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Comment by lijogdfljk | Hacker News Reader

I like some of those, maybe 10% of the time (because i'm reasonably anti-social), but man it has to be really good to put up with a commute.

Wasting 1-2 hours of my day, with the potential to have it become a 4 hour drive once every week or two.. just way too rough.

I honestly don't get how people put up with commutes. Like, honestly and really. It feels like i'm just destroying any chance i have for downtime during the weekdays. Throw in chores, and oof. Plus i don't have kids.. i can't imagine having kids on top of a commute.

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I ride my bike to work. It's fantastic. Commute isn't a four letter word to me - I get exercise, time to think, I see my neighborhood and surroundings in a new way through all the seasons. I don't do it every day, sometimes I WFH or drive to work, but most of the time, 8 months out of the year, I ride my bike.

Someone is going to come along and say "BuT I dOn'T hAvE AnY bIkE pAtHs!" That might be true. Almost nobody has a bike path from their front door to their office. I sure don't. But if you stare at a map long enough, you'll find a way. It might mean you add a detour to ride a safer route. It might mean you have to drive half way. It might mean you take public transit half the way. I can't solutionize for everyone, but changing up your commute really changes things. It doesn't have to be such a miserable existence.

Not sure if you are in the US, but here what you are saying is absolutely not true for most people. Most of the country is so incredibly car centric that there’s absolutely no way you could bike 30 miles across a city. And then in most places the public transit is incredibly bad.

For example, I am a 40 minute, 30 mile drive from the city center. Most people in this area would consider that a reasonable commute. It would take 2 and a half hours to bike that distance in melting Florida heat and heavy aggressive traffic. It would take 2 hours by a succession of busses.

If I wanted to live a nice bikeable distance from the business center, I would pay dearly for it home price.

It didn’t have to be like this, but at this point we are so committed to suburban car-centric sprawl that there is now way back for most of the country and things like walkability, bike friendly and rapid public transit are going to remain luxury goods.

I'm in the US. I'm 10 miles from my work, in one of the eastern-most suburbs. I cross dozens of major stroads (arterials with HEAVY vehicle traffic) in my commute. The temps here in the summer are regularly 90+ degrees.

Solution? I got an e-bike. Again, I'm not saying everyone can bike the whole way. Take a bus for the first or latter half. It can be done if you actually want to make the change.

If I rode my bike to work, it would be 3 hours a day. Plus the 2 showers after each ride, packing extra clothes to change into, etc.

I’m happy to pick a job based on the commute. It’s not hard in the Bay Area to find something good and close. I’ve never had more than a 15 minute commute when living here.

I worked in Tacoma (Washington State) and the drive on I5 there could turn a 25 minute drive into a 4 hour slugfest. Worse yet, about once a week it would be 3 hour drive, almost without fail. It was awful.

I did end up with a 30 minute trip home today because of an accident blocking 3/5 lanes. But I guess that's not that bad of a worst-case scenario.

I rear ended someone last week near the end of a ~90 minute commute home (there was unusual traffic but it's still an hour minimum) and it really was the wake up call I needed to remind me why I was so opposed to working in my country's capital. At this point I think I'm ready to quit my developer job and take a 50% pay cut for any desk job with a reasonable commute (no developer jobs open in my country right now as far as I can tell).

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