Her six-hour commute each day seems crazy, but her affordable rent is not
latimes.com
latimes.com
My typical day, I wake up at 4am, drive to Riverside to do some crossfit from 5:30-6:30, and hop on the train at 7am. I get to the office shortly after 8am. Fortunately, I leave around 4pm and am usually home by 6pm. I tend to work on the train, but I can use that for side projects or leisure when I feel like it.
After 5 years of doing that, I shifted to working in the office usually 3 days a week, and then remote the last two days of the week. It really has helped.
Why do I do it? I really love where I work. It is fantastic. I also really love where I live in the mountains of SoCal. My coworkers have a hard time wrapping their head around dealing with wildlife like bears and things like ice and snow in the winter :). Many also can't process that my mortgage is under half of what they spend on an apartment (that they split with a roommate). My wife is a part time crossfit coach and full time mother, doing home school with our two youngest kids.
I've thought about moving close to work, but housing is just so expensive there. Counting commute costs, I would have to spend 4x on a mortgage in the city. I would like to do things like save money for my future and eat healthy foods. So I stay where I'm at. And I'm happy.
seems like you are also on your way to squeezing out more WFH as time progresses
as long as your company continues to honor your arrangement, it sounds like you have it made, congrats!
Don't worry, they'll tell you.
Passenger: I do CrossFit.
Flight attendant: He might be dying!
Passenger 2: I’m a vegan.
(I fully expect to be crucified for this)
I couldn't have hobbies other than reading. I couldn't get a gym membership. I couldn't have any real social life outside of weekends. Grabbing a beer after work with coworkers was possible, but it meant a 3 or more hour bus trip home instead, getting home at 11 if I left the bar by 7.
It's no way to live. After a year, my wife got a job in the city. She now walks to work and I take the subway.
What blows my mind though was the number of people doing this. Why? So that they're kids could have a yard. Never mind that the kids don't use the yard and miss their parents. Any future child of mine will grow up in a condo, but at least they'll grow up with present parents.
While there are lots of positive changes to living so close to work, I’d just like to add some of the negative ones I’ve found since I moved:
1. A 3 hour commute would leave me exhausted when I got home. I would wake up at 7:30, get into the office at 10:00, leave at 19:00 and be home around 20:30. I’d eat dinner and then settle down for to bed. Since moving I now have so much time in the evenings for practising guitar, video games, reading and social events, but I’m no longer tired in the evenings which is preventing me from sleeping.
2. Living in London is stressful. I’m on a quiet street, but it’s a lot of people, a lot of light pollution and a lot of noise pollution. I’m used to pitch darkness and dead quietness. The air is also no where near as fresh.
3. I find that living so close to work makes it harder to unwind. Upon getting home I’m still in work mode. The commute was a nice chance to forget about work and calm the mind.
4. I used to walk almost 25 miles a week, it’s less than 10 now. Sure I can go running more often, but it requires more effort to enforce the habit.
5. I spend so much more cash living in London on rent, food, social life and dating, which leaves almost none for savings and motorsport/track events/cars.
This is the weird part for me: moving into the city saved me money overall.
In the suburbs where we lived, every person needs a car. It was a 30 minute walk just to get to the nearest store. So we paid insurance, gas, maintenance, etc on two vehicles. In the city, we have one car that we rarely use. If it dies, we'll get a car-share membership. (Frankly, I'm not certain we wouldn't save money if we just did that immediately).
The commute wasn't just long before, it was expensive: $400 CAD or more per month. Inside the city, $140 has me covered. Utilities on the small house we rented were nuts, especially in the winter. We pay a fraction of that now.
Adding it all up, the increase in rent was less than the saved amount.
The only real danger I find now is that I can go out with friends. I have more opportunity to spend money- but at least I'm enjoying spending that money.
How did you manage that? I have 1.5 hour commute and I leave at before you do and arrive after you.
But I agree with you. It is just exhausting and you are left wondering where the time goes.
But she's moved into that home when her children were still kids. Surely she doesn't need the space now that they've moved out, and surely something else must be available.
I mean, she works 9 hour days, travels for 6... If you add a normal sleep pattern of 8 hours, she's got 1 hour left for life, so she breaks down her sleep structurally. But even then, there's just no time on any of her working days to actually live.
In addition, it's as if she had to spend 6 hours in a room every day, unpaid, on a noisy chair.
I can't imagine she can't optimise that. I'm hearing: I spend $400 per month to sit in a room 6 hours a day without pay/productivity/leisure, to live in a home with 2 redundant bedrooms, because equivalent rent is $800 more expensive.
Surely: 1) can live in a smaller home. 2) can find a slightly better rent. 3) can reduce her commute costs. 4) can earn money through extra work (to trade for leisure) or get more leisure time by cutting commute costs.
While there are a small percentage of people who genetically require less sleep, 4.5 hours day in-day out would result in severe sleep deprivation symptoms in the vast majority of people. I know after a couple nights in a row with 6-7 hours of sleep I basically become pretty non-functional and I always get sick.
It's true.
I've met people who slept 3 hours a night regularly to make ends meet. They seem and act normal until you try to have a conversation with them or ask them to do something outside their routine or that requires thought.
You'd be surprised how much of human social and work behavior comes automatically. You can sleepwalk through modern life and never have to wake up.
They were even capable of getting passing grades in university. Even some kinds of learning come mechanically.
Any less sleep will means my productivity drop off rapidly and makes error and judgement that I need days to recover from.
Another reason why I believe there should be some government regulation, or little regulation but worker union.
Unsurprisingly there is such regulation in Europe. It's illegal to work over certain amount of time -- it's the employer that potentially gets into trouble so this is usually observed as far as I know. There are allowances for short periods of overtime, but strict limits over longer intervals.
"Death march" as commonly used in English-speaking nations is typically used as hyperbole or dark humour, whereas in Japan "karoshi" is used in a clinical sense for documented cause of death.
I’ve done commutes ranging from 10 minutes walk to 90 minutes by bus, with lots in between, and strongly recommend that minimising your commute should be a top priority.
There’s no point living in a nice place if you don’t see it five days out of seven. Live somewhere convenient and “commute to the country” on the weekend.
You can’t get that time back.
1000x this. I've done commutes ranging from 0 to 4,5h daily and I can even affirm that commute discomfort is exponential: a 4,5h commute is way more painful than a 3h commute. I would also add that the sweet spot, IMO, is not zero but around 20 minutes of daily (walking/biking) commute.
> "Live somewhere convenient and “commute to the country” on the weekend."
Once again, 1000x this.
The point would be your family see's it even if you do not...
>Live somewhere convenient and “commute to the country” on the weekend.
You act as if people choose to live in the country for ascetics, not economic reasons...
Some do, I did at one time, but this article is about people moving to where they can afford to live, and I dont thing they are talking about home in the country side with a stream and woods....
The unemployed must be immeasurably happy.
It has an intractable gang, homeless and drug problem. The crime rate is twice that of Compton.
http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/story/news/2017/07/26/valle...
And Gold Base... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2168482/Snipers-razo...
6 hours a day - the commute is 3 hours both ways.
In other words, she works 9 hours a day, commutes 6 more, and then has 9 more hours to do with what she will, like sleeping (which normal folk like to do for 6-8 hours). So she has about an hour-three hours a day of actual non-work involved free time.
When one is single and (relatively) unattached, the calculus is different, as Silicon Valley neatly shows.
Edit: you've unfortunately also posted a ton of unsubstantive comments to HN. Please don't do any more of that.
In fact, there are far more east/west than north/south lines on Metrolink: https://www.metrolinktrains.com/rider-info/general-info/stat...
People asked me why I wouldn’t just drive to work which would take me about an hour. I for one did not care for traffic and having to stay alert for an entire hour whereas on the Metrolink I could just fall asleep, read, listen to podcasts or eat some food. Needless to say the commute was kind of hellish If I had to do it for 16 years. I was happy to quit just 2 years later.
After that job I worked remote from home for several years and now freelance full time. I feel pity for anyone who has to commute to work.
I should point out that I left work at 4 and was usually home by 6. Nobody left as early as I did but I just didn’t care and made up my own schedule. Nobody objected.
So much time lost.
The Capital Corridor Amtrak line goes from San Jose to Sacramento, up the East Bay and through Fairfield/Vacaville (where there is a stop). Its the 4th busiest Amtrak line in the country, and largely used by commuters. Connections to Caltrain in San Jose and BART in Oakland are available. No matter how you do it though, an 80+ mile commute into Silicon Valley isnt quick during commute hours.
We did only pay $1450 per month for a 2bd/2ba townhouse though.
Also, I don't think working from home as a norm is radical. Why do we all have to swarm back and forth to some magical place? Making employees commute is an awfully expensive proposition for quality water-cooler time.
And if the office is like 30 min away from home, there's no commuting problem. Yes, that's an hour a day, which is still potentially significant, but on the other hand you don't work at home. I hate working at home and I'm not alone.
So much of human communication is non-verbal. When you're building not just a product, but the team behind the product, getting people in the same room is often crucial for building empathy and trust.
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't normalize remote work - most development tasks require uninterrupted concentration in front of a computer and there's no reason why somebody can't spend time at home or a co-working space or wherever else getting it done. But team members need to meet in-person on a regular basis in a non-formal setting to develop that team "jelling".
Even here at Bangalore/India, I spend close to 3 hours in travel. Fortunately I've pick-up/drop facility to office from home. So, I just sleep in the office cab.
It's only strange until you get used to it. Once you are used to the travel routine, you can start to explore newer ways to make the commute time more productive (reading/writing a book, learning a new programming language, taking a power nap etc).
It's actually very funny how the (perceived) worst/cheapest area in SF is right in the center of the city with easy transportation everywhere.
Of course, after 2 years I felt mentally exhausted from walking around so many mentally ill homeless and seeing garbage everywhere, but it was a calculus I made at the time and looking back the pros of a short commute, cheap rent for sf, and being centrally located with short walk to lots of transit at civic center muni/bart outweighed the cons.
If they really want to be located in the city have an ego office in downtown and open satellite offices in the east bay or south bay. Makes for happy employees and cheaper costs.
A fifteen minute walk with the Walking Dead theme song playing on spotify always beats the commute from hell.
You get exercise, cardio, and All of us here are able to monetize those additional 2-9 hours daily to amplify our salaries #yayinequality. Plus lets be honest you can always just walk on Van Ness or summon an uber.
Of course the TL is cheaper. Its not safe and its a terrible experience on all regards.
The TL has some good things going for it. Good Vietnamese/Thai food, some cool bars. But agreed, I lived there because it was central and relatively cheap, not because I enjoyed hanging out there. But a 5-10m Uber ride in any direction made it much more bearable than it would've been 10 years ago.
I'm not sure I could even imagine commuting six hours a day - that has to be soul crushing. And I love riding trains...
Tried the Transbay buses also; I can barely stay standing since the drivers seem to rapidly alternate between slamming on the brakes and flooring it. At least the acceleration curve on BART isn't designed to kill you.
The motivator for many a seemingly crazy, very large sacrifices. I hope things work out well for her children!
If she really wants her kids to have a better life she should start from herself.
My commute is typically 1.5-1.75 hours each way per day, door to door, and that excludes days when Caltrain has some incident or another.
But right now I pay a third what I'd be paying, at least, to live closer. I get to save a lot more money, which is nice, but the commute is awful when you realize you're basically throwing away 4 hours a day on the commute. I'm not the type that can get work done on the train either; it's hard enough sitting comfortably for an hour when people elbow me because they think they own the middle arm rest and beyond into my space.
Wish the newer trains (and the next gen ones coming in the next decade) had single seats. Rather unfortunate.
His blog post: https://bestburgerinnorthwestlondon.wordpress.com/2013/10/24...
A Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/commuting-fro...
Considering the amount of fossil fuel that goes into flying, I don't think so. Commuting long-distance by plane is insane on that perspective.
So while she does have an arduous commute, she just chooses to get up even earlier which makes it sound more extreme than it is.
“Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon Musk
Google, Apple, Facebook all have the means to afford any possible telecommuting technology, yet they also bus their employees 40 miles south from San Francisco to the office.
I have no doubt that telecommuting works well for some teams and some employees, but does it work well in the general case?
I don't think that encouraging spread out housing in large homes on large pieces of land is going to solve any energy problem. People still need to go out for food, errands, entertainment, etc. And single family homes in general are less water and energy efficient than more high density housing.
Traffic is a by product of the single family detached home and lack of transit options.
That's a small part of it. Traffic is also a byproduct of increased population, jobs consolidating into a few large cities, in the US, middle America jobs going outside the border (gotta move to cities), requiring workers to be in the office, even when it's mostly unnecessary, and probably plenty I'm missing.
There are plenty of large cities in the world where most people have reasonable (e.g. <30m each way on transit) commutes.
The problem with the US is that the infrastructure and regional/urban planning is largely designed to only support low-density development, with unscalable and extremely space-inefficient car transportation for every trip, so when population goes up beyond the capacity of key bottleneck roads everyone is screwed.
If you instead build subways, BRT, pedestrian friendly streets, and both office space and medium-density housing near transit corridors, then scaling is much easier by just adding more frequent trains/buses.
* The denser the area, the slower the transportation (by any mean).
* People in dense areas spend more time commuting than people in sparse areas.
* When you upgrade the infrastructure making transportation faster, people move farther, keeping their commuting time constant.
It's just that packing people around the same area is not a very good idea, whichever way you do it; there is no true solution to the problems it causes.
There isn’t really a “good idea” alternative to packing people around the same area; higher density is dramatically more cost-efficient for providing the same quality of public services and infrastructure and the same kinds of employment opportunities.
The question then becomes: if n people are going to live in the metro area, where someone in any nearby housing might plausibly work at any nearby job, what is the most convenient and effective way of organizing the space? The answer is: put a high density of housing and jobs directly next to transit corridors, so that many people can find work within a reasonable commute from their house (or can find housing within a reasonable commute from their jobs) without creating traffic bottlenecks. If instead you follow the LA model where density is mostly uniformly low, and commuting is via low-bandwidth freeways, then what you end up with is people living 2 hours from downtown and leaving home at 4 AM every day to beat the traffic, and other people stuck crawling down the highway twice a day.
It is demonstrated at this point that sprawl results in traffic pretty quickly, while dense cities with good public transit have a much smaller commute time (e.g. NY, London).
In places like Manhattan you could walk to work on Manhattan, so other types of transit is a convenience rather than a necessary.
I think you mean “symptom”. The root cause is corporate refusal to spread out and use some of the wide open space in between the coasts.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/health/longer-commutes-health-...
If you're going to spend 3 hours commuting, that wouldn't be a bad place to do it.
Could just/largely be a case of controlling forces leeching off workers?
> “I chat, I sleep, I listen to music, my mind wanders, I think about the past and the future,” Cherry says as the train from the land of affordable living arrives on time, halfway through another day of compromise.
So she does sleep sometimes.
[1] https://github.com/HackerNews/API [2] https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/15943530.json?pri... [3] https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/15943534.json?pri...
Trains manage to do that in most countries, given a few minutes walk to and from a station.
I don't commute now but I used to commute two hours in the UK, and I walked 3 minutes to a train station, and then took a couple of trains all the way, and then a 3 minute walk at the other end to my office. And I lived in a small village not a major area.
Why can't they do it in the US?
Take just the Northern California region, then, around the same size as the UK. Now there's no argument about size difference. The population is around a third of the UK, so while that's less and so lower density, it isn't a crazy difference and the major areas of population themselves where you need the stations are high density.
I can go from any city in the UK, to any other city in the UK, via a couple of trains pretty effortlessly. Why couldn't that be replicated in an area of the same size and more of less the same population, in California?
Why can't it be replicated just in the Bay Area even! Why aren't there lots of trains there?!
1.) The Bay Area is made up of 100 cities and towns and several counties. There is not a single “Bay Area government.” Every single transit project has to be approved by several levels of government and funded by the state and federal government. Moreover, that funding and consent has to last for decades to keep the project on track. It rarely does. Every train line in the Bay Area was the result of a fight.
2.) Trains require density to be feasible. Density increases the supply of housing, driving down the value of existing single family homes. Owners of single family homes store a significant amount of their net worth in the equity of those homes. Municipalities rely on the property taxes from those high value homes.
3.) The Bay Area is not zoned for density. Trains will not catch on here because 60 odd years ago the people who designed the highway system did not consider the possibility that many people would need to live close together to make the place affordable. No one was thinking of affordable housing then.
But the density of even the wider Bay Area region (the CSA) is higher than the entire UK! How come that's dense enough for lots of trains in the UK but not dense enough for trains around the Bay Area?
If we change the policies that ruin the cities and design them around the human and not the car, we can make transit work more.
Well yea, density is what enables a transit-centric, and American having an intense phobia of density is part of what makes them so car-centric.
And then comes these patronising messages "This [Chrismas|Easter|Weekend|Holiday] I am working for you." I saw those messages for 5 years and still saw services going downhill.
One funny anecdote probably illustrates their lethargy. Station I used to board from was upgraded and platform extended to allow boarding from 10 carriages. This happened long before I started living their. But announcement always said only 9 carriages will open. I lived their for two years and same message was played everyday.
[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/a-year-of-excuses-to-rail-ag... [2] https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/check-before-y...
Blaming transit workers for system performance is also pretty controversial; most would probably attribute that to incompetent management or stingy taxpayers?
”The train leaves at 4:43 a.m. and Cherry, 60 years old and a couple of years away from retirement, rides it all the way to the final stop, more than two hours away. That’s Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Scheduled arrival time: 7:05.”
It's not legal to camp in your car in a parking place but with a self-driving car, people can just sleep in the back while the vehicle drives aimlessly around.
If this process makes traffic go very slowly, so much the better - less gas spent and a gentler ride.
I was being a bit facetious above and aiming to show the multiple contradictions that seem to be in play in the idea that self-driving cars could solve the interlocked high-rent/absurd-commute problems.
I mean, sure, maybe the final absurdity is going to be a mass of people telecomuting from the back of their self-driving RVs as these inch along in some random location but maybe the complex will fall to pieces before this.
B. Such a claim would require all current cars off the road. How well do you think anyone could manage that? In any car-using nation, including Asia, there's a huge investment in current cars and ending that would be harder than simply introducing self-driving carts.
C. Even 2-3x the capacity can be used up quickly if people are willing to waste it and self-driving cars have much less incentive for not sitting in rush hour traffic than regular cars - which already spend a lot of time in rush hour traffic.
B. See autocratic country claim. China has done this before with certain cars in certain cities (e.g. breadbox vans). Japan deprecates all cars after around 5 years to make them basically unusable. Singapore has that $60k car plate thing going on that I think only lasts five years.
C. People told me LA traffic was bad. When I moved there from Beijing, I thought I was in paradise. Same with Seattle, the USA does not have traffic problems, at least relative to China; the problems are just at different scales. Also, taxi ridership is much much larger in these countries (it isn’t unusual that every other car on the road is a taxi). Enforcing self driving only on the ring roads would already be a huge win; capacity is easily controlled already by plate lotteries.
That would require some central control for whatever resources the transport system use (road, car position, etc).
Just about all the profit centers for cars and transport today hinge on entities that just control some parts of transport - so prying loose their hold would be quite a challenge. We shall see.
Self-driving car can't beat physics. In case of an accident everything inside will fly continuing direction of movement. Including the passenger. There will be no two couches facing a table. Because in case of an accident the face of a passenger sitting facing the back of the car will be hit with: his book, his hot coffee and opposite sitting passenger's laptop.
And then another data miner will discover the bulk of the traffic time is spent on traffic, so they will buy land to create a right-of-way lane to optimise the commute times.
Finally, the Ouroboros eats his own tail by creating a private subway system.
Commuter train cars generally weigh about a ton per 3 passenger seats, but packed-full cars are considered uncomfortable. So a pod weighing 600 kg would be equal in weight per passenger to a train car where everyone sits alone on a double-seat place. Which is a pretty reasonable comfort standard. An EV pod could also be charged in the train during the journey, so you would have its full range available at both ends of the train journey.
With the disclaimer that this was just a fantasy and probably shouldn't be taken too seriously.
The title is off by a factor of 2.
3 hour commute.
It's assumed that a commute is both ways. "Commute" is not used in the way the headline uses it.