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Comment by diziet | Hacker News Reader

Okutama, Tokyo is part of "Tokyo Metropolis". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okutama,_Tokyo . The furthest I've been is Hachioji, which was about 1 hour by train from 23-ku. Hachioji is roughly half as far as Okutama. In New York City terms, getting to Hicksville, NY takes about 1 hour by train. For Bay Area folks, both Dublin / Pleasanton and Bay Point / Pittsburg ... or even Antioch are about an hour away by BART.

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Not fair comparison, Okutama is literally in the middle of a mountain range with no much around, but you can get there combining a bunch of express trains in a very straightforward combination, which seems pretty hand-picked. Hicksville to NYC is 56km by car. Okutama from Tokyo Station is 96km.

I actually compared train-to-train distance to Hachioji, not Okutama.

Is 1 hour by train a reasonable metric to use given the differences in trains

yes, because we are measuring how satisfied the people will be with their living arrangements not how fast the trains are. As a person I don't care if the train is fast or slow I care how long it takes me to get home - if it takes me 1 hour to get home with a slow train or 1 hour with a fast train it is the same to me - I live 1 hour from work.

Almost. Take reliability of trains into account too. If you are physically closer you have backup options (buses, other trains, bicycle perhaps!). Sydney has such slow transport that if you need to make connections it can be quicker to cycle the same distance. The UK people live not just in suburbs but entirely different cities to commute to London, but using trains that if they go wrong - and they will - it’ll be long and/or expensive commute that day.

> Take reliability of trains into account too.

I think it's fair to say that Japan is the country in the world with the most reliable trains

Switzerland, but Japan is up there indeed!

> Sydney has such slow transport that if you need to make connections it can be quicker to cycle the same distance.

I believe that would come under the time to get home calculation. Aside from that all these other points would seem to be to Japan's benefit.

I'd say yes, an hour to work - while long - is pretty acceptable to most. Many caveats here such as reliability of transport etc but it does come down to time.

I think there’s an adage of urban planning that the median commute is always 30 minutes independent of how much transport infrastructure you build.

An hour commute to work is most definitely not acceptable to most, especially post-pandemic. Median commute in the US is about 26 minutes and many people are now used to working from home some or all of the time. Hour-long commutes are outliers for a relatively small percentage of people in a small number of cities.

Fair enough, my point of view may be skewed by living here for quite awhile

Possibly. But close to an hour commute (or more) is probably the reality most places if you work downtown in a city and don’t live within the city limits. Even within NYC getting to the financial district from Brooklyn or Staten Island is probably hitting close to that.

Average commutes in the US are brought down by urbanites who live close to the office and suburbanites who live a modest drive away from an office park.

The data does not support your statement. For example: https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute/

Sure, if you cherry pick the worst possible commutes in the worst commuting cities you're going to find pockets of ~1hr commuters, but the broader claim simply isn't true and is perpetuated by people who are themselves trying to justify their overly long commutes. The large majority of people value their time too much to put up with commutes over about 40 minutes.

That data for people commuting into cities seems pretty consistent with what I said. A minority have a less than 30 minute commute. A significant majority aren’t more than an hour. I certainly agree that more than an hour isn’t common though 10-15% isn’t nothing. I did that part-time for about 18 months and it really isn’t sustainable.

Also presumably the number goes up if you exclude people who live within the metro whereas I specifically excluded that group.

1 hour is a fair measure in my opinion, the average commute time is about 30 minutes in the US:

> In 2019, the average one-way commute in the United States increased to a new high of 27.6 minutes [27.6]

Which would mean the reasonable "maximum" is going to be about an hour one-way. Some will commute further but it'll drop off very fast. You can actually see it in action if you graph house prices on a map around an urban area; once you are outside commuting distance from the center prices start going down. People will still commute to the edges of the metro, but the numbers who want to decreases.

And a train can create "pockets" further away by mileage.

[27.6] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...

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