In the Bay Area, 1-hour commutes are generally for older and apartment people. Younger family people are in the 2+ range.
5 hours round trip commuting a day is giving up over half of your prerogative time to simply shuffling from one place to another.
The Bay Area is lucrative monetarily and all, but there's just no world where that's worth it for me.
https://www.aaastateofplay.com/the-u-s-cities-with-the-most-...
- Be extremely well paid, and don't mind buying a $1.5m house that would go for $500K in, say, Pittsburg CA.
- Squeeze into an apartment.
- Buy near one BART station and find a job near another, e.g. if you buy right next to the Pittsburg station and work at Uber HQ it's 1 hour each way. This mostly rules out Apple, Meta, Google, etc.
Another way of course is if your colleagues bought homes at around the time of the market lows, but that was ~15 years ago, so they would not be young families.
... what?
You have to sign over most of your future earnings to the guy who's selling you the property, in exchange for (hopefully) getting the next guy to fork over most of theirs. The game is so hardcore that the pyramid scheme is as strong as ever.
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans....
Edit: also, the chart is too simple to know how they conducted and came up with the data.
Not sure there's just one right way to live though. I wasn't saying there is, just sharing some data to a discussion oblivious to the realities of most Americans.
In BCN for example commute would be most of the time ~15-20 minutes (walking+metro). Car would easily take twice as much.
Of course if you are living in urban sprawl and nothing is close and even getting something to eat requires "a trip" then yeah - door-to-door car would probably be "better"
So change my mind?
Just want to say that sitting in public transports I can do other things such as doing some work or reading a book. While sitting in a car feels terrible to me. 30 minutes of driving a car is a lot worse than sitting in public transport. Also, if I have to commute by walk/bike, I also feel much better.
In my experience that kind of activity was often not possible, especially in cases where one bus was late and I had go worry about getting to the connecting stop on time. Likewise I couldn't really read b/c I might get distracted and miss a connection.
This was all pre-Internet and of course pre-unlimited data plan. These days I might have a downright pleasurable experience on public transport listening to podcasts under those conditions. Except here in Seattle there are just too many maniacs on some lines.
I live outside Rome, Italy, my SO works downtown. It takes her 35ish minutes to get to work by train, it would take her way more than one hour by car.
Hell, it takes her colleagues living in Rome center often an hour to get to work on a 6 km drive.
The funniest thing was when I worked with a guy that commuted by train from Naples! That's 150 miles away. And he would still get back home quicker by train than people living in Rome.
I agree that kind of commute is insane, but maybe we don't all want to raise our families in shoe boxes (often surrounded by filth and crime) in the city centre (as if everyone in France lives in downtown Paris).
You may find that thrilling, but I don't. None of it.
The areas that received additional attention experienced a 20% reduction in calls to the police. The study concluded that cleaning up the physical environment was more effective than misdemeanor arrests."
> There is zero relation between filth/crime and living in the city centre.
Everybody should live in the context they prefer.
That being said, if the suburb dystopia was instead built around sensible public transport with good trains, metros and well planned gathering and commercial areas I could have some sympathy.
But no, everything is planned and built around the concept of owning and driving a car for everything.
Which is also why you end up having so many suburbs that are the facto dumpster ghettos, people not owning a car cannot even easily commute daily to a job available downtown.
Good public transport and proper city planning are some of the best social equalizers and life improving engines out there. For everybody, including and especially people wanting their own home rather than living in apartments (that by the way don't have to be small, albeit smaller dimensions have plenty of benefits too).
There are solutions but they are the hard “get people to buck all incentives and change their behavior for the common good” kind that take a lot of work.
At least, I can work remotely 2days+what ever I need depending of the day.
Over the years, I had met several workers who were doing 2h+ per leg commute.
I far prefer my current commute of walking downstairs. I could abide the 45 minute ride-and-walk commute if there were a legitimate reason I needed to be somewhere in person. No one would pay me enough to commute 5 hours a day.
the saving grace: whereas lane splitting (driving a motorcycle between two cars) is illegal in 49 states and grey-area in DC, it is outright totally legal in California.
Thusly those with interest and probably low anxiety and medium-high deathwish are exempted from traffic