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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

New York has one of the worst commute situations in the country, with an average of 36 minutes each way. The US average is 27 minutes. People commuting two hours a day are extreme outliers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/realestate/commuting-best...

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Census says 10% of people have 1-way commutes over 60 mins. Not typical but certainly not "extreme outliers" either.

And that's just commute time, which doesn't include getting dressed for work, gassing up the car, etc. (sure, WFH doesn't completely eliminate those, but the difference adds up across the population)

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

I had a 60-70 minute door-to-door commute for several years. Fortunately about 45 minutes of it was on a train, with about a 10 minute walk on either end.

... Maybe? This might be a case where an average doesn't tell the whole story.

45-minute to hour-long commutes each way have been the norm for me pretty much the entirety of my 20-odd year career in Silicon Valley. For me the outliers were the folk who opted to live 2+hrs away to afford a single family home, and were still commuting in - some did it daily; some did it weekly, and couch surfed during the week.

(The other outlier was the fellow who parked his Airstream in the back of the company lot until they told him he had to move.)

I think discussions about remote work and commuting bring out people with unusually bad commutes. And probably people with unusually bad commutes are in social bubbles where they think it’s normal, otherwise they wouldn’t sign up for it. But statistically, they are unusual!

It's fair to say that according to your own sources that the average commuter according to census.gov loses between 250-520 hours per year commuting if we don't count the 125 they spent getting ready for work. I think pointing out that most people are closer to 250 is quibbling over less than meaningful details.

It's a huge waste.

2 hour round trip * 5 days/week * 48 working weeks/year * 20 years = 9,600 hours commuting. Assuming 16 hours awake per day, that's 600 days of your life over two decades.

One might observe that if that's not an outlier, it ought to be.

You gain time not spent preparing for work as well and its important to note that public transit is another thing entirely.According to the same census.gov report sourced by that article public transit riders consumed 47 minutes on average and that doesn't even tell the whole story because transit schedules NEVER align perfectly with your work schedule meaning if you don't want to be late you are always going to waiting 7-8 minutes for a bus and then arriving 15 minutes early.

An hour each way including waiting time is perfectly normal for anyone who has relied on public transit.

That 27 minutes of commute is most likely calculated from door to door.

It doesn't include the fact that when you're working remotely, you can just plop your ass on the work chair wearing whatever you slept in. Log in, check your messages and go make some coffee, prep the kids for school and maybe change into something smarter before the first meetings of the day.

You can also do chores while listening to meandering presentations on wireless headphones. If you're brave and cameras on isn't a culture in your company, you can do interactive ones by lugging your laptop or phone next to the dishwasher :D

I love when people point out wrong info just so someone can make a stronger claim that is essentially the same point. 1 hour a day wasted is still a lot of time.

Depending on how you make the journey, it isn't necessarily wasted.

For about a year I commuted around 30 minutes by train, from a station <5 minutes walk from home, and <5 minutes walk from the office. I liked reading books or the newspaper in the morning, and the same or staring out of the window on the way back.

It was a good transition between work and not-work. Driving requires too much concentration, cycling is somewhere in between, and working from home doesn't have any of this.

Every few months, generally if I feel I've been really unproductive, I'll walk home from the office (~50 minutes) just to enjoy the walk.

Is it wasted? Thirty minutes is honestly pretty fast for a transition as momentous as getting into or out of the workday.

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