, I had been using public transit (buses) as transportation for more than ten years, and frankly, I was completely fed up with it. For my current commute, the buses would never come on time (either 10+ minutes late, or just a bit too early). Then, when I’d finally catch my first bus, it would always reach the last stop just late enough for me to see the second bus (that I’d have to transfer on to) reach the stop I’d have to get to and leave.
That’s not even mentioning all the other annoyances, like:
• (sometimes) waiting more than an hour for a bus to arrive
• the commute regularly taking 1.5 hours each way because the buses would regularly come too late or too early (on the very rare occasions when I’d catch both buses instantly, the commute would become a blissful 45 minutes; I truly treasured those days…)
• etc.
Finally, I got completely fed up of it and was desperately searching for some other way to get to my destination. After doing some research, I realized that I lived right next to a huge bike trail that could take me almost half the way, so I ended up getting a bike. Frankly, it was the best decision I’ve made in a long time. My commute is now 2 hours each way, but unlike the situation with the buses (where I was just waiting half the time), with the bike, I’m actually doing something (riding it), so the time passes by so fast, I always find it unbelievable when I realize that, somehow, two hours have just elapsed without me even noticing it.
Well, you can look at the display [1] showing the ETA for the next 10 busses at the station, and notice your bus isn’t on it.
Otherwise the app from your MTA should show that info, too.
________________
I'm now in the DC suburbs. There are several different transit agencies that operate here, and some are better than others. Some do have signs like the ones in Kiel, but for the buses I take, this is what I get to deal with for signs: http://i.imgur.com/Zd2TNVG.jpg
I have enter the stop number on rideonrealtime.com, and then search. If I try searching for it today, I get an error, because the 14 bus doesn't run on Sunday (but they don't say that). Believe it or not, their desktop website is actually a little better than the mobile version.
Even in the fancy new transit hub that recently opened, the electronic signs only show the published departure times. At off hours, this is fine because they are generally accurate. During peak traffic times, however, they're completely inaccurate and you need to go to their terrible website to look up the actual time the next bus will arrive.
KVG actually nowadays has a neat REST API for all their data, btw: http://www.kvg-kiel.de/internetservice/services/passageInfo/...
Compared to what you describe, this is pretty awesome.
(Btw, I’m studying CompSci in Kiel right now – I’m interested, what did you study, and when?)
I only heard of those days – I was 4yo in 2000 :D
Where I live, I have dedicated bike/pedestrian paths so it's only a few intersections where I need to watch out. (a bit over 10 km, 25 min in the summer and 25-40 in the winter, plus the time it takes to shower and change clothes at both ends).
> lower quality of people in general
is likely to get some downvotes.
Ya I hear you, I moved south and the low education and low quality of character definitely got to me.
Of course I moved south from Canada into the US, so all of you Americans are garbage to me.
And people wonder why large swaths of the country are angry at the entitled sounding northeast with comments like the above. I grew up in the south and oddly enough the south I grew up in is now mostly people from the northeast. So either all the low quality people from the northeast moved to the south or you are letting prejudices get the better of you.
i think it stems from the perception that some of the stranger laws, viewpoints and customs are exceptionally backwards by the standards of most modern populations and are more popular than they are in reality. the religious fervour and gun loving being the two most obvious things that no other highly developed and civilised part of the world has and which are strongly associated with the southern US.
(p.s. i am from the UK)
i try not to think this way myself... my own experiences clash with this sort of thinking a lot, but its a very common perception and its evidence is to be found in a lot of places sadly... helping to reinforce those perceptions.
Which may be worthless, or anger people.. but I have more experiences than most so I tend to trust my own thoughts more than some politically correct statement about the southern US (where I live) not matching up with stereotypes.
The southern US is like the northern US but basically taking the trailer trash from the north and multiplying it many times over. That's the south in a nutshell.
Where there's smoke, there's fire. There's always some truth to rumors and stereotypes. I don't dislike the south or southerners, but when I said "lower quality of people" that was a poor choice of words. I should have said a general lower quality of education. I also think it's clear the general standards for anything in the south are lower than northern states. They'll give a driver's license to anyone south of the Mason-Dixon. I hate to say it but I think this is indisputable. I love southern folks as much as I do any other, they're very friendly and good people. Some are worse than others and the truly vile ones are no more a larger percent of the population than any other ethnic group's bad apples.
That said, I do prefer Mexicans to Americans of all stripes. Just a better culture, friendly, open, they take insults from Americans in stride and the insults never stop from my nation. Amazing people to be honest. Point being, my views are well-traveled and are not exactly some US-Yankee carpetbagger elitism that my initial statement suggested.
Granted it takes some space to have more than one bike, but I have a garage. On the other hand, some folks just keep a second pair of wheels with the studded tires. When buying a bike for commuting, it's good to make sure that there's enough clearance for fenders and wider tires if desired.
I find that I manage with surprisingly little clothes even if it's cold, the main thing is to be covered up so that the cold outside air doesn't enter from sleeves etc. Aside from that, the most critical for me is shoes and gloves, I easily start freezing my toes even though I'm otherwise Ok. And if it's colder than, say, around -15C, some kind of face mask and glasses are good, otherwise your face freezes.
As for equipment, I have winter tires for my bike. I haven't bothered to acquire another pair of wheels, I just change the tires in the autumn and spring. My winter tires aren't any wider than my summer tires, so it gets a bit tedious if there's loose snow on the path. Most of the time it's fine, though. I don't have a separate "winter bike", I use the same bike both summer and winter (a cyclocross/touring kind of thing with drop handlebars etc.).
I found that when I had a 30 min cycle commute, the total time was more like 50 mins when I included shower time.
When I've had a bad day, when I cycle home I can feel myself leaving it all behind. When I get home all the trivialities of work are gone.
Taking the metro home is fine also but not as liberating.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
“If these numbers sound ridiculous, it’s because they are. It is ridiculous to commute by car to work if you realize how expensive it is to drive, and if you value your time at anything close to what you get paid.”
On the other hand the alternative would be 90 - 100 minutes (one way) of commute by train with (included) 20 minutes of walk. I would have to switch trains twice. Cost would be about half to a third of above cost.
My time and my sanity (sitting in a car, listening to podcasts and not encountering the mass of idiots in public transport) is easily worth that much to me.
So for me the math works - that my tl;dr.
Well, another alternative is to move somewhere closer to your current workplace and a fourth alternative is to get a job that's closer to your current home.
I cannot bike to work, but I'm sitting on the back porch looking out over the marsh on this amazing Sunday morning. In the city, if I even had a porch I would be staring at someones back yard or the building next to me.
He is right about the wasted time though.
Edit: had to look it up. 25 mpg is a joke in terms of fuel consumption.
However, 25mpg isn't that crazy. That's about what my wife's 2005 CR-V gets in around-town, short-trip usage. I'm sure the newer ones are better than that, but paying $20K less for the car leaves enough money to invest that the gas is effectively free. (5000 miles/yr at 25 mpg is 200 gallons. At even ~$3/gal, that's $600. $600 is 3% of $20K and it's not hard at all to clear 3% on investments.)
It's noble of you to wish you could also tie up a large amount of capital and use it to provide housing to tenants. I looked into it pretty hard, and the returns weren't nearly worth the hassles.
Landlords now who are making money bought in cheap 10 or 15 years ago. For them it's money for old rope.
MMM bought at least 5 years ago. He's full of it, suggesting things that save a few bucks here and there when he is taking a slice of the labour of 3 families.
House prices and rent are linked. Higher house prices demand higher rent to make the investment worthwhile for the landlord. High house prices provide a floor on rent (otherwise, landlords sell and the rental pool shrinks).
Higher rents provide a floor on house prices (when monthly rent rises to more than about 1% of purchase price, it becomes attractive to buy property to rent in areas without insane taxes).
What's common about both those upward pressures? That they are driven by the demand for housing units (of either sort) by people who want to live in a given area.
More people? More demand. More demand? Higher prices.
I have no connection whatsoever to MMM (other than generally agreeing with a lightweight version of his frugal teachings). I don't see how his being a landlord has any bearing on whether his general information is valuable or not.
Taken to the extreme exploiting land monopoly isn't "providing shelter" any more than serfdom landlords provided shelter. They extracted labour at state gun point if necessary.
We have a very extreme situation now dating back to pre 2008 when the banks went utterly wild.
Rent is likewise a balance of many factors, including wages but also interest rates, house prices, rental supply, rental demand, property taxes, and other factors.
I'm not sure what you propose as a workable alternative. Banning renting of housing? Government dictated housing prices? Banning real property ownership? Something else?
Buying a house and renting it out is not a land monopoly in any meaningful sense of that phrase; otherwise, I'd have a "monopoly" on the shirt I'm wearing right now.
Right now with land we have artificial scarcity (and real in places like Manhattan).
In order to accomplish that, we have a notion of property rights (the right to exclusive control of [including the right to exclude others from] the housing unit) and we allow those rights to be permanently or temporarily traded to others in exchange for money or other consideration.
Unless you don't care who lives in your housing unit from day to day, there's got to be some kind of property right in real property and a derivative right-to-exclude. If you want to call the right I have to my own house a monopoly on that particular property, you're technically right (the best kind of right). By that same argument, the corner gas station has a monopoly on selling the specific gasoline contained in its underground tank.
Land is indeed finite. That's one of the properties that makes it valuable.
From stress, to car insurance, to gas. All the bad things in my life have decreased. I have more time, feel healthier, and get more sleep. I haven't paid for gas or filled up my car in months. All from this seemingly small change. A 1 minute jog to work. I decided if I ever got a different job I would move to be as close as possible to it. The benefits are too enormous to overlook.
The office building I worked in had an abandoned caretaker's apartment on the roof. (For the Australians, it was in Sydney above the cinemas on George street.) I and a colleague nabbed it for basically nothing and commuted 30 seconds via elevator. It had some benefits, but honestly, it was weird to go entire days without leaving the building, and sometimes it felt like I was always at work.
Now my commute is significantly longer, but most of it is on a train. I walk to the train station, and from the station at the other end to the office, and along the way I listen to music or podcasts or read books on my phone.
If I were driving it every day I would probably go mad.
I listen to the news on a radio and catch up with overnight emails from global colleagues on my Galaxy Note phone.
I'll either move jobs, or move house to make it shorter than that.
At first I loved it, for the same reasons you listed. But then I started to realize that living so close to work blurred the line between work and life. I couldn't mentally detach from the job after coming home. Even on evenings and weekends I'd think about work.
That's when I realized an important purpose that commuting plays, which is a transition period from work mode to life mode. So now my commute is 15 minutes: short enough that I don't go insane, but long enough to help me put some mental distance between myself and my job.
My commute is good for me. Her commute wears on her. She is not tech focused so she does not listen to podcasts.
I would love to walk to work or ride a bike. But with olders kids and school choices being a driving force for where we live that is not possible yet.
We craft our day around the commute. We are up at 4:30 and at the gym by 5:20. We strive for 5 days a week at the gym. We probably average more like 4.5.
With the early rise I have to be in bed by 9PM to 10PM most nights.
Gosh now I'm thinking when my youngest goes to college I move much closer to work. Maybe even rent and not buy since I have 4 more years before I retire.
I'm also lucky at work. I have an office with a door. Power naps most days keep me productive in the afternoon.
What are the pros? I can work, read, or email on the train. I listen to audiobooks on the drive. I commute with co-workers and can either shoot the shit or have productive talks. I get paid 150% of what I would work more local. Where I live, I have an amazing view, wildlife from birds to bears, seasons, can have any pets I want (I recently started raising chickens that live in my yard during the day), literally zero crime, very decent schools, family in the area, ...
There are cons. I only get about one to one and a half hours at the most with my kids in the evening. I have zero time to do anything else during the week. I recently started experiencing one of the issues the articled called out: terrible sleep. Aside from a handful of nights, I've not gotten solid sleep in the last four months. That could be the commute, or diet, or anything else.
Could I move closer to work? Corona would not cut it (I could save maybe about 30 minutes but that marginal benefit does not balance out), so I would have to move to something in Orange County. The prices are crazy. I don't know how people live there. Rent is FOUR TIMES my mortgage. I don't make enough to have a mortgage out there as I would have zero disposable income and zero savings (if I qualified for a mortgage).
I've been doing this for five years now. If I could have a decent back yard, a mortgage that came in at 1/4 (or so) my income, and near a decent school, I would consider uprooting my family. I don't think that option exists.
Does this include weekends? I totally empathize with your situation concerning prices, but as your kids grow into teenagers, they'll want their own independence so this time may decrease as it goes on, and the time you have now with them while they're young... it's not time you'll get back, unfortunately.
(I've seriously considered commuting to or doing a startup from Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, or Austin even though I'd need to be in SF for work or to meet with people several days per week.)
I went full-time remote from that kind of structure, and have reclaimed an incomprehensible amount of quality of life and daily time, compared to the slog you are rationalizing.
Problem is, I would love a shorter commute, but my lifestyle is simply incompatible with life in an apartment or tiny, semi-detached town house, so I'm left with having a nice place to come home to but a long journey to get there, which for the most part I feel is a worthwhile trade so far.
Sometimes the gloom and rain of Seattle just meant I couldn't bear to ride that day. Sometimes I needed to get some emails punched out or I just REALLY wanted to read a book. Even though it took longer I almost always felt more relaxed when I got home from riding the light rail. But I usually felt more ready to work when I rode in.
By the end of my time at that company I was riding my motorcycle about 90% of the time because I couldn't bare to give up 2+ hours a day to my commute.
When I left and started my own company the first thing I did was find an office space I could ride my bicycle to. It's actually faster to ride my bike than drive.
I started the job in the fall, and riding the bus was fine, but as May rolled around and I saw the weather getting better and better and thinking about all the time I was stuck in a bus instead of outside, I realized it wasn't going to work out. (There were other things going on at the company too, but this was definitely the straw that broke this commuting camel's back.)
Especially during the spring and summer- I missed that nice, gorgeous, Seattle morning ride as the morning transitioned from pre-dawn light. I'm probably going to have to find a really inneficient and long way to get to the office some mornings now that I think about it.
Have you looked into working remotely?
You tend to not realise just how weird it is unless you moved to Sydney from somewhere else, or until you leave Sydney to go somewhere else...
/spent a year or so living there myself: my commute was actually about 30 mins (Hornsby - Chatswood), SO's was about 1 hour 15 mins each way into the CBD once walking time was added on...
If I had to leave at 6 or come home at 7 when the kids are sleeping it wouldn't be worth it regardless of what job it is or how nice the house is.
But your lifestyle is compatible with spending 15 hours a week (60 hours a month, 700 hours per year, or the equivalent of 17 additional 40-hour workweeks annually) commuting?
The real beauty of it is that I don't bring a mifi card or anything like that, so I can't get online and read HN or whatever. Instead, if I run into an issue, I have to read the code of whatever I'm working on and experiment in the REPL to figure it out. So it's been really productive in a couple ways.
I wouldn't want to do it every day, since it makes for long days - but a few times a week it's not bad at all.
That's good to hear, I live 10 min from Herndon and had to drive to northern Arlington for a bit, with no traffic its 20minutes...But typically it was 1 hr each way.
I think the metro system needssom. Work to improve its service in DC. More of a NYC business model. 15-18 bucks a day is not realistic during peak times for commute and parking
I then moved right in to the city, a 15 minute walk to work. My overall happiness increased significantly. I could hang out with friends, stay out late if I wanted to - and I almost always found my place to be the place people would want to be at (somewhat opportunistic due to locality - but that's 100% fine by me). The price I paid was nearly quadrupling my rent. I felt like I deserved to treat my self to one year of this - and I quite enjoyed it - but the high rent was just not sustainable when you factor in alimony and past debt.
I then moved to a place about 30-40 minutes away from work. The commute was nice, the distance is about just right, and the rent was $700 less than my Manhattan apartment. I immediately saw a drop off in how many people would be coming to visit me - once again, I am fine with that and understand the circumstances there. The problem is that now my building is raising my rent by $300 - and the expensive commute costs really don't offer much savings compared to living in the city anymore - this spot has been "discovered" and will now just keep going up like the rest of the commutable areas to NYC.
So, this Monday, I am moving back to Staten Island - I will have twice the amount of space, dropping another $1000 from my current rent, and my commute will be about 1hr. I now have the opportunity to work from home a bit more, so by breaking up my week and staying home on Wednesdays, it will take the stress off of commuting in every day. A lot of the people I work with and manage work remotely - and they live all across the country - they don't have to worry about commuting in in the morning, and can live where they want to live -- sure, there are other disadvantages to working remotely, but as the availability of high-internet speeds and technologies make working remotely easier and more common place. As this improves, and more companies understand and embrace remote work mentality, I see the necessity of being chained to a big tech hub like SF or NYC to be far less important.
Nice work on getting a remote job. That must make things much easier.
It's definitely done on purpose.
Look at Singapore or Hong Kong.
And there's also not-so-mixed use eg in some German suburbs. Though by American standards, it's still very mixed. Ie you have to walk ten minutes to the nearest shop, instead of three.
See https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Sonnenweg,+47918+T%C3%B... for an example.
But since I have been doing it, for the past four months, my wife has bought me a whole set of new pants. Smaller pants.
I ride my bicycle about 2.5 miles on each end of Caltrain.
10 bicycle miles per day, with high consistency, has markedly improved my health.
10 bicycle miles is not much. But I push hard, each of those four separated segments, to be well winded.
I have always hated exercise, and never did it consistently. But I intentionally set myself up to be "forced" to exercise.
It is a 55 minute train ride on the front and 45 minutes on the back. And I get most of my best work done on the train. Because I catch 5:57am and the 3:37pm trains, I always get a good seat. My wifi is generally good.
So it makes for a relatively long day, but I physically feel better than I have in a long time, and working on the train and early in the office gives me a lot of high quality "heads down" time every day, which is so important.
As stated elsewhere, the commute itself is less important than the quality of the commute.
Calculating mileage and maintenance costs is easy compared to factoring in your risk of bodily damage from your commute. Commuting on a motorcycle is fun, but I haven't figured out whether it's 'worth it.'
In Pittsburgh, I found a minimal-walking bus path that required a transfer. It made the path slightly longer than the 5.6 miles from apartment to work, but still roughly a tenth the distance of Des Moines to Marshalltown. Surprise--it took about an hour each way, and longer if, as was far too common, the first bus in the morning was late or the second bus in the evening was late. What's wrong with this picture?
I'm back in the Des Moines area now, and hoping for a much closer workplace.
Busses simply suck.
It was absolutely exhausting, and utterly killed any motivation for me to actually do anything what I got back in each night. Oh sure, I had ambitions when I started the journey each evening, but they were damn well as good as dead when I'd finished it.
Fortunately, my current commute is much better, only taking about half an hour a day and not involving the London Underground in any way. Could it be better? Probably, but it's reasonable enough for now, and isn't anywhere near as mentally exhausting.
Living nearer work? Forget it, a lot of companies here are located in the most expensive areas of the city. Unless your family are wealthy enough to pay for a luxury apartment in the city of London, or maybe somewhere likes Mayfair or Knightsbridge, you're likely going to be commuting to any job round here. Even the cheaper places have rents high enough you'd likely end up living on the breadline with a typical developer salary.
It very obviously takes its toll on me.
But, that topic requires another completely different article. :)
Think of how much better everyone's lives would be if only those who absolutely needed to be in an office (Doctors, mechanics, etc) went to work and everyone else just stayed home.
And... I'm kinda happy about the current job. Four years of being remote taught me how isolating it can be, how easy it is to end up feeling utterly detached from what my co-workers are doing, lacking in human interaction during my working hours, and being in an office and around people again every day has done a lot for me.
So I wouldn't be so quick to send everybody to work from home all the time.
most people do not work in an office environment. iirc about 10% of people work in production industries which means factories, building sites and mines etc. 10% work in social and health care which means hospitals, community centres and homes... 10% work in retail which means shops. 10% in leisure and hospitality which means restaurants, hotels etc. 5% work in agriculture which means farms, orchards, vineyards etc. 3% work in transport and warehousing... thats not quite a majority, but i can easily find around 48% of jobs are impossible to do from home...