Readers' tales of extreme commuting | Hacker News Reader

Readers' tales of extreme commuting

bbc.co.uk

62 pointsarethuza90 comments

Back on those halycon days where they'd actually let me leave the office before 11:30 PM, my salaryman schedule was hitting the last subway at approximately 12:05 AM to hit the last train at 12:30 AM, which got me into Ogaki at 1:05 AM and to my apartment at 1:30 AM. If I was able to eat in 30 minutes, that meant I'd get 5 hours and 20 minutes of sleep and still make it in by 9 AM the next morning.

That's when everything went right and I could actually leave nice and early at 11:30 PM, though. When our schedule was not quite so lax, I got to trade the commute home for a much shorter commute to one of the local business hotels. Unfortunately, even shaving an hour off the commute would very rarely leave me with a restful night's sleep.

Dear reader, if you are offered this schedule, run screaming. It literally nearly killed me. By the end of my 3 years I was suffering blackouts on the return trip.

In the end, do you think the 15-16 hour work day was close to being as productive as two 8 hour work days?

I feel that in the end you will create more harm than good as more mistakes creep in during the later hours of the day which will then have to fixed the next day. (aside from your mental/physical health going to shit that is)

At the best of times, dear God no. At the worst of times, a week of 16+ hour days probably accomplished less than two 4 hour days.

You know how great your ability to debug a hard problem through multiple levels of a call stack is when you're so tired that you don't know what day of the week it is and cannot remember the name of any Java implementation of the Map interface? Yeah. Those were probably not my most productive days in my career. Now stick six months of them end to end.

Better question: does working a 15-16 hour day, day after day, result in higher productivity than 8 hour days?

I suspect that there are no creative/logical jobs where that is the case.

I doubt there's any work where this is the case. 8h to eat, wash and rest does not leave sufficient rest time for physical recuperation any more than mental, at least in the general case (I'm sure there are people at the end of the bell curve for whom it's sufficient).

I'm curious why you ever accepted in the first place? False advertising? And why you stayed three years?

A strong desire to continue living in Japan, where this is pretty much the societal expectation for professional work. I stayed there three years because I had made a commitment to do so to my bosses. They had staked their careers on "This wild unprecedented decision to hire an American will not blow up in our faces." They were scrupulously fair in their dealings with me, particularly in one way which is table stakes in the US but requires anomalously strong moral character to do in Japan, and so I tried to uphold my end of the bargain.

It seems like they killed you with kindness. My grandma likes to play the saint and guilt me into doing her bidding to this day, I've become allergic to this.

> this is pretty much the societal expectation for professional work

This alone almost entirely explains, to me, the negative birth rate in Japan. For people at optimum reproductive age (18-35), there's just no time.

With such a crazy work schedule, does that even allow you to enjoy the reasons/desire to live in Japan? I mean, how much time is left in a week to live your non-working life?

I am assuming here that these was when you were single..

It literally nearly killed me.

Is this related to the health issues briefly discussed in your latest year-in-review posting[1]?

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/01/06/kalzumeus-software-year-...

People spending 6 hours a day driving, I can't imagine that being good for anyone. I'm trying to find a way to say this without sounding obnoxious (it's their choice, after all), but the reasoning is so strange for some of these ("I drive 6 hours a day so I can run on the beach"? Just drive to the beach to run then?)

It's difficult to read "I've worked out that the travel is exactly the same as the cost of renting in London - so therefore a better option" as anything other than confused or deluded.

Living in London costs the same in terms of money but significantly less in terms of time spent per day?

I feel that lot of Brits have trouble seeing the bigger picture and focus on one aspect. Commuting is one instance, where people disregard time and only focus on housing costs. That might be overly general, it's my experience of them, though. (I'm English)

Not just Brits. I've known people to commute into Washington, DC, from West Virginia and from Pennsylvania. Back when the housing bubble was going, the NY Times had an article about people commuting into NYC from Pennsylvania.

It depends. If the commute is your "me time" then it can work out. My commute (by train) is my quality reading time for example. Some people like audiobooks. Of course there comes a tipping point.

Just have some "me time" at home?

Sitting in a car, you can't feel guilty about not doing the laundry / mowing the lawn / painting that fence, so in some ways "me time" can be better in the car. I wouldn't listen to as many podcasts/audiobooks if I didn't have a 1/2 hour commute each way.

There's something enjoyable about being on the train, for some people anyway. Seeing the countryside go past, and meeting a variety of people in an environment where socially it's ok to talk to strangers but also ok if you don't want to.

> socially it's ok to talk to strangers but also ok if you don't want to

I'm guessing you don't live in London, and if you ever visit, please don't start talking to the rest of the passengers.

I do, actually. Even in London it seems like it's ok to talk to strangers on trains (e.g. Thameslink), just not on the tube. Or the overground. It'll be interesting to see what becomes the standard on Crossrail.

Fair enough, I hadn't considered Thameslink: I'm more used to the tube, and would never, ever dare talk to anyone!

I can understand trains a bit more: you can do other things. But driving is a slightly active experience, and at least you can sleep in the train if you need to.

I found that living in w2 was cheaper because I could travel on a zone 1 bus pass instead of a tube pass. The inner city council tax is also much cheaper than outer suburbs. The trade off was a much smaller place, but this was balanced by proximity to the parks and many places to eat out.

But the real bonus for me was when I scoreda job around the corner and had a five minute walk to work. I had tons of free time others could oly dream about. Of course I understand that people with families need rooms ad schools and the rest.

My time has always been too precious to spend commuting.

Even more confusing: Unless his accommodation in Lancashire is completely free, then living in Ramsbottom and travelling to London is significantly more expensive than just living in London.

I posted this as 6 hours driving (3 hours there and 3 hours back) is a pretty typical time I spend to go skiing at Nevis Range from Edinburgh and after doing that I'm pretty tired the next day and it's not the skiing as I can ski all week in the Alps and not get that same kind of stressed tiredness (even allowing for uplift in Scotland mostly being surface lifts and therefore no chance to sit down).

I'm happy driving 6 hours in a day for something like a day at Nevis Range, which is awesome on a good day, but doing that to get to work, every day - that would kill me!

"I've worked out that the travel is exactly the same as the cost of renting in London - so therefore a better option."

If you don't factor in the fact that you would have 4-6 hours of extra time at your disposal every day. But what's time, its practically limitless right?

One positive is that you could rent/buy a much larger property outside of London for the same cost.

Or a nice car, because, lets face it, you'll be spending more time in your car than in your house.

There is no such thing as a "nice car" with respect to long distance travel. They're just not optimized for it.

Maybe when the cars drive themselves the situation will change a bit.

I disagree, the luxury and grand tourer segments are much nicer to spend extended periods of time in than say, a sports car with a heavy clutch.

> I'd do the train journey in one and a half hours but it cost 250 euros (£208) a day

That's certainly correct if you always pay full price (~90€ each way in 2nd, 140 in 1st), but not if you use frequent user programs. IIRC thalys has a "premium" pass between Brussels and Paris with a flat 30€/way (in 1st unless train full, so you get a fairly large seat, a meal, slow wifi and a ~100W 220V plug), specifically for commuters.

As a bicycle commuter in an extremely bicycle-unfriendly city, I expected "extreme commuting" to mean something other than "spend 6 hours a day sitting in a 2-tons tin box polluting the environment"...

I wonder how much pollution is generated to make the bike. This is a genuine question, I don't mean to quarrel. I'm certain that car is polluting far more then bike of course.

There is certainly some from the paint and the tires (mostly oil right?). I wonder what else?

EDIT: The initial text was stating that a bike pollutes more then a car which is obvious shit. This is just my english at its finest. I'm sorry for this.

Making a bike pollutes more than making a car? Not even to mention usage pollution itself (which I primarily had in mind)... Also, just compare a lifespan of a car vs. a lifespan of a bicycle. I have several bicycles, the one I use mostly is around 20 years old, I have others considerably older than that, still functioning perfectly.

Yeah, there's no way making a bike pollutes more than making a car.

However, there's a slightly more interesting analysis to be had if you consider that car fuel is way more efficient than bike fuel (human calories). So maybe, just maybe, a sufficiently poor diet can cause riding a bike to work to be worse for the environment than driving.

Although there are outliers with super-bikers riding 20 year old bikes for thousands of miles per year, joe 6 pack average dude finds bikes are extremely high maintenance demands per mile, expensive to maintain per mile, and make 1970s detroit iron look reliable and long lived.

I have a "Giant" from 1992 and I am not a serious bike rider but I believe I've purchased more tires for the bike than for my car, despite commuting probably 100x further in my car. Bikes are a serious headache to maintain compared to a decent car.

If someone could design a bicycle that lasted as long as a car for normal users, that required as little maintenance as a car for the first decade or so, that was as reliable as a car, that blew out tires as rarely as a car, then it would be one heck of a bike... unfortunately due to lack of economy of scale and having almost nothing in common with conventional bike design, it would probably cost almost as much as a car...

Such bikes do exist. Unfortunately people's expectations of cost are skewed by cheap bicycle-shaped objects in department stores.

Look at nations that have cycling as a way of life. "Mama fiets" (apologies for potential misuse of Dutch language) are robust bikes for carrying children and shopping around.

There are puncture resisting tapes that can be applied to tyres.

Most people don't need fixed wheels, nor 20 gear derailurs, but would do well with 5 well chosen gears.

Aluminum frames (with modern welding and tube shapes) are light and robust. And probably a good use of recycled aluminum.

And people tend not to educate themselves about cycling. Having the seat post at the right hight makes a huge difference. Using the balls of the toe on the pedal and not the arch of the foot makes a huge difference.

Many people would be served well by a £500 bike and a book about cycling. Include a basket and some panniers and mud guards, with a can of spray lubrication and a few spare tyres and replacement chains.

I agree that cycle shops usually are not set up for this, and that the image of flourescent lycra is off-putting to many people; and that it would be great if commuting by bike was more accessible.

Ex bike repair professional here.

It's definitely possible for your bike to need way less maintenance than a car and to provide very few headaches.

In your case, I recommend that you buy very good tires. Most bikes have cheap tires, which dry rot. Some of my bikes have tires that are 6-10 years old and still working fine. They also cost $40 apiece back then.

In general, most bikes are designed for the recreational "joe 6 pack" market and are of poor quality. If you expect a bike to work well and last a long time, you have to pay extra.

It really depends on what kind of bike you buy. I have a steel-frame bike with hub gearing. It's never needed any repairs for 3 years, aside from tightening a bolt. It was really surprising to me that when I switched from using a derailleur to using hub gearing, I suddenly no longer needed to get my bike tuned every 2 months to avoid gears slipping. And when I got a steel frame, I suddenly no longer needed to worry about it bending out of shape all the time.

Sorry, it's very hard to even conceive the constraints and abstractions under which a bike would be worse for the environment than driving. First and foremost, riding a bike relies on sustainable energy (grow, eat, repeat). Cars are still far far away from being remotely sustainable.

Car vs. bike discussion may have (some) sense when it comes to commuting distances, adverse weather conditions etc.

All purchased food relies on unsustainable energy sources and nearly all food relies on unsustainable fertilization and other petroleum derived products.

I have a super minimalistic garden and grow some of my own salad vegetables in the summer but I'm under no illusions and 99% of my food calories come indirectly from crude oil and natgas.

My car doesn't burn biodiesel and isn't made of soy. The store is illuminated and HVAC by natgas and coal. The delivery truck from the warehouse doesn't burn biodiesel and isn't made of soy. The warehouse burns lots of coal for its HVAC and lights. The trucks delivering to the warehouse don't run on biodiesel and aren't made of soy. Assuming produce and not "processed food-like substances" the farm uses diesel to run the tractor and other gear, some coal powered electricity in the greenhouse, fertilizers made of phosphates dug out of the ground (what to do when they run out?) and nitrates made by the haber process outta lots of natgas. Also there may or may not be herbicides / pesticides / fertilizers made out of crude oil.

If your food is cheaper per "gallon" than diesel, its at least theoretically possible to make it with biodiesel and be net energy positive. If it takes 20 gallons of diesel equivalent environmental damage to make a gallon of walnut oil, then if you poured walnut oil into a biodiesel tank the system would rapidly run dry and halt.

Computer science types have a stereotype where the "halting problem" can't be solved for them so it can't be solved anywhere, although energy calculations are actually pretty simple (yes yes I know totally different type of halting its a bad joke). If (Energy Returned) is less than (Energy Invested) then the only way to keep pumping food out is to burn crude oil to make up the difference.

Depending what axe you have to grind, EROEI of food varies from 0.1 to 1. The truth is probably within that range, perhaps 0.3. A pound of fat (animal hydrocarbon, basically) is worth 3500 or so calories so the environment is better off if you burn two pounds of gasoline than if you eat a pound of food (aka equivalent of 3 pounds of diesel burned to make it) and bike the same distance.

Are you seriously suggesting that I polluted more by cycling to work (for the extra food that I had to ingest) than I would if I drove instead? Can you point me to some reading material which would prove that? Thanks.

I don't have enough datapoints but its quite possible.

One big problem is the EROEI of food varies so much. Kobe beef flown in by air from Japan as a bicyclist fuel is likely to be vastly worse than driving a typical car, yet eating home grown vegetables is likely to be better than driving a V8 crew cab pickup truck. No debate there. Are you better off eating a little more factory farmed chicken on factory farmed rice fried in chemical plant produced psuedo-oil, or burning gasoline, well there's a debatable area.

You'd do best to google for EROEI and related terms. Warning that all reports in the field are highly politicized, so you need to average the archived stuff on theoildrum showing a 0.1 with some multinational megacorp astroturfed greenwashing campaign claiming a 10.0 EROEI.

There are no unbiased academic textbooks I'm aware of. Its all "The Peak Oil Myth Debunked" or the "Partys over" book and "Crude awakening" movie and there is nothing in between.

Generally the pessimistic treatments do a good job of science and engineering and math and do a bad job of politics, economics, PR and emotional response. And the optimistic treatments do the obvious swapped topics. So if you critically read both and pay attention appropriately, you'll come out with the best of both (try not to mess up and end up with the worst of both sides LOL)

For just one book, you could do worse than read Kunstler's emergency book. Not because its perfect or even because I agree with all of it, but because it is extremely content dense WRT listing the many inter-related systemic problems. It makes at least passing mention of almost all issues, and at least one sides thoughts about it, regardless if you agree or not. I don't think the "other" side has anything near as information dense, that I know of.

2 pounds of gasoline is about 1/3 of a gallon. So a charitable 20 miles of car range.

3 hours on a bike at a somewhat moderate pace isn't going to be more than 2000 kcal. Of course, animal fat is like 10 times less efficient than directly eating the vegetable calories.

I guess an electric car that recycles well might end up beating the bicycle though.

You think making a bike is /more/ polluting than making a car?

You are certain a bike generates more pollution over it's lifetime then a car? Or only in the manufacturing?

A worthy third option is "per mile".

I got 160K in 16 years out of my last car. It cost about $20K. I figured its total lifetime cost including gas and what little maintenance it needed at thirty five grand. So figure about 20 cents per mile. That's cheaper than average, then again it was more of a beater of an old car that most would tolerate. Mechanically fine, but cosmetically a mess. So yes twenty cents per mile is not totally ridiculous.

Being a purely recreational biker I suspect I've only got 1K or so miles on my "Giant" bike from 1992. It was about $300 but the way tires decay (why so much faster than car?) and general minor repairs I'm sure I'm in for $500 by now. So I'm paying 50 cents per mile, or about 2.5 times more than my commuter car costs the environment.

Worst of all, being a recreational bike, I've caused $500 worth of environmental destruction just for fun when I could have meditated or bird watched or gone hiking. And if you get rid of the recreational bikers, that's a large market segment so costs and enviro-damage will increase. Aside from the obvious win of get rid of recreational bikers, well, they'll just drive to the mall with their new spare time or whatever.

I'm sure I could game the numbers and if I had a recreational car and a commuter bike the numbers could be made to look different. One problem with a commuter bike is the weather only cooperates about 1/3 of the year, and my car goes easily six times faster than my bike, making the commute punishingly impossible.

I'm not entirely sure what your point is here? The pollution generated by making a bike will be orders of magnitude less than the pollution generated by making a car.

Following on from that, the pollution generated from day to day upkeep will be less as well (when was the last time you had to change the oil on your bicycle?)

Lastly, the energy required to power the bike (the energy that you provide), is a bit of a sunk cost, you need to eat to stay alive after all, and while you _might_ need a little more, it's still not going to be equivalent to driving your car to work and back every day.

Orders of magnitude? Doubt it. Check out http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/energy.html - while biking is typically more efficient than driving, it's not orders of magnitude. If you play with their calculator, you can find that driving a 50 mpg car and riding a bike really fast both have about the same carbon emissions. This is just from factoring in increased food consumption.

Your link doesn't mention the resources used in the production of either a bike or a car.

Thanks for sharing that link. It's interesting to think about this. I don't agree with the conclusions, though.

First of all, your metabolism isn't going to stop (assuming you're still alive), so it's not really fair to say that those calories you burned wouldn't have been burned if you hadn't biked. I exercise a few times every week. If I bike less, I just have to do more exercise, but i burn about the same number of calories.

Secondly, most bike trips are short and relatively low speed. Biking encourages you to explore your local area. Lower speeds mean lower wind resistances, and shorter trips obviously make the mileage considerations a lot less important. I really don't think I'd be willing to travel more than a few miles by mike, since I don't want to spend hours in transit.

What do you mean by "I'm certain that it is far more then what car needs"?

Let's guess that a car weighs about 3000 lbs, and then let's guess that a bike weighs about 20 (obviously there is large variance). Mining or producing all those resources produces pollution, we can even generalize it to be similar levels of pollution. The 3000 lbs. of raw materials times the pollutant level will, by far, be the dominating factor in the 'how much pollution did creating this thing create' equation.

A bicycle will have a smaller carbon footprint when it's made (reduction of material etc) than a car, and lower carbon emission costs as it's used. A car in theory if it's well taken car of can be used for decades, as can a bike. A car will need regular oil changes, new fluids (brakes, etc), new components as parts fail, more equipment is required to work on it. A bike will require cleaning, oiling and maintaining, new tyres as and when needed (probably about the same time scale as a car), but has less components than a car and generally requires fewer tools.

Overall whilst a bike isn't carbon neutral to make, it'll produce less over it's life time.

my guess would be that bikes contribute to the pollution by slowing/congesting the traffic (even with a bike lane it means taking driving space away from cars - adversely impacting the flow of cars).

Home is where the heart is. Most long commuters I know do it because they have a significant other at home, and that seemed to be the case with many of the subjects in the article.

There are far fewer cases in the developed world of a long commute resulting from a disparity between rents at home vs near the job site. It's not unheard of however, as evidenced by the one guy who lived 3 hours outside the city and commuted in because the cost of renting in London is the same as travel (and presumably cost of living would provide additional savings, even at such a high opportunity cost).

My situation is a bit odd because I have a good job in the suburbs but I enjoy living in the city with my SO, so I reverse commute. It is cheaper and less crowded, but it still takes time, and combined with study, side projects, and enjoying life, it makes for long days, and I feel it beginning to wear me down after two years so I may look for other work. I feel like a wimp compared to the people in the article however however, as my commute is a mere 3 hours round trip.

I commute 6 hours per day and don't want to move "because I'm a fanatical skier, I live half an hour away from a chair lift." I might have gone with: move 30 minutes from work, and then get to ski/spend an extra 22 hours a week with my family.

I can't believe people don't put more value into a short commute when buying their houses. Why do people say "I could get an extra 1000 square feet of house for my money" instead of "I can do what I want with an extra 10% of my life by living closer to work"?

If that were his only reason, I'd agree, but his very next sentence is, "My wife is an English teacher which she enjoys and we have a great group of friends so it would be selfish to ask to move again." In other words, it isn't just the skiing. His wife also has a job in the area and they are socially established there. And from the sounds of it, they've moved a fair bit in the past.

Children can affect that decision significantly, particularly when it comes to finding good schools and a good neighbourhood in which to raise kids.

But in general, I agree with you. My current client's office (I'm a contract consultant) is 20 minutes walk from home, across the Thames[1] and I'm really the option of getting home before 6pm.

[1]: From my walk to work this morning: http://twitter.com/JackGavigan/statuses/422671719145295872

Children also like to see their parents from time to time, so the extra time works, too.

There was a study some time ago stating that there is a reverse relation between the time one spends on commute and happiness. The more time you lose in the commute, less happy you are. Maybe this is something you can do for an year or two, but I can't imagine doing it for 10 or 20 years.

On the bright side - maybe these people will be amongst the first to adopt self-driving cars. I even can go so far into the future to imagine that there is only one means of transport - self-driving, electrical, shared cars. You just order one from here to there, it comes from the parking lot nearby, takes you to your destination and finds another spot to a parking lot nearby. Clean, fast, reliable, able to schedule the travel in non-congestive way. Hm but the thing is that the buses/trains can have far more people per space, so maybe the electric, self-driving buses will be the answer to our needs in business districts on a weekday.

Personally I expect self-driving cars to solve the unsolved last mile.

Most mass transport today relies on the hub and spoke model. Get yourself to the nearest hub where there's efficient, speedy, and frequent transport to another hub, then get from the destination hub to your actual destination.

We've got the middle bit solved pretty well. Even the relatively slow, pokey commuter trains are plenty fast compared to driving. The main issue is how to get to/from such hubs.

Park and rides are one thing, but parking capacity is always the limiting factor. Park and ride lots fill up fast during rush hour, and their physical space also creates a dead zone around the hub and inhibits local development.

The most common last-mile solution today are buses. They suck in a horrible way.

IMO in the "self driving cars are universally available" future, we won't see many long-distance trips with cars at all. Instead, the vast majority of trips will be to/from the nearest transport hub where you catch something much faster and much more efficient.

I did maybe 4.5 hours commute a day for a few months (bike - train - bus). The worst part is, you leave so early and get home so late that you can never do any errands where you live. Especially when banks etc. are closed on the weekend. Also when you start thinking about how much time you're wasting per week it gets depressing. On the train I could at least browse the internet and play games and read. Sometimes do work but it's not really still the same as being home to relax for that time.

I remember reading of a businessman flying his own Cessna from Atlanta to Houston every day, which seemed like a fine way to combine a hobby, living with family and friends, and an otherwise unbearable commute through a commercial airline.

Never been to Atlanta, however I couldn't help but think of this in the context of how impossible I've heard it is to walk anywhere in that city :)

My goal is to do this eventually. I live within walking distance to a small air strip at a mountain resort, and my office is within walking distance to a local air park. I wouldn't have to use a car at all.

I telecommute most days, but it is two hours by car through DC traffic when I do visit the office.

Consider the group (R,+). Now that's extreme commuting.

Well played, Abel.

I once remember reading about a guy who commuted from Bridgeport or some other Connecticut city to Boston every day. It was about 3 or 3.5 hours each way in his pickup (this was in the era of cheap gas). Then I saw this article (1):

SIDNEY, Maine -- Boston commuters who grind their teeth during the patience-fraying gantlet of exhaust-shrouded traffic and bad etiquette should consider the case of Stephen Jordan. The way to work could be much, much longer.

Jordan, a retirement fund analyst in Boston's Financial District, commutes 340 miles a day, 1,700 miles a week, from a 15-acre spread outside Augusta that he praises for its proximity to nature and ultra-affordability.

But there is a price: Jordan spends nine hours a day on the road and the rails, leaving his house at 4:15 a.m. to drive 62 miles to Portland and ride Amtrak's Downeaster train to North Station. After an eight-hour workday and a long trip home, Jordan opens his door to greet his wife at 10:15 p.m.

Jordan's story is 10 years old, and I would be very surprised if he had managed to keep it up ... but he did note that he was able to get a lot of work done on the train.

1. http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004... (Complete ungated text here: http://www.urbanplanet.org/forums/index.php/topic/2082-340-m... )

8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 2 hours leisure... I have no idea how people live like this!

Most probably convert some of that commute time into leisure. Audiobooks, podcasts, radio possibly.

It's hard to enjoy a book when you're constantly scanning the highway for things crossing the road, or slowly inching up a lane of traffic. The concentration required for driving detracts from the audiobook experience. It's often better than driving in silence, but I'd hardly call it a replacement for leisure time. I reckon most people would rather be home.

I've found non-fiction audiobooks to be good when you can't devote full attention. I do find that fiction audiobooks are ok on interstates, though, for especially long drives.

Those two hours can probably be struck off. Getting ready in the morning and evening, eating, and maybe an errand and that's gone.

Makes me wonder if these people are running from spouses they don't want.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-02-27/

Most definitely. Many people I know basically develop a relationship with the office because the relationship with the spouse is that difficult / messed up. As a person working from home, I have to sympathize with them : it takes a lot of work to keep a good relationship and working away from your spouse / significant other for n hours a day certainly makes sense. I suppose the problem is when n becomes greater than 8!

I used to spend 3-4 hours on commuting per day, but I didn't consider this extreme, as many of my colleagues lived outside the city and spent up to 6 — this is unfortunately common situation in Moscow, especially for those who use their own cars instead of trains and subway.

Then I chose a small apartment in the city center instead of a bigger one on the outer rim. Now I live in 20 minutes walk distance from the office. If I'm running late, I catch a cab and get there under 5. I feel much more relaxed and have more energy; overall, I think it was one of the best decisions that I made in my entire life.

Sadly enough, the average commute time in Sao Paulo (Brazil) is 4h daily.

10 million people live here after almost a century of chaotic, totally unplanned growth. Currently there are 7 million vehicles licensed in the city, with more than 1000 brand new hitting the streets daily (3.8 million considered "active").

At the peak hours, main streets look like parking lots - 500km of jammed streets is not uncommon on a typical day, worst if it is raining (and it rains a lot in summer). Public transportation is crap, so people prefer to suffer inside their own cars - at least they can sit, have AC and music (and even being forbidden, I see people watching television all the time). Sometimes after a big rain fall there are floodings and thousands of citizens can't even make home.

I'm lucky enough to telecommute (why do I live in such a hellish metropolis if I'm able to work from home is a very good question). Once or twice a week I go out for some meeting riding my Yamaha Tenere at 60km/h (40 mph) between the jammed traffic[1]. By average 3 motorcycle riders die daily splitting lanes like this, and yearly traffic kills are higher than the casualties at Bagdad and Afghanistan together (on both sides).

[1] http://www.mundomoto.esp.br/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/corre...

My friend used to commute from Bristol, UK to Munich, DE. Wake up at 04:00 Monday, drive to Heathrow, fly to Munich airport, get a lift to work, in by 13:00. Then do it in reverse on Friday. It's no 6 hours a day, probably a bit better, but still seemed crazy to me... Not cheep either

I had an ex-colleague who did the same thing from Brussels to London. Not as crazy as it sounds - half-hour walk to the train station, 3 hours on the train, 20 mins walk to the office in London, and she had a 30-min commute over the week while staying in London, so a total of around 16hours/week spent commuting - less than if she'd had a 1 hour daily commute.

For around 3 months I had a commute of 5~6 hours a day. It involved bus, train, subway and a small part walking (~15-20 minutes) During the same time I was getting my driving permit, so I was adding time to attend classes, etc

It was pretty awful, I had to wake up to catch the 4:30 bus most of days to be at work at 7:30, and then got home at around 8pm

Once I had car permit, I was able to reduce it to 1:30 each trip (if you avoid traffic jams), which is also bad, but felt like a huge improvement.

After 2 years in that situation (with a lapse in another work at around 20m by car), I'm now able to walk to work in 30 minutes. It feels AMAZING :-P

Several years ago Midas gave a Cisco engineer their "America's Longest Commute" award for his 372 mile round trip commute. [1] The craziest thing is that it seems he had been doing it for over a decade. I just can't fathom that. At some point an air taxi subscription or even a private pilot's license would become a worthwhile investment if you don't want to change the location of either home or work.

[1]: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/13/cisco_commute/

Its an interesting puritan relic that commuting is bad / wasted but driving a service truck around all day is just fine.

I used to work directly with guys who spent well over 80% of their working day driving trucks full of fiber optic, SONET, and router gear all over the countryside. If you've got one guy assigned to maintain four POPs each a hundred miles apart, you can expect to log some serious windshield time. This does nothing good to mean time to repair if a tech can be working on one problem and get called to a new outage over three hundred miles away.

I think if someone's willing to pay you to spend most of your 8 hour workday driving around then more fool them (unless you hate driving). But spending your own time on a commute is a waste.

I was aiming more at the "my body parts fall off and I feel like death if I spend more than an hour driving" or whatever, because I know field techs who spend a multiple of those commute times on the road without any real problem.

I'm not enthusiastic about my one hour commute, but I flextime and although paycheck / 11 hours is less than paycheck / 10 hours, I'm still pretty happy with paycheck / 11. With an hour lunch thats a 12 hour work day every day. The way to survive a decade or so of 12 hour days is to never work more than 4 in a row, with (at least) 3 off in a row.

My commute used to be 3 hours if lucky, closer to 4 on average, and once took 6 hours. After doing for 2 years I ended up switching to a job where I'm a remote worker and my sense of wellbeing and overall happiness is significantly higher knowing that when I wake up I don't have a commute lying ahead of me. Spending 6 hours of your life just traveling to make money at a job is as crazy as the people who think you need to work nothing but 14 hours a day, every day.

My commute used to be 'only' a little over an hour each way. Once I began my remote work, I became much healthier as well, both physically and mentally.

It's a shame not more organizations offer this option.

Reading this just makes me feel all the happier that my usual commute it is a 15 minute walk along the Amsterdam canals. (Although currently that is extended with, the horror, a 10 minute tram ride.)

I gladly pay the price for that in terms of less space for more money. At least have the time to enjoy being home, and not be exhausted or asleep while I'm there.

Doesn't this leave zero tolerance for incidents on the road? A 3 hour commute, could that not turn into 6 hours?

I think I can do without the penis measuring contest and enjoy my 2m bed-to-desk commute.

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