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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

I live in NJ, about 4 miles away from my office in Manhattan and I have a 45 commute. Can anyone figure out how to solve that problem? It's a lot of fun to kill the afternoon talking about something that's never gonna happen. In the meantime, millions of people are wasting days a year crawling to and from work.

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Get a pushbike. Persuade everyone you know to get a pushbike. Make them persuade everyone they know to get a pushbike.

Start a campaign for people to only use their cars if they i) Have to or ii) are travelling over 10 miles.

Make workplaces have facilities for cyclists. (Perhaps going as far as treating car-parking spaces as a taxable perk). Make schools have facilities for cyclists. Make shops have facilities for cyclists.

Persuade the bad cyclists to stop being idiots. etc.

There is a river in between. You would need to bike up to the George Washington assuming he lives in Hoboken and commute to Midtown. Either way you go from a 45 minute commute to maybe a 2-3 hour commute if you are lucky. Even worse since now using a bike his commute is ~20 miles instead of the 4 in the first place.

Excuses... I don't even live in NYC and yet it took me 1 minute to find a better option: take the ferry (bikes are allowed). http://goo.gl/maps/ssB0.

I bet on a good day you can cycle this route under 30 minutes including the ferry ride.

That'll cost 3x more than the bus, and it doesn't scale.

http://www.nywaterway.com/hoboken14throute.aspx

There are hundreds of thousands of people who cross the river every day. Thanks for taking 1 minute. Can anyone solve the real problem?

Monthly bike pass is surely cheaper or comparable to whatever he is paying for parking. I solved his problem.

You are responding to me, the person whose problem you think you solved. I take a bus that costs $98/month. The ferry is over $300 for a monthly pass. If I want to take the ferry tomorrow, with my bike, for example, it'll be about $20 for a daily round trip. My best option would be to taking a folding bike so I can take a train. That would work on nice days.

However, what I'm really asking for is to solve the problem for the millions of commuters. It's crazy that people waste so much time commuting.

Cycling does not work for you because of your weird river situation.

Cycling is a solution for the millions of people who have commutes of 4 miles without rivers in between. It's a solution for most people in most other situations.

I did the NJ->NYC commute for a couple of years (Parsippany->Soho, 1.5 hours door to door). It was pretty awful. I'm really glad our governor nixed the idea of building another tunnel.

If its only taking him 45 minutes he's probably not driving in and parking, he's probably taking mass transit on a system that is quite overloaded. So no, you didn't solve his problem, but nice try.

> Can anyone figure out how to solve that problem?

4 miles? Why don't you walk or cycle?

I live in NH and walk to work every day. 4 miles would make a good jog/walk too if you are looking for more exercise time (depending on what you take to work with you).

You can't cross the hudson easily.

that's an easy problem to solve. you could either

  a. move your home closer to work
  b. move work closer to your home
  c. move both

you're traveling 4 miles, across a river, into one of the most densely populated cities in the world. there's bound to be some friction. that said, you could probably live 4 miles away in brooklyn or queens and be at work in 15-20 minutes.

That's simple solutions, not easy ones.

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