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Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

Except that housing an hour out of NYC seems to be more expensive than the housing the article talks about.

New Jersey and Long Island are not more expensive than what the article talks about.

I don't know - an hour out of Penn Station takes you as far as places like Wyandanch on Long Island with the LIRR, or Stamford, CT with the MNR.

I specifically looked at Stamford when I wrote that. Tokyo is in the 350-600sq ft range by the article. You can currently get a fairly spartan 600 sq ft in Stamford for the price listed (one vacancy). That's more than the average the article cites, but in the same range.

After all, you'd have to compare the outskirts of Stamford with the outsirkts of Tokyo.

Well, yeah, if you take the commuter rail line along the densely populated coastline.

If you take the Harlem Line up to the middle of nowhere, you can get to Katonah in an hour on the express trains during peak hours.

And in the other direction, an hour out of Penn Station can get you about halfway across northern NJ even with extensive train traffic.

The theoretical travel time might be an hour, but we can't realistically compare the travel time variances between MetroNorth and Japanese trains.

Going to Stamford is maybe like 1 hour, with frequent catastrophic delays and problems, such that we can maybe model it as like 1.5hr +/- 20 minutes, whereas an hour on a Japanese train is like 1.01hr +/- 30 seconds.

Wildly different user experiences.

OK sure, but if you want to talk about wildly different user experiences, you also need to consider the likelihood of being physically rammed into the carriage by the platform staff so the doors can close when riding a rush-hour train out of Shinjuku station or whatever.

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