I remember the day when the car I'd been driving in college finally broke down sufficiently that the various repairs exceeded the value of the car. By that time, I'd been working for well over a year, and my 18 mile / 25 minute commute by car was, for that one day, affected as follows:
1. I was working at NCEP at the time, which was still located in Camp Springs (off 495 Branch Avenue exit 5), which was about a mile away from the last stop of the green line metro. Walking a mile isn't bad, but it does add about 15 minutes to the trip.
2. Because of the way the green line is set up, taking the metro from college park to branch ave is in effect a 45-60 minute ride (nearly from one end of the line to the other end, even though the distance around the beltway is only about 15 miles, or less; the problem is, the green line makes a huge detour through DC).
3. This was compounded by the fact that I had to get to the metro station in greenbelt first. I could either walk there, which would have taken about an hour, or I could ride a bus--which, as it turned out, took 50 minutes to traverse the same ~4 mile distance. Why? Because a) it had to worm its way through the labyrinthine neighborhood of Greenbelt, with
very frequent stops.
In short, what took 25 minutes door to door on any given day before ended up taking ~two hours on the way to work. And for reasons I can no longer remember, getting back home ended up taking twenty minutes longer.
In other words, a total commute time of ~50 minutes (max) was turned into a ~4.5 hour commute due to having to rely on public transportation.
I also remember the specific reason why I went and bought a new car that same weekend (fortunately this happened on a Friday): it was the realization, upon arriving at home (after said ~2.5 hour commute), that I had forgotten my apartment keys at work.