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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

3-4 hours a day commuting? I confess I used to bike to the office and that could take about 3 hours/day, but I could cut it down to a 2 hour/day by switching to an ebike. I also like biking. On my "work from home" days I would aim for an hour and a half ride every morning.

I can't imagine being in a longer commute that I didn't like.

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Sf Bay Area can easily exceed 2 hours each way if you aren’t willing to pay insane money on housing. It honestly made me wonder how low income people exist there at all. I did more than 2 hours each way for many years there but only by riding the train with a hot spot.

When I graduated college, the drive from Santa Cruz to 85 and Shoreline was about 35min at 730am. These days that is 90-120 minutes at that same time (think google/microsoft campuses). Many can’t afford to live close to those areas any more.

Low income people exist by either living with family or commuting insane distances from lower cost areas. I've met quite a few people who would commute from Tracy or Stockton to SF/Mountain View to work as janitors or food service workers at tech offices. It's brutal, especially when they're expected to show up in time to serve breakfast or open the doors.

That sounds insane to me. Again, I had a long commute by bike. Could have easily shed most of it by getting a car. Would have to shift off rush hour, but that isn't too hard to do?

Would love to see more data on this. Quick googling shows average commutes well below an hour. I'm assuming average is just not a good stat for this?

Some of the comments in here are all in on "I'm going to take half the money to work remote and not have a commute" but were apparently not on board with "I'm going to spend more of that double-salary to live close" which is a contradiction I find interesting.

(Obviously not everyone could choose to live closer without driving up the prices even more in the short-term, but the value of money-vs-commute compared to money-vs-remote doesn't seem directly comparable to many people.)

Agreed on that odd trade-off. I'm assuming an implicit love of extra space? Definitely not really rationally compared.

Even odder are the insistence on public transit or similar. I share the preference, but if time is valuable, a personal car or small car pool would almost certainly cut time.

Again, I used to bike about 3 hours a day. I can't really blame that on the job, though.

I used to commute 3 hours a day. Then one day I added it up and I was shocked to know that an entire month of my life was wasted in traffic. My year was essentially 11 months long. I quickly decided to change that and told my boss I wasn't coming in to the office anymore in 2 weeks, and he said I could work from home. This was in the mid-late-1990s, when 56k modems were the fastest available. I hated driving so much at that point, that I let the city tow away my shitty car because it had not been driven in 6 months, they thought it was abandoned. Good riddance! I haven't owned a car since the 90s. Currently I work for a totally remote company, we had a big remote workforce before the pandemic so it wasn't a problem for me to move away and keep working for them. There's no way I ever want to commute, or go to work inside an office ever again.

How do you like biking 3 hours a day? I'm starting a new job next year that requires me to be at the office most days. It's 40-50 minutes each way by bus or about an hour (if you're fast or with an e-bike) by bicycle, and I'm already considering getting an e-bike for the summer months for this. (It would be only 20-25 minutes by car, but I'm not willing to commute daily by car I think. I also just don't want to own a car in the first place.)

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