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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

Longer commute time is highly correlated with unhappiness. I think scientists even determined a number for how much more you would have to earn to compensate for extra commute hours.

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Goodness is this true. Early in my career I worked some positions that were great career-wise, but terrible commute-wise. I simply didn't know what a difference a short commute made in quality of life. Over the years I went from a 2 hour commute down to a 20-30 minute commute and I couldn't really see going back. It really restricts that places I can look for work as I love where I live, but the tradeoff is worth not spending 2-5 hours a day stuck in my car doing really a bunch of nothing. There really is a limit to how much music and audiobooks you can tolerate day after day.

Autonomous cars can't come soon enough!

That will be nice, but it's still not a sufficient trade-off for duration in your day, unless your time spent in the autonomous car counts as part of your work day. I liked the idea of taking the train into the city instead of driving to my current job, partially because I had this fantasy about how I would be able to use my time on the train productively, as opposed to just driving.

But, the thing is, the train trip into the city is 1 hour, and the drive is 30 minutes. And the train schedule is dictated by people who work 8 hours in the office; taking an off-schedule train is a much worse proposition. So even though I gain the time on the train (which is probably not as valuable as I think it is) I still lose out on the rest of my life for having 1 hour less per day to spend completely electively.

So, yeah, I'd like it if my car drove me into work so I was free to do other things. But I would still value a 30 minute autonomous drive much more highly than a 1 hour autonomous drive.

I thought this, too, when I started a job in a city centre for the first time - great, I'll take the train, and get so much work done on my commute instead of driving!

No - it's impossible to work on a rattly, wobbly old train, standing up, or crushed into a seat with some guy's elbow digging into you. You can barely read a book or Kindle on there, let alone whip out a netbook and work. So it's just wasted time every day.

Pretty much. I've been experimenting with taking Amtrak from where I live in the east bay to the office in San Jose. The train is 2 hours each way, but it's like commuting on a cloud. I catch up on news or sleep in the morning, and finish my workday on the evening commute. it works because I can do 6 hours at the office and 2 productive hours on the train.

It does make for a very long day though. Between driving to my home station, taking the shuttle from the station to the office, the actual commute, etc, I'm up at 5:30am and get home at 6:45pm.

Connectivity is an issue too. Amtraks spotty wifi is fine for browsing -- queue up a bunch of tabs when the signal is good -- but it's terrible for anything else. Forget about ssh sessions or transferring large files or anything like that.

Over the last few years I've had jobs that had a 1 hour drive each way (which I hated), a 5 minute walk (which was too close) or a very pleasant 25 minute walk - which seems to be a sweet spot for me - allows me to listen to podcasts/audiobooks and have a gentle context switch to/from work.

I also like it if it is 20 to 30 minutes by bicycle. That way I already get some exercise in for the day.

Ah yes - I did have a job years ago where I had a 12 mile cycle to work (generally uphill and into the prevailing wind) and there was the opportunity to go for much longer offroad cycles in the Pentland Hills in the evening.

So far, this is great. Worried about winter, though.

I know, in my case, there isn't a direct 1:1 correlation between hourly rate and hour of commute. The calculation for determining that calculation (at least in the context of the study) would be interesting.

Do you happen to have a link? I would be interested in reading that paper.

This article summarizes some of the research, unfortunately no direct links to papers (should be google-able via researcher names):

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/05/your...

Found link to the commute-divorce paper, Erika Sandow Umeå University "On the road. Social aspects of commuting long distances to work.": http://umu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:415050/FULLTEXT01

An interesting article from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2011/02/h...

This article seems to have some links to papers: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7am/rational_home_buying/

I can't seem to find it now, but I seem to recall that dropping from 1 hour to 20 minutes was worth a 30-40 pct reduction in pay. http://www.quora.com/What-studies-have-been-done-on-the-effe...

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