Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

I've met several people who in pre-pandemic times were commuting from beyond Sacramento to San Francisco, which is about a 4-5 hour daily commute. You'd be surprised how far some people will go to have both a good paying job and the house of their dreams.

View on HN

There are plenty of places between SF city and beyond Sacramento which would be just as affordable.

this kind of commute daily no less seems to be more of a stubborn personal choice than any economics forcing it .

Those dang irrational personal choices!

All models are wrong, but some keep your hopes closer

Almost anywhere in the world a one way 110+ miles commute one way is a personal choice that maybe makes sense to that person.

It is certainly not because of economics of rent or house ownership or any other reasonable criteria so not sure what point such personal outliers prove in this discussion

What the hell is the point? With that kind of commute assuming they work a full day they'll be home for a scant few hours a night sleeping (we hope, for the sake of other commuters) and the weekends for which they'll probably be dead tired.

Nobody actually does this commute 5 days a week, 45-50 weeks a year. It's either someone who does it sporadically but regularly (e.g. every other Monday or something for a few years) or briefly while finding something less insane (for a few weeks, maybe a month or two).

I had a job with an effective ~4-hour round trip commute, from one major city to another in both my car and a train, but only had to do it once a month.

I used to have a similar commute into NYC. I lived about a 10 minute walk from the train station and my office was another 10 minute walk from Grand Central Station. Round trip was about 4 hours. I did the commute about 3 days per week but saw tons of people on the train that did it every day. I saw a guy talking to the conductor saying it was his last time commuting after THIRTY YEARS. I imagine most of those people were driving to the train station and then taking another subway once they made it into the city, adding a considerable amount of time to the already brutal commute.

I only lasted a year before I went fully remote.

I take the 510 AM train from Albany to NYC about once a month. There’s a dozen folks who are on that train enough that I recognize them or chat with them. There’s a few who board at Hudson too.

It’s a mix of lawyers, construction guys and others like FDNY guys.

If I go into the city for a customer visit (not frequent/not rare), I'm 2 hours going in whether mostly train or mostly car. And about the same going home by train and maybe more like an hour+ by car.

I did have a job that was about 90 minutes door-to-door each way (train schedules were a bit better then) but even then "only" had to do it about 50% of the time. Wouldn't have been long-term sustainable.

The OP was referring to a 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year dystopia:

"Even if you don't want to live in your car that the pressure will still be exerted on you because you'll be competing with people that do."

Which is why so many folks are mocking the idea.

Now if only there were time to enjoy those things

Reply on news.ycombinator.com