Mega Commuters in the U.S. [pdf]
census.gov
census.gov
I have never been more depressed in my entire life. After the drive home on Wednesday, I had already spent over the equivalent time of a standard work day in my car. At the end of the month, I had spent well over a work week's worth of hours commuting.
That is time you don't get back, and it is near impossible to use it for anything worth while if you're stuck driving. Audiobooks helped _a little_ some weekly podcasts made some days better than others, but on the whole, it was just 3 hours of bored raging every day.
When you're finally home, you've got about enough time to cook, say hello to the family, and then nip off to bed because you've gotta wake up before dawn to beat the bulk of the traffic. It was such a fucking grind.
Never again. I'll happily trade 10s of thousands of dollars off any potential salary to not endure traffic again.
I really can't comprehend it. I recently went from a 25-30 minute commute to a 45-60 minute one and I'm already regretting it a little because I just feel much more tired when I get home.
My previous, shorter, commute required a line change so I was only on each train for about 5-10 minutes. My new commute is all on one line for at least 30 minutes (and more often 45+). So I have more than tripled my time on the train, and I think it is precisely this that makes me get to the end of the commute feeling so much more tired.
A train commute is not the same as a car commute (as castratikron (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12865204) also notes). I have a two hours' walk to work, and I love it; it is calming. Half that time in a car would have me a frothing mess of rage (I say with authority, having briefly had a 90-minute commute a while back).
I dunno. I used to spend time on a treadmill, too, and that really killed my knees, so it's not just some super strong joints. I think you just get used to it; I started when I was 20 (though I've scaled it up over time), and that probably helps.
* Wake up at 6:15AM
* Leave house at 7AM
* Arrive at work at 9AM
* Leave work at 6PM (sometimes 7PM if there's a late meeting)
* Arrive home at 8PM (or 9PM depending on above)
* Play with young daughter for an hour or so until bed time
* Try to manage to get some dinner into my mouth as I'm falling asleep from exhaustion
This is when I don't come in very early (like today), which can sometimes shave 30 minutes or so off the trip.
Honestly not sure what the solution is. I'd trade salary for a saner lifestyle, but I would not trade away the job security that comes with having a tech employer on every block for miles. You don't get that certainty in non-insane small towns. The only thing I can imagine worse than a long commute would be to have to move every 2 years to a different city for work when your company goes belly up or when your company realizes it can abuse you because there are no other employers around.
You have a very warped view of the tech industry outside the valley. Your impression certainly doesn't match reality, but enjoy that commute!
There's plenty job security around here unless you are incompetent and don't know anybody.
It's also impossible if you're stuck standing on a public transit vehicle. You need one arm for the overhead rail and another for the backpack there isn't room to wear, and most of your attention to keep from falling over when the bus or train accelerates and brakes.
BART for me is a 15 minute bike ride + 10 minute transfer + 25 minute train + 10 minute walk, for a total of a little over an hour. The AC Transit transbay bus is more like 50 minutes, given that have to transfer from transbay terminal to Muni, but it's unreliable and the chances of getting a seat are zero instead of slim.
I now accept a 75 minute commute split between my car, the Oakland/Alameda ferry, and Muni because traffic within the East Bay is reasonably pleasant to drive in and the ferry feels reasonably civilized (no quick jerky movements, not crowded, reasonably clean).
In clear traffic, like if I go in on a Saturday, the drive straight to my office takes 18 minutes. Our public transit system is horrifically dysfunctional.
Its the perfect storm of Gen X tech scene who settled in the suburbs and Y and beyond who refuse to leave the city, turning even 20 mile commutes into 90 min plus Ultra-marathons.
I regular experience 120 min commutes with the occasional 2hour 30 min each way commute. It has gotten to the point that I believe people are forgoing families because they simply don't have the time to get to work, work, and spend time with their kids, while still affording to live here.
And no, natural market forces are not rebalancing this.
I couldn't afford to compete in redmond proper/seattle proper (low end ~500k+, regularly escalated with 20+ bidders 100k+ in cash over listing) so I got a house out in the suburbs (duvall, off in the northeast about ~20-30 miles) for ~430k.
Grew up/worked on the east coast for many years, and regularly lived 60-80 miles outside of cities but could rely on light rail to get in to center <40 minutes of very regular, very easy travel. Here, a fraction of that distance regularly takes me 60-70 minutes to drive. I'm VERY LUCKY that I have a bus route, so that I can at least work, but as others have said, if any of the 1 lane roads have an accident, my drive rapidly becomes 2 hours+. I have to wake up before 6 to avoid rush hour, and even then it's a coin flip.
I would frankly never make this tradeoff again. I now burn 2-3 hours every day (assuming I get home at 5-6 and sleep at 10-11) this just ate ~50% of my leisure time for a given day. I fucking love nature, having a yard, having autonomy to run my house how I want, but this is slowly destroying my sanity as I go to sleep each night with an even more pressing feeling of "not enough time in the day" than I ever had in an apartment near work.
I'm... not too happy with the job/home life tradeoffs that I've seen available thus far. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but in most cities with high tech job concentration and reasonable stability I don't see a way around having to live like this unless you happened into money. (I was priced out of Seattle even with over a decade of life savings)
Here in NYC a lot of the NIMBY voice has been silenced by "look, they tried your policies, and it failed. Let's try these instead."
People think SF will be Beijing when it needs to be Queens.
- A lot of people are commuting into government offices in the city. DC does indeed have a strict height restriction. But it's also worth observing that DC was generally considered to be a pretty dangerous city to live in and lots of people moved out to the suburbs because they didn't want to live in the city.
- It's also just a sprawling metropolis with a beltway that's famously congested. It's not so much that people can't live nearby where the companies are but people want to live in particular communities and they change jobs and they end up having long commutes on busy roads.
The fact is that there are lots of places around the US with plenty of places where companies and people can be nearby each other. But especially with two-income families where the couple work at far apart companies, or when someone just has a strong preference to live in the city or live in the exurbs--and that's not where the company is--you end up with long commutes.
* parking minimums require land that could be used to house people be used to house cars instead. It also means that people who wouldn't own a car due to the cost of parking decide to own one because parking becomes a sunk cost. (If I had free parking where I live now I'd probably own a car, but I don't in large part because parking it would be €250 a month or so).
* Density maximums mean that housing a given number of people takes more space. This means you have to move through more space to get to your job.
* Designing roads to the goal of moving cars at high speeds (rather than people to their destinations) results in land that could be used for housing and jobs going towards wide roads, support infrastructure (slip roads, etc.), and yards (because who wants a front door that opens to a road filled with cars?)
* Zoning means that instead of an acre of space providing homes for 10 people and jobs for 10 people, it provides homes for 15ish people and jobs for 0 (or more likely 5 given the aforementioned density maximums). Then, in the acre over, land that could provide jobs to those 10, or 15, people does so for fewer people since so much of it is given over to housing cars. Note how the companion to a highrise in many cities is a big parking garage for its employees.
* The above make the carless less able to participate in society, leading to poverty, leading to stigma, meaning even people who have the means to get by without a car will often be reluctant to do so because they don't want to be stigmatised themselves.
I get that you wish they didn't have that preference and didn't vote for the laws and taxes that enabled their preferred lifestyle.
This is false. I think they should live however they like. I just don't like it when they make it illegal to build apartment buildings down the road because _they_ think everyone else should live just like them.
As housing options are limited in Vermont due to restrictive development laws, we had to pick a place that is reasonable for my wife to commute. It ended up that my commute was much longer when I got the job.
It sucked esp during the brutal winters! Never again. Now I'm happy with an easy 10 mile commute.
I commuted 90 miles one-way for several years. Most of it was on a turnpike, and I could almost see myself reading a book or something during my drive (I never did though).
If not, sounds like they, too, are simply mega commuters.
Poor bastards...
Assuming I'm reading the study properly, solo driving does account for a significant portion of these commutes.
Anecdotally, I had a commute that was at least on the cusp of this definition for a time. Driving it was pretty awful. Taking the commuter rail, as I typically did, was still something of a pain--it's just a big chunk out of the day--but was at least somewhat tolerable. (Fortunately, I also traveled and/or worked from home a significant portion of the time.) I wouldn't have wanted to do this long-term.
I'm also fun at parties.
The major difference to the US is that here in London basically no one commutes by car. Train services are nearly always faster. And it has the advantage that you can use your time more productively.
If you're near a mainline rail station, it's not rare at all.