I did this exact commute (Phillipsburg, NJ) to Port Authority for a few months when I first graduated college and was living with my to-be-in-laws.
It was grueling and miserable. I would wake up at 5:30, stand outside in the cold at 6:45, arrive at PABT at 9 to be in at work by 9:30 - 10. Leave at 6:30 to be home by... 10:30 , eat cold dinner in bed then go to sleep to start all over.
I broke down one day and couldn't do it anymore so I got an apartment in the city (It was harder than it sounds. Searching for a non-craphole place in a good area then throwing down like $6k just to get in. Yikes.)
I don't understand people who do this as a lifestyle. It is miserable and you spend an inordinate amount of your life on a bus: Get a new job.
None of my friends or coworkers grasp why. I sometimes don't either. At least if my train is late again, and doesn't show up for hours.
I guess a big part for me is where I came from, which is underclass. Expanding my radius allowed me to overcome pay gaps because I was able to find more companies who would hire me even with my soft skill shortcomings, which always showed my underclassyness.
Did multiple of these arrangements with 1h45 each way 5d/w, then 4h each way once/w, an exhausting 2h10 each way 4d/w, then 1h30 each way 4d/w. But on each job, I was able to renegotiate after some time and gotten more remote working days.
I do feel the wear and tear of it, but I've gotten exposure which in turn infused me with soft skills. Plus the reputation of the teams I've worked with opens more and more doors for me. Overall I've increased my income by 500%-600% and am in the top-10-decile income group of my country. The only reason I don't use that income now to move closer to my workplace is because in the meantime became a father and the kids will grow up in a quiet town with gradparents who have a farm.
And because of my exposure, I can now work 4d/w remote with highest pay I've ever had for work I'm overqualified for.
I can relate - commuted 2 hours from NJ into Brooklyn for a while.
At some point you have to ask yourself if that's the quality of life you really wanted for yourself. I never saw myself as a rat making a grueling trip into NYC for cheese.
So I decided to find a WFH gig and grow a company on the side (which is now my full time gig, paying me more than I was paid in BK).
I did this from Northern NJ to NYC. 2hrs each way by bus. Awful. The only benefit was that you almost (98%?) always got a seat. A small laptop and you've got 4 hrs of potential productivity on your own "time" for whatever you want.
But wow, does it suck away the joy from your life.
Did this for ~ 1 year. If you aren't driving and don't have to change buses or trains its possible to structure your life to take advantage of this personal time. While I miss that personal time, I wouldn't trade my current situation for it.
NJ is currently dealing with the NJTransit summer of hell too. Trains lose power, A/C and lights get shut off (sometimes while underground in the tunnel), tracks get closed and Amtrak always get priority anyway. I lived 15 miles from NYC and it would usually take me two hours door to door.
I'm on the train now. I take a very early train in and that's pretty reasonable. Then the extra time at work and the morning hacking have me pretty well satiated hack-wise. So then it's just time to space out on video, random phone apps, or if I'm a little motivated, coursera.
I agree with you. But in their defense, many of the people in the article have children. As a parent, I can understand why you would want to give your children a space away from the city. Some people are willing to make a personal sacrifice to improve the rest of the family's life.
I understand that as well. I'm not sure going from 2 parents to 1.2 parents is worth a yard though.
And there are other options, like taking another job in a smaller city. Running a small business in a suburb isn't sexy, but you can afford a yard and have time to teach your daughter about robots and be there when your son gets bullied on the bus ride home.
Not only the children don't get to see you, but neither your partner. American nightmare, I'd say. Relationships break, and all the grass in the world will not make up for it.
And kids are smart and pick up on things fast—a kid who sees their parent suffering through a grueling commute every day is going to absorb that as some kind of life lesson.
I've heard too many people justify a horrible commute and shitty job with "my dad did it, it put me in school and food on the table". If you don't absolutely have to, don't. It isn't a right of passage
It's not just a yard. This is declining now, but for example, for decades children's blood lead levels were correlated to their proximity to the inner city.
I grew up in a medium sized city and it was awesome! I wouldn't trade it for the world. Sure, I had to share a room but it really doesn't matter because I only used my bedroom for sleeping anyways. I had tons of access to other kids in the neighborhood [1] and kids are great keeping each other entertained. We also had access to tons of various public parks, playgrounds, and facilities in which to play. Most were a short walk or bike ride away. My days were filled with adventure. I would be bored spending my time alone in a backyard all day.
[1] The Jerry Seinfeld bit about making friends as a kid is on point - "Of course when you're a kid, you can be friends with anybody. Remember when you were a little kid what were the qualifications? If someone's in front of my house NOW, That's my friend, they're my friend. That's it. Are you a grown up? No. Great! Come on in. Jump up and down on my bed. And if you have anything in common at all, You like Cherry Soda? I like Cherry Soda! We'll be best friends!"
Why do parents think that being in the middle of nowhere is good for children? It might be good for small children, but as they get to their teenage years, many will undoubtedly hate it. Will these same parents move when their children get older or just leave them to suffer and ignore them even more with the convenient excuse of their super-commutes? It truly boggles the mind that parents don't realize that as their children get older, they will want to interact with others outside of their family and that their choices will severely limit this. Not only that, but being in the middle of nowhere severly limits their children's future job prospects. As one of the people quoted in the article says, “When the kids graduate from school around here, they leave.” Gee, I wonder why.
I would much rather spend a bit more time with children while not commuting (and I sure as hell don't want to be stay at home for years) then that yard.
Which is why distance from work was important for me as a parent.
My kids and dog have a yard to run in and wild animals, even coyotes that visit. Once had two ducks raise their ducklings in our pool. And if thats not enough room there is a golf course and two parks in walking distance. Each can have their own room.
Yea, my commute is worth it. And unlike you i've lived long periods in the suburbs, downtown in a large city, and even on a farm. The farm was easily best, suburbs a clise second, and city only good when you don't have kids.
I've grown up in cities, dense suburbs and typical suburbs. As a kid I loved the city and dense suburb way more. It's great to be able to walk or bike to school/friends places or the park and have independence as a kid. In the suburbs it's crippling not being able to go anywhere without having your parents drive you.
To put that in perspective, 700 sq ft (65 sq m) is above average total usable space in a London 3-bed two-storey house.
(75 sq m is the notional English average for a 3-bed, but in reality that includes bathrooms, hallways, stairwells, and other unusable internal space. When buying a house in London, I wrote a scraper that extracted room dimensions, and 55 to 65 is a much more realistic range.)
The UK is notorious for building homes with tiny rooms in my experience. I've often felt personally that the housing market there is too obsessed with bedroom count as a metric for comparison rather than actual usable square footage.
My father's house in the UK was built in last 10 years and promises 5 bedrooms, I've often thought that knocking this down to 3 and making reasonable sized rooms would have made for a much nicer home. I imagine it also would have knocked however many thousands off the seller's asking price as well though...
Oh I fully agree. My scraper made up a list of properties that could be sorted by a balance of commuting distance and size - I was particularly interested in a larger place given how small the standard is.
I ended up with a 3 storey, 4 bed 120 sq m town house with garden + garage 35 minutes motorcycle ride from my workplace, or 55 minutes if I have to take train + tube (which I very rarely do, because waiting for the train sucks if it's delayed or missed).
The finished square feet are tracked by the government, for tax purposes, and yes, they tax your bathroom and closet, even if it's shaped weird. Measuring and omitting those when selling your house would be a huge headache just for the purpose of ... screwing yourself out of potential buyers?
As a counter-example, for France anything under 5ft is not counted. Areas under the stairs, that edge area of slanted ceilings, areas above a loft can't be counted. You can include it but the official number is footspace that is standing height.
My realtor described it as everything under air meaning that if the space is heated or cooled, then it's counted. So the garage is out, but bathrooms and hallways and closets are in.
That's not exactly correct - part of my basement is heated/cooled but I'm pretty sure that doesn't count towards square footage (at least, the appraisal didn't count it).
Are you somewhere where people don't have basements?
Usually it's about finished vs. unfinished. I've never thought about whether my basement is heated or not. I mean it doesn't have radiators but that's where the furnace is and if the basement got too cold that would be problematic because of pipes. But it's very unfinished :-)
I don't think it's completely unreasonable, particularly in the case of bathrooms. Larger bathrooms (to a point) are nicer than smaller bathrooms, and that should be reflected in the square footage.
As a kid I'd rather have my parents around when I got back from school more than I'd want a backyard or more expensive clothes and toys.
People who think they're doing their kids a favor by commuting 4 hours a day to work 10 hours are at best misguided and most probably have a martyr complex.
Anecdataly ;) it has been my experience that they sincerely believe that they are doing it for the children, but are actually doing it to satisfy the socially scripted demands of their non-working spouses.
My commute is 2 hours and change, each way; I'm out of the house for a little over 12 hours a day. My job is flexible, so I can leave for work at a little before 9 and return home a little after; I can also work from home 1 day a week.
This amounts to being away from home ... about 50 hours a week, 60 when I go into the office all five days. Is this forum really going to tell me being out of the house 50 or 60 hours a week is excessive?
Compared to a parent who has to work 2 jobs, or who has a job that requires long shifts, or who has to be away from home for weeks or months, a well-managed long commute hardly interferes with a family life at all.
In the original comment, the person speaks about being commuting to work or at work literally all their waking hours. That's the scenario, not 50-60 hours a week.
I work 9-5 with a 30 minute commute and see my kid for about 2 hours a day during the week.
If you leave at 9 I imagine you get some morning time, so maybe that's your time (and you'd get probably roughly 2 hours there?). Totally cool if that works.
I grew up with a single mom who worked 60+ hours a week and I really only spent time with her on weekends. In retrospect I wish I had parents around when I was growing up. She didn't really have a choice, and she feels the same way I do about it — we wish it was possible.
I don't want to criticize someone's life and what works for them too harshly, since this is just my personal experience, but I've been on the side of the child and the parent in a situation like this and I didn't like it on either end.
There are definitely trade-offs involved, and I cannot emphasize "well-managed" in "well-managed commute" enough.
For anyone considering it, I'd definitely encourage you to keep the following factors in mind when designing a super-commute:
1. Workplace flexibility; if your workplace requires you
to be a butt in a chair from 9-5 (or 9-6), it is going
to be difficult to engineer a workable commute.
2. Can you engineer an early or late commute? If you
can arrange things to be home for either breakfast or
dinner, and see your family for a couple of hours in
the morning or night, it's way less isolating.
3. Stick with mass transit; there is a big difference
between 90 minutes in a car and 90 minutes on a train.
4. Optimize your work arrival/departure for train/bus
times. If you have to wait 45 minutes for a train
after getting off work, your commute is 45 minutes
longer.
5. Keep a rigid schedule. Commuting 2+ hours each way
with tight margins means you can rarely work late,
come in early, or go out after work with your coworkers.
6. When considering a new home/job with an extreme commute,
evaluate your entire commute. If you only consider
eg the train time, and not the trip to and from train
stations and wait times, you will get in over your
head. Two houses in the same town may have radically
different door-to-doors for two different jobs in the
same city.
It's not for everyone, and if you can't design it well it eats into every part of your life, but my point is just that, if you do it right, an extreme commute ... may not be the most salient part of your life. You go to work, you spend time with your family, and you get whatever you were trying to get by living 80+ miles from your workplace.
And you come to relish your time on the train, where you sit quietly and don't talk to anyone or do anything.
I have what people would probably describe as an extreme commute. 2+ hours each way (maybe 1.5 hours in the summer when there's less traffic). I leave the house before kiddo wakes up and am usually back after she goes to bed. It sucks. But my spouse is stay-at-home which is barely do-able financially in the Bay Area. I think it's important to let my kid have her own room and sharing walls with neighbors sucks, so apartments and townhouses are not acceptable. I'd move elsewhere but there are very few areas in the country that actually have more than a handful of good tech jobs that are also close to housing.
You may be putting too much value on having separate bedrooms and no shared walls, and too little value on your presence.
My parents had 4 children and we lived 3 bedroom 1 bath house, my brother and I shared a bedroom, my sisters shared the other. No shared walls with neighbors, but I don't think that would have really mattered. At the time (and to this day), I never really felt slighted by having to share a room, it was just "normal", since I didn't really know any difference. One of my close friends had just one sibling and his own room, but I didn't really think anything of it -- he had only one brother so he got his own room, I had a brother and 2 sisters so I didn't. Not a big real.
Of all of my childhood memories, the only thing that I wish was different was that my father would have been more involved in my life.
Mom was a stay at home mom, dad worked long hours at his job. I have vivid memories of mom at all of my school and after school functions, but I really only saw dad on the weekends, and even then he was often doing some sort of work from home.
Dad later said he regretted the same thing -- though he felt he had no choice in order to make ends meet.
"I'd move elsewhere but there are very few areas in the country that actually have more than a handful of good tech jobs that are also close to housing."
You're living in a bubble. There are plenty of good tech jobs all across America.
There are good tech jobs all across America. There are plenty of tech jobs all across America. The intersection of "good" and "plenty", however, is limited to a few generally expensive areas.
What's wrong with living close to people as a kid?
This line of thinking is entirely new and really foreign to me. Even my grandparents, and the people around them, living in a tiny town and owning quite a few large pieces of land chose to build their homes close to each other. Sharing walls even.
How is not seeing your father better than sharing a wall with someone?
Sharing a wall means becoming a recipient of whatever sounds and smells my neighbors (whom I cannot choose) decide to let emanate. My family has lived in apartments/townhomes and had to deal with, among other things:
* Deep wall-shaking bass music
* Game show TV turned up to the highest level, at 3 in the morning
* The smells of fried rotting fish heads
* Power tools
* Continuous dropping of items ranging from silverware to books to unidentifiable large metal objects onto tile (shared ceiling)
* A vast variety of sex noises
* The smells of sewage backed up into a bathroom
* Horse-like foot traffic on a set of shared wooden stairways late into the night (drug deals going on upstairs)
Never again. Yes, you can have shitty neighbors in the single-family-home suburbs but the extent to which they can ruin your quality of life is reduced.
This depends a lot on where you live. I've rented a few apartments that were cheap, by local standards, and learned exactly why this was. Loud obnoxious neighbors, who liked getting high and playing techno at 3 am, or having sex in the middle of the ground floor garden, or going crazy and screaming crazy stuff for hours.
But then I bought a decent apartment in a decent neighborhood and had none of that, and later traded it for a row house where every room has a wall shared with a neighbor in an even better neighborhood and now I pretty much don't notice my neighbors at all.
When I lived in Mountain View, my apartment was located on the middle floor. I consider myself a night owl, but my neighbor who lived upstairs liked to practice playing the drums at 5 AM in the morning.
I think working from home some days changes the dynamic potentially quite a bit. I have a relative with a ludicrous commute from Lincolnshire down to London -- but they only have to do it one or two days a week I think.
It's too bad the hyperloop idea is focused on city->city transportation. It could be an incredible tool to combat the increasing cost of living in cities. Imagine living this far away but getting to work in 30 minutes. Housing prices would return to sanity in cities.
You don't need hyperloop. Existing train technology could easily provide this. With modern signals and a good track, high speed trains can deliver good throughput with high comfort.
The problem appears to be the old tracks (speed restrictions) and old signalling system which increases delays and lowers throughput.
EDIT: To use the route here as an example. According to google maps the distance is 83 miles on road, so probably around 80 miles for a train. This can easily be done within 45 min on a train. Have a look at the German cities of Cologne and Frankfurt. There's a high speed train running and I know some people commuting there. It's not nice either but a distance of 150 miles with <1hr commute each direction. The ticket costs ~$4,500 per year which includes free rides on all trains within Germany. There are 3 stops on the way and some people only commute half the way which makes it a 20-25 min commute for the same distance of Philipsburg to NYC.
To give a point of comparison, Riverhead in Suffolk County is about 80 miles from Penn Station. Monthly tickets would add up to $6,000 a year. There's one train in the morning that you have to catch, leaving at 6:08 AM. It requires two transfers and gets to Penn Station at 8:23 AM. On the way back you again only have one train to catch, at 5:41 PM. It has one transfer and gets to Riverhead to 7:37 PM.
For not much more than 8 hours at the office (depending on how far away from Penn it is) you'd be away from your house for more than 14 hours every day.
At least it can serve to distribute the cost of living to multiple cities. Philly is incredibly cheap in comparison to NYC -- As mentioned in this article (and others) people are already commuting daily from their homes in Philly to their office in New York.
This actually isn't anything new. Growing up, one of our neighbors in exurban Philadelphia commuted into New York City for the week. I think that's probably the more common situation. Doesn't work for everyone of course, but traveling somewhere and staying there for the work week is a pretty common pattern for a lot of consulting roles, for example.
It's common in consulting roles where the company you consult for is paying for your apartment/hotel. Probably not so common for W2 employees unless you are an upper level executive perhaps. I'm sure the people in this article would elect to stay in a hotel for the week if given the option.
Yes, but if you are taking Amtrak from Philly to Manhattan every day roundtrip you already have a pretty hefty commuting bill--probably $100/day fairly easily. This is admittedly less than a Manhattan hotel but there is a fairly significant financial cost associated with these extreme commuting situations.
Yeah, for sure, but the people in these articles were buying $350k homes so they are already pretty well off. I don't think any of these people chose the commute option because they couldn't afford a place in the city (just not as big/nice of a place as they have where they live).
Yeah, good point. It could also serve to grow smaller cities. I imagine something like Albany would be an attractive option, if they could afford to build a hyperloop there.
Why bother with Hyperloop to Albany? The train right-of-way already exists (and it's beautiful), the terminals already exist. Plus, people want to go to Hudson, Poughkeepsie, Tarrytown, etc. Just make it very high speed rail and suddenly the full trip is <1 hour instead of >2.
A hyperloop terminal would probably be located in a vastly less convenient location than Penn Station. I expect for many NYC residents it'd be a shorter trip to take a high speed train through the existing right-of-way than to take a hyperloop, similar to how it's often faster to take the train from NYC to DC than to fly.
I really do not see the appeal of hyperloop in any situation involving high density land use, and I also do not see how it could work in locations without high density.
I wonder how well you could do with a planned town and a hyperloop or high-speed rail line? Offering a 1-hour commute to somewhere 150 miles away from San Francsico sounds like a risky-but-worthwhile development.
Difficulty would obvious vary quite a lot by city, and I imagine NYC is basically irreparable since you can't even get a line into it. But it would at least have potential for less dense locations.
I'm not sure you could get a line into SF. CalTrain has been trying to electrify their line, and even that appears to have been a mini-nightmare, e.g., with Atherton suing.
Not just that, but in many ways a strange business decision. Traditionally, it's not uncommon for railways to build a line to the middle of nowhere where they own the land, then make their money developing and selling the land, rather than from fares.
I know :) That's why I said "too bad". We can't fix the cost of living in cities problem if the only place it's convenient to live is already-big cities.
The Boring Company is planning 200kph for local tunnels and 1000kph for hyperloop between cities. This can be the biggest ever impact in commuting times at all distances.
I started taking my personal laptop with me and using my phone as a hotspot (because the bus WiFi is a joke).
I would get stressed just looking at the traffic the bus had to endure, I can't imagine having to do that then work for 8 hours then do it over again (plus the cost of parking!)
My longest commute (admittedly weekly) involved leaving my house near Ipswich in Suffolk, England, at 0430, driving to Stansted Airport, taking a flight to Zaventem, taking a train to Brussels, taking another train to Liege, then taking a bus to Sart Tilman, finally arriving there at 1120 (1030 UK time).
That was my first thought, but the article sort of doesn't support that?
Like, this is an expensive lifestyle. Gas and new cars are obviously very pricy, but even with busses and biking this isn't a cheap way to live. Most of the people mentioned are working upper middle class jobs but want to own desirable or spacious land. That's an outlook I very much don't have.
I've known people in the other situation, doing 1-3 hours of commuting because they had no choice. But it mostly seems to be about limited transit access, like taking a 10 mile trip that takes two hours because there's no direct bus route, or getting two jobs far from home and one another.
If you can't understand why anyone would do this, here is the logic:
* Most of the best & middling jobs in the region are in Manhattan
* You can live in Manhattan but you can imagine its super expensive. Good for singles, yuppies and wealthy families.
* The NYC suburbs/NJ across the river are a 30-60 commute, they are expensive too and largely apartments and small town houses. Public schools are often sub-optimal, traffic is bad, sometimes crime.
* City Fringe - LI/Westchester/Northern NJ - 60-90 min commute (when trains/buses are running): big houses, lots beautiful suburbs, good schools, backyard, maybe close to beach. The American dream. Some places are affordable but still expensive.
* Extreme Commutes - Much cheaper, wide variety of cities and towns, some great schools. Affordable for normal people. 2hr + commute for one of the parents
Other points
* in the 80s with high crime lots of firms moved out to the suburbs. This is now no longer in fashion as newer generations are happier to live in apartments and office parks are empty.
* The geography of NY is tough with the Hudson River & harbor making access difficult, and suburbs more remote than say LA or London.
* Other towns in the North East are struggling. Upstate NY, Connecticut, Southern NJ all suffer from shuttering firms, low employment and low wages so people will commute to get to NYC from those areas.
* Trains and Buses are super slow, the final few miles into Manhattan are often stop/start. updated infrastructure will help a lot. Would also increase urban sprawl though.
I chose to raise my kids in an apartment and avoid the commute. But I know they're missing out on a lot, maybe I'm selfish and the extreme commuters are the sensible ones.
Some of this is responding to you but I think it got a little away from what I originally was going to say :)
I agree Manhattan real estate can be crazy expensive but there are plenty more affordable apartments in Harlem, Brooklyn, Long Island and Queens. They are still expensive compared to the national average but I live in one of those areas and pay a third of what many of my friends do that live in UW/LW/UE/LE sides.
From this article it seems the most important things to them are the space and schools they are able to get from moving outside of manhattan. Which is nice but certainly a personal preference. I value things to do over my commute so I actually live in NYC and do an hour to work outside of the city.
Either way, what do you think they're missing out living in some place like Bethlehem? Most people move there because there is nothing there, and as someone who has spent some time, there really is nothing to do there. Most cities have parks, rec leagues etc. for kids to enjoy. Not having a yard won't deprive you kid of most activities besides not having to walk a few blocks to find somewhere to play.
To add to that, having easy access to all the cultural events that a place like NYC provides is great for kids. All of my friends that are native New Yorkers got exposed to a whole lot more at a much earlier age than those that didn't grow up here. For a curious kid there is a whole lot more to explore in a city like New York than in a suburban backyard where things are only accessible by car.
I think you're missing one of the biggest reasons people end up super-commuting: family.
If you are from the NY metropolitan area, "choosing to live 2 hours from your job" is sometimes synonymous with "choosing to live 5 minutes from your parents, grandparents, siblings". If you choose to live closer to your job, your children may get to see you for a few more hours during the week, but they'll only see their grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins two or three times a year, at the holidays.
(This isn't actually the situation I'm in, but my anecdotal experience is that 1/2 to 2/3 of the other super-commuters I know are making that trade-off.)
Growing up 2 hours from your extended family is radically different from growing up in the middle of your extended family.
I grew up ~5 minutes from my grandparents, great-grandparents, and two aunts & uncles. During the summers, my grandmother would watch us when we were smaller, and sometimes my great-grandmother or aunts or uncles. We'd go over for lunch or dinner on Sundays, stop by someone's house on the way to run an errand, tag along to quilting circles and church events.
There's a casual contact you get living so close to so much family that you lose when you need to coordinate schedules and "make it worth" a 4 hour trip each way. It becomes a burden for you to bundle up the family and drive them out once or twice on the weekends, and an imposition for your family to entertain you each weekend, not to mention the loss of week-day contact.
There isn't two options, live down the street and see extended family everyday or live two hours away and see extended family only on Christmas and Thanksgiving on odd number years. There's a ton of in-between and it's totally disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
Yes, you don't get daily contact with extended family when you live two hours away (and usually not if you even live 2 minutes away) but we are talking about a case where it's at the expenses of not getting daily contact with a parent plus the marital strain that it probably causes. It's not like one is objectively worse than the other.
If your family is so nasty they basically write you off because you moved two hours away then they aren't really the kind of people you want to be close with anyways. You're basically laying out a scenario where your family only cares about you if you happen to be physically present.
Plus the people who think nothing of commuting four hours a day five days a week are not suddenly going to be extremely burdened by commuting four hours once a week.
Over a decade ago I moved 2.5 hours away from my home town but I have maintained very close relationships to the people that are there I wish to remain close with and we visit very regularly without anyone feeling burdened or imposing. It works very well if all the participants involved want it to work.
I'm not saying you can't maintain a close relationship with a little distance.
But first and foremost, there's a big difference between you yourself traveling 2 hours each way (to work) and you, your spouse, and 2.5 children traveling 2 hours each way. Getting kids ready & keeping them entertained for a 10 minute drive is bad enough.
And it's insane to say four hours of travel time isn't limiting. You maintain a close relationship, sure, see them often, sure. But do you stop by just for lunch or dinner? Do you see them during the week, or just on weekends? Do you go to the same church, are your kids in the same softball league? If the kids are sick and need someone to watch them during the day, do you drop them off with grandpa or do you take a day off work?
The point of having a 2 hour commute is so that you can live where you want to spend most of your time. If you want to spend most of your time 15 minutes from your office, great. If you have somewhere else you'd rather spend most of your time, it makes sense to live there, so that by default, there you are.
I see the logic if you have to live in, say, the New York City region... But the fact is, you don't.
I live in a suburb of a moderate-sized southern city and work as a data scientist at a technology company just outside of downtown. The pay is good, the commute is 15 minutes one-way (pretty much 100% of the time, too), the cost of living is phenomenal, and I'm within walking distance of all the shopping, eating, mountain biking, hiking, and boating I could want to do in an average week.
I have no idea why folks seem to think NYC and the Bay Area are the only places you can possibly live...
My problem was that, being in Dallas and having worked for companies that are not household names, companies like yours ignored me whenever I applied. The ones who didn't we're clustered in NYC and Seattle (with a few exceptions).
In addition some lifestyles are just easier to attain in these scenarios, such as making a enough to be the sole earner in the family and allowing your partner to stay at home and raise children (which keeps even more money in the bank).
I can imagine being in this position and opting to extreme commute.
It very much depends on how valuable your time with the kids is. How many days of holiday do you get and do you spend nearly all of the weekend playing with the kids?
I only have a 45min commute and I still only get to spend around 1 to 2 hours with my kids during the week. Some days I'm too tired to even make best use of my time with them. I'm currently looking for a new job in London which will put my commute just shy of "extreme commuting" knowing I might not see much - if any - of my kids during the week. But I can live with that because of the opportunities it creates for our family and the most valuable time I spend with them is the days I don't work anyway.
It isn't about you, it is developmentally harmful to children to only ever see one of their parents. Even just seeing the father at breakfast and dinner for 10 minutes of chatting is magnitudes better. Even if your routine gives you extra days, the younger the children the more consistency is important. Having 3 days to see your children and 4 where you are missing from their lives can cause developmental complications even if it is done for noble causes.
The scientific data on this is at best controversial, there are plenty of studies claiming the effect is real, and a bunch of counters that the data is fundamentally flawed in complex ways, and doesn't appropriately account for a lot of other variables that can affect child development. It is also likely that high income offsets many of the most correlated negative effects, i.e. educational attainment.
My first career was in education, I worked with and saw many kids with a breadwinning parent who was absent most of the week, and they generally developed on the same spectrum as parents of equally present two parent households.
Anecdotally, my mother worked extremely long hours from her first child (I'm the youngest of my siblings by a decade) until I was a teenager, I routinely only saw her to say goodbye in the morning and on weekends. My siblings and I all ended up pretty far ahead on any developmental scale you choose, even though we basically only saw her on weekends.
My point was looking at it from the benefit of my kids. Weekdays my eldest wants me to run around the garden and play with him when I get home. Most weekdays I'm too knackered to really maximize my time with him which sometimes leaves him thinking I don't want to play with him.
I would gladly work longer hours but see less of him during the week if it means I get more days off because the time I spend with him will be more positive overall.
Its not just about the yard though. There are many other factors to it. It is a balance of a lot of things. Schools, safety, privacy, space, cost of living, ability to save for their future, ability to save for retirement, pollution, and plenty more factors.
If I can either spend $3000 a month on a for a tiny two bedroom apartment 30 minutes from work. Or spend half that and get a bigger house with a yard, and have to commute an extra hour. You bet I am going to take that extra commute. There is less pollution, less noise, and just as good an education system. And that is $18,000 a year that can be spent on family vacations, college, or retirement.
Then again I am a second generation commuter, and that is just how life is to me. So maybe I have it wrong.
I don't disagree that it sucks. On the other hand, if a person has a job where working is part of their commute then there may not really be a tradeoff...the hours on the train answering email and making calls and banging at the laptop could just be hours at the office if it's still a ten or twelve hour a day job.
I currently have a 2hr+ commute, one way (so 4hr+ a day) and surprisingly it's not a problem for me.
Key is that you have to embrace the commute and not fight it. But some important factors make it possible for me:
-it's by train, and the bulk of that (1hr 25) is a single train leg. It's far enough out that I'm guaranteed a seat every trip, and it's only really the final two stops where things fill up. Really it feels like my commute is the bit after that train.
- that train journey is great: it's quality 'me time'. I can do some work, I can surf the web, I can play some games. Previously, on a 30 min commute, I'd get home and need unwind time on the sofa doing the same - no longer necessary now
-home is properly amazing and a real escape. I live 2 mins walk from the sea and it's the opposite of London. Ie the destination feels worth it
-many others in my office have similar or worse commutes (2.5 hrs is common, and the CEO has this length), so culturally no-one bats an eyelid at leaving the office whenever
- I always leave the office at 5:20 to catch my train, and if I need to work I just do that on the train. So I'm never back particularly late
-when things are busy that extra quiet time on the train in each direction is a god-send and can be super productive
- I can walk to the station so no additional leg in the car, and hence no buffer needed for traffic etc. It basically feels like I'm still at a tube station just one further away
- I work from home 1 or 2 days a week
A few years ago I would have strongly said I'd never live a long commute away and always want a <30 min commute. I was wrong. With the right ingredients not just doable but weirdly enjoyable
In the same boat as you.. 2+hours, but about 1.5 of it is usually on a bus so it's bearable. That's my alone time. Phone goes to Do Not Disturb mode, put on some music, and relax. I thought I'd hate the commute but your comment is spot on: "With the right ingredients not just doable but weirdly enjoyable" Every once in a while I will drive the whole way and it's really not so bad. It sucks not seeing my kid during the week though.
My home is not amazing, it's pretty bog standard, but then again it didn't cost me $1M+ so that's amazing. Home prices entirely drive this. When we were looking for a place to live, we basically plotted on a map "places we can afford" and picked the place the shortest distance from my work.
I did a ~1hr 45min commute at one point, with an hour of that on a commuter train, the rest on an uncrowded subway + walking, and I also didn't have a problem with it. The train was calm, I had plenty of room, and as you mentioned, it was "me" time. I could do whatever I wanted- read, listen to music, play on my laptop, work on my laptop, whatever.
The train was also a nice forcing function to get up and leave as well and get in a routine that you stick to. I actually also kind of miss commuting on the train- I read so many books, many technical and textbooks too- there weren't a whole lot of distractions, so you could really dive in.
I have slightly less of a commute (still 50 minutes on a train), and I find it almost the same as you.
If I am prepared for the commute it is no problem. Having a fully charged phone (or a charger), laptop/tablet with books, tv shows and movies and a portable gaming device, makes the time fly by! And all are things I would do at home (well I probably wouldn't read as much). I do wish I could make a few more dinners though
My guess is that I could still make work. But as mentioned I don't get home horribly late - 7:40 or so, so similar to those with a normal commute and a longer office day. And I work from home a day or two. So on balance I think it's workable even with children. I think I'd even appreciate the 'me time' more :) and the quality of life difference for them being by the sea and not in London would feel more valuable I think
If I had to work a longer office day or no working from home then of course that would be a very different picture.
I must admit this is something I do not understand the appeal of. I have a 15 minute walk as my commute, and one of the things holding me in place right now is the inability to contemplate sacrificing this luxury. I used to do a ~40 minute commute, and I hated it - 1.5 hours of my day I considered wasted.
I appreciate many of these extreme commuters can get some stuff done during their commute, but what's the point of having a nice place to live if it's quite so far away? I find it hard to see any benefit in these lifestyles over staying central Monday to Friday and commuting home for the weekends. You're not getting anything back by going home every night.
I don't think there is any appeal to it. More like 1. The well paying jobs are in places like Central London and NYC but 2. Housing in those places is unaffordable so you live in a more affordable place far away.
My current commute is 30 mins each way. It's right at my maximum, but I don't really mind it since I only go to the office a couple of times a week. Usually what I do on those days is plan to get other things done either on the way to work (there is a gym location 1/2 way) or on the way home (like grocery shop).
The commute is also on two highways that run pretty well unless there is a wreck. I would rather a slightly longer commute with easy driving than a shorter one with horrible traffic.
I used to go to college less than 30 minutes drive away, but I did not have a license or money to drive (Europe) and public transport took 3h in real terms to do that journey.
Sometimes it is not economical to have a car (lack of parking, excessive costs etc;)
Americans tend to measure distance in "time" which doesn't work when you're dealing with alternative transport methods.
For instance someone told me the Philadelphia is "just 3 hours away, so it can't be that far" when I asked him how long it took by train. (it took 5hours in the end)
Americans frequently cite long distances by time: the assumption is that you are taking a car and that the traffic is whatever they perceive as normal.
For very long distances, this correlates to 50-60 miles
per hour.
For trips inside an urban area, it's rarely accurate to the nearest 10 minutes.
Wow, some pretty extreme disconnect. 30min of driving vs 3h of public transportation? What was the route? In European cities, I'm used to at most 2x the difference, and sometimes it's actually faster with the public transport, if you work in a city centre and go there with a tram (which mostly avoids traffic).
Also, even if public transport takes ~2x the time of a drive, I still prefer it. That 1h / day in a car as a driver is completely wasted, while the 2h / day in a bus is something I can (and do) use to read books/articles, answer e-mails, etc. I try to schedule my day so that anything I can do on a bus I'll do on a bus.
If you're seriously curious it was a bus route between Coventry and Sutton Coldfield in the UK.
By car it can take as little as 20 minutes, especially due to a toll motorway which never has traffic.
By bus you must take a 1.5hour bus into Birmingham city center (the bus number 900, goes via the airport), go across the city center on foot (20 minutes) usually wait 10-20 minutes for a 40 minute bus ride (940) into Sutton Coldfield.
Likewise, my commute from my home to the office, is approximately five minutes. I'm in Upstate New York. I see these salaries/lifestyles out West/Down State, and wonder if I ever made a mistake sticking around here. But for the amount of my life I've saved having zero commute times, I feel like it's justified. The ability to run home for lunch, take a nap, come back to the office, is just magical.
This is one of the (few) great things about charter schools. They admit irrespective of location. As long as you are in the county, can find transport there, and they have space you are in.
This is working out so well that even the public schools are doing it. I won't be sending our son to our local middle school. He'll commute with me and go to the school a few blocks from my office.
Are you though? If you factor in 4 hours of commuting minimum on top of an 8 hour work day (generously low), plus 8 hours sleep, you end up with 4 hours of quality time as an absolute maximum. If you have young children, this time is unlikely to coincide with waking hours anyway!
I don't think there is an appeal. I would move 15 minutes to work _in a heartbeat_ if I could afford it. Starter homes near my job go for $1.2M+. The difference in housing costs between where I live and 15 minutes to work are about 10X the total cost of a car + all maintenance and gas. So I commute.
exactly. My house was 180k + 2hr commute. I could get a house for around 1M + 8min commute. We are talking about $4k/mo difference.
If I commuted 5 days a week, you could look at that as $100/hr made by choosing to commute. I only commute 3 days a week, so it is more like $160/hr. And I get to work on the train for half my commute. It's not bad.
> And I get to work on the train for half my commute.
That's the thing that's key for me. I go nuts if I'm sitting behind the wheel in traffic for more than 20 minutes. I can easily do, for example, an hour each way on the commuter rail or shuttle. In fact, I feel it actually allows me to waste less time because I'll bookend emails and other communications in my day to my commute, and then while I'm at work I am able to focus better.
> [An extreme commuter] typically logs a 10- to 12-hour workday, returning home at close to midnight.... “Our little guy goes to bed at 9 p.m., which is not so cool, but he loves the backyard and neighborhood, so it’s completely worth it.”
I'm not judging this guy, but I can't understand the mental math here. So much of parenting is just being there as life happens. Noticing when things are off. Giving impromptu love, advice, and correction.
How do we make sure we're not just suffering from confirmation bias when we say these choices are a net win?
> So much of parenting is just being there as life happens.
It's easy in our consumerist, materialist culture for parents to become confused about this concept, and emphasize making sure that the life that happens for your child is as good as possible by providing them with luxuries like backyards and designer clothes and buying them the best toys and tech and clubs and sports and vacations. And when you even dip your toe into this danger by spending a bit more than you budgeted for at Christmas or for a birthday, you can become trapped into keeping up with your new neigbors (who are probably playing the same game you are) and feel forced to maintain a front of being just a few percent more wealthy than you are.
Not saying that it's smart, but it's happening all the time.
Is a backyard a luxury? I can't think of any kid that would prefer living in a concrete jungle vs having a back yard they go play in without having to plan a trip to a park.
I'm with ya though on the keeping up with the Jones stuff.
I grew up in a city and didn't have a back yard. I never minded it. The cool thing about being a kid is that you don't have many expectations - you accept things you see as the way the world works.
I didn't have backyard until I moved to America and we bought a house. People very rarely used their backyards including kids, but it was great for having people over once in a while. Parks were always more fun growing up because other kids would be there too. But I realize the the culture shift of being more protective of children and not letting them out on their own when younger makes visiting parks more difficult.
Any reasonably-well designed urban area is teeming with parks of all different shapes and types. In the suburbs, there may be one part per town, largely focused on ball fields, but in an urban area, there are parks all over the place.
The other big thing is that parks often have much better equipment than people's back yards. A lot of suburbanites buy their kids swing sets, which are usually not well designed and of poor quality. Most urban parks aimed at kids have lots of professionally-designed equipment that is well made and keeps kids attention much longer. It's also much easier to find a full-size basketball court, tennis court, etc.
You don't have to plan a trip to the park if you actually live in a walkable area. You just walk to one.
> Any reasonably-well designed urban area is teeming with parks of all different shapes and types. In the suburbs, there may be one part per town, largely focused on ball fields, but in an urban area, there are parks all over the place.
I've lived in a couple of US cities now, it's very hit or miss. San Jose, CA? Plenty of neighborhoods without a park of usable size within walking distance, and the intellectual and financial investment in equipment is fairly limited. Boston, MA? Feels like you can't go 3 blocks without hitting a park, and many of them have great equipment.
In theory your statement is true, but the reality covers a spectrum that may or may not be acceptable.
Um, What planning is needed to go to the park? When I was a kid nobody planned to go to the park we just thought "Hey, I think I'll go to the park" and then immediately either walked or biked there.
The best part about the park is there's tons of other kids there. Sitting alone in a yard be very lonely.
"I can't think of any kid that would prefer living in a concrete jungle vs having a back yard they go play in without having to plan a trip to a park."
In my opinion this guy has his priorities reversed, basically admitting he never sees his kid yet somehow finds it worth it (he comes home at midnight and gets up at 5am):
“Our little guy goes to bed at 9 p.m., which is not so cool, but he loves the backyard and neighborhood, so it’s completely worth it.”
I assume its on the basis that he needs to work to support his wife and kid, by sacrificing his time he can give them a decent house and garden which they would otherwise be unable to afford. I'm not saying its the choice I would make but i understand his reasoning.
I knew a guy who slept that little and he thought he was fine with it but he routinely fell asleep for a few seconds at a time during various times/activities and, strangely enough, had no idea he had fell asleep. I had to record him doing it before he believed me.
Note that this does vary from person to person. I know people who can sleep anywhere but I personally find it very difficult to sleep sitting up. I pretty much never sleep on planes, for example, no matter how little sleep I've had or how long the flight is. So in this commuting situation I would try to sleep, but probably only be asleep for half the time and never get to the REM stage.
my dad was emotionally cold so he did what he could and ensured that even though he felt awkward hugging and playing with me and my brother that he would work for us and buy us things we wanted.
Not everyone is touchy feely. It did take me a while to understand his love to be honest but it was definitely there. He turned down a move to another country because he was worried that it might negatively effect us. With that he lost a promotion and his senior position at a fortune 500 and worked positions much lower to keep us going over the next decade.
2.5h into London is not uncommon. 2 hour is quite common and that is my commute. And many colleagues do similar routes.
Recently there was an article somewhere of people living in France and Belgium and commuting to London!
My commute is simpler, I cycle to the station, which is an end station so the train is always there, take a train for 1.15h to Waterloo station, then walk to the office. I am asleep on the way in and hack away on the way home. I am usually home before 7pm.
The key to stressless long commutes is avoiding multiple connections and no waiting for a train, tube or bus. Also paying for your mental sanity such as near station parking and 1st class tickets also ensures less frustrating commutes.
Kids are the reason I now live this far out (as opposed to my old 20 minutes commute). But I also take a lot of holidays, 1 or 2 days WFH a week, and long breaks between jobs/clients/projects.
Well living in Lille (North of France), if i take the eurostar, it takes me 30mn to go to saint Pancras (1h30, but there is the time difference, brussels is 2h away from London so 1h if you add the time difference)
Londoner here. I am lucky enough to be able to work from home 95% of the time, but for the first 22 years of my career it wasn't so. I commuted from various locations on the edge of South East London to the The City (London's original Financial District, near Tower Bridge) every working day. A typical journey would take about 90 minutes each way, IF the trains were running on time. If they weren't, and that is unfortunately a regular occurrence, I could be experiencing 2-3 hours each way instead.
Property prices in London are insane, but even worse within walking distance of a train station. To even get to my local train station required a 15 minute drive from my house, and that's when I moved in; 10 years later from the same property that journey has become 30 minutes due to increase traffic levels. Once at the station, it costs about £8 a day to park in the station-side car park, however if you got there after 09:30, there are typically no free spaces, and with nowhere to park near the station either, you'd just have to give up and drive back home. I put myself down on a list to get a season ticket, which although still didn't guarantee me a parking space, did at least grant me access to the season ticket holders parking area before 09:30. It took three years of waiting before I finally got the season ticket. This season ticket for parking costs £1,200 a year.
Once on the train, unless I get a train that departs for London before 06:30, it will be packed solid with commuters, leaving squeezed standing room only. The journey is typically about 45 minutes (again if no delays), with the train stopping at many stations en route, and even more people trying to squeeze on. For this enjoyable daily privilege, I pay about £180 a month on a travel pass.
The 90 minute commute comes from factoring in the unpredictable traffic for the drive to the station, plus waiting time at the station, plus the train journey, plus the walk to the office at the other end. And then I have to do it all again 8-10 hours later, to go home. All because I wanted a nice house with a good garden for my family.
I have worked with many people whose commutes into London take longer (From Norwich, or York), but those people always have a seat with a table, Wifi, and food service, so it's way less of an ordeal.
London sucks. Don't work there if you don't have to.
I knew a Londoner with an almost identical commute, seems quite common over there. At the time my commute was 60 minutes one-way, and even though it was pretty easy (a single train leg, always seats available), it was still enough to make me vow never to do it again. Those 2 hours a day could have been used exercising, cooking with my wife, playing with my dog. I guess it's all about life priorities, but I'm skeptical any time someone suggests it as a healthy lifestyle.
Yeah. I commuted into Boston for a bit over a year and I was similar. It was a relatively straightforward commute. Short drive to train station, train, then shortish walk to office. And, of course, I could read on the train. (This was pre-smartphone.)
But it was still about 1 1/2 hours out of my day each way and the train wasn't very flexible if I wanted to do something after work in the city. In which case I had to leave very early and drive to an outlying subway station. (Which took about the same length of time total.)
I traveled some and worked from home some so it was fairly tolerable but I wouldn't have wanted to do it long-term.
Yeah, NYC is a lot denser that London, so commutes of, say, 1 hour more are totally normal in London, but somewhat uncommon in NYC. For me, this makes NY a lot more appealing.
I had a similar commute - lived just outside London:
Drive close to train station then walk - parking fare at station was a rip-off. An hour on the train. Half hour walk from station to work. At least once a month no trains due to a jumper on the line so not getting home til midnight
Couldn't move closer to London as too expensive, main source of jobs was London
Couple of years of that was too much so started looking around and ended up in Michigan with a 15 minute commute and an acre of property
Also from NZ and living in London. Not that I'll ever go back, but I'd definitely be willing to do a much longer commute in NZ than I ever thought was acceptable when I lived there!
I'm on the outskirts of London now where if I take public transport the whole way it takes me 1.5hrs each way (or more, because it's Southern trains -
grrrr). Normally I cycle 20 minutes to Epsom where the train journey is much quicker.
There are tradeoffs to be made. I don't like having to spend a long time travelling but equally, it's much better for my kids to have space to run around outside. I do wish the trains were cheaper though.
Just curious, why are so many Kiwis leaving New Zealand? It seems a lovely place, it's a developed country, surely it can't be that bad.
Romanians (where I'm from) I can understand, they are moving from a developing country to a developed country on the same continent, they just need to learn the local language and they double or triple their salary, possibly even more. But New Zealanders... it seems kind of strange.
Imagine you live in a country where there's no where else to go for miles around, and you're young, and you want to see the world - then it might make a little more sense :-)
It is really common though. It's referred to as your OE (overseas experience) and a lot of people do it. Many just to Australia, but the Uk and Canada are very common too. Mostly because there are reciprocal relationships with those countries that make it easier.
Have a few friends who were doing the Brighton to central London commute (~2.5 hrs). They liked the beach and hippy vibe of Brighton. More friends moved there and then the company decided to open a branch office in Brighton.
Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe he knows the value of his family getting to live in the countryside with space and fresh air and is willing to pay the personal price himself to allow that.
Yeah, I had a friend who was taking the train from York to London every day and back. I think they may have stayed over on a Friday night, but even still... I always thought it was crazy, until I moved to the US where people will take a 90 minute subway train across a city.
I took the train from York to London a few days ago with my family. It was pretty crowded. The ride into Kings Cross from York was around 2hrs. It was not bad. What I wonder about is the cost. Peak time which is the morning trains are around £45 from what I saw.
These commutes can look OK on paper, but there are so many points of failure. All it takes is 15 minutes oversleep, a missed your connection, a delayed train, failure to get a seat and you can have an entire morning or evening taken out and a boatload of stress with it.
And that's just looking at it from an individual rationality point of view.
If you expand this lifestyle into it's externalities it's clearly a huge loss for everyone involved; with those participating in it only funding a tiny fraction of it's costs.
Not only are these types of lifestyles by far the most subsidized in the US (not even a tiny fraction of suburbs are sustainable financially long-term), this lifestyle is actively destroying the social cohesion of the country.
I think the lense of history will show the suburban development model to be laughably obviously not sustainable in a financial/energy sense of the word; but I think in the end those will be footnotes. The true destruction and externality is the divisiveness and social dysfunction. You cannot have the vast majority of your "best" middle class population sequester themselves into little boxes (house, car, cube, big box store and back again) with exceedingly little forced social interaction and not expect the outcomes we are seeing.
Basically it's the balkanization of America, and done for almost the sole reason of propping up single family home values.
People in the valley, doing 2 hours commute, paying incredible fees for kids school, incredible rent : do everyone a favor and just leave this hell. This is more balsy than creating a startup, but also more disruptive. the only reason this situation exists is because people tolerate it, and perpetuate the vicious circle between companies going where people are, and people going where jobs are.
This is crazy. We made the choice to live in the city. We have a townhouse with a 300-square-foot backyard, a 20-minute subway ride to the office or a 15-minute bike ride. Friends choose the suburb, have I don't know how many square feet backyard, a bigger house and a 1.5-hour car commute. I don't know how they do it plus all the time spending maintaining this big house and backyard.
Which city? In NYC, a stand-alone townhouse in need of TLC with any outdoor space would probably start somewhere around $4-6 million (Manhattan). $2-3 Million in the outer boroughs (the ones that are up-and-coming, some of the gentrified neighborhoods are approaching Manhattan prices). All of those neighborhoods have poor public schools (yes, I know there are exceptions these days. But they are just that - exceptional. Not the norm). You would most likely have to send your child to private school. Minimum $20k/yr/child starting in kindergarten. Many push $40k/yr/child.
In surrounding suburbs with top public schools and ~45min rail commutes, a well-kept ~2k sqft house would be around $700-800k. New construction with all the trimmings: $1m+.
Not every city has delusional real estate price. The point I made in another comment is that the "choice" of going into the suburb has a price put on everybody else. Urban sprawl has a real price (Highways, interchange, pollution, etc.). Here in Montreal you can have a decent townhouse for 500K to 800KCAD.
That's nice, but the article is about NYC, not Montreal. For $500K CAD (i.e. 400K USD) you could maybe get a 1 bedroom in one of the more remote parts of Manhattan or the nearer parts of Brooklyn/Queens.
Just preference over how and where they live. I'd much, much rather have a far more enjoyable home life in a quieter countryside area even if my weekday time there is significantly less due to the commute. But I know friends that grew up in cities and are bored to death in the countryside. I can't wait to finally rent my own place in a small village when I move away from university in a couple of months.
Yes and no, yes it's preference but urban sprawl is a real problem and every other people pay for the preference of having a large backyard away from the city.
I echo this sentiment. I came from London to Malmo, Sweden. I went from riding 30 minutes in horrible crazy traffic to 6 minutes along a quiet cycle path surrounded by trees.
My commute in London was one of the "Luxury" ones (IE; I was in Zone 2 to the east and commuted to an "eastern central" part of the center.) (if you know London think: Bow -> Shoreditch)
I paid through the nose for this "Luxury" "Central" commute. I can't imagine it being worse than that, but for most people it is.
It's definitely something I have a strong consideration for now. Commuting is basically "unpaid work" time in my mind, it's time I could spend doing other things and I only commute for my work.
Extreme commuting has always fascinated me. I don't like to commute and so early in my life my wife and I worked very hard to get into a small 'starter house' in the middle of things. It was a good choice for me, given how much I don't like commuting. But a good friend of mine who worked at NetApp lived in Livermore which is 40 miles away in exchange for a bigger house and a larger lot, a lot of the reason that was 'ok' for them was the 'ace' commuter train(1). When I worked at Google there was a good friend of mine that lived in Marin county (about 75 miles away) and took the Google shuttle.
What all of these things have in common is that for most of the commute if you aren't driving and can do 'productive' work, the time isn't really "wasted".
And that kind of thing leads to all sorts of speculative questions;
Like what if a town outside of New York invested in their own train that would take residents to downtown Manhattan? If you compare the sales tax and property tax revenue of those people with the cost of operating a small passenger service to Manhattan how does it compare? How about a bus service like Google does for its employees?
At what point would it make sense to have a train that was the office? Given the price of real estate when does a company benefit from having a train that rolls in a loop amongst some number of cities and people get on and get off when the train returns to their city. Could you topologically arrange it so that a city was re-visited every 8 hours?
How will self driving cars change this? Clearly a commute isn't as big a deal if the car is driving you (its your own commuter bus to work, but with all your stuff and you are in control of who rides with you). Should we be buying up property in the Exurbs in anticipation of the huge demand? What about 'driverless car roads' that go from the exurbs to major cities?
I'll do you one better: combine super comfortable van dwelling type vans, autonomous vehicles, and extreme commuting. Can I fall asleep in my van in my driveway 2 hours away from Manhattan but program it to start driving me in about 90 minutes before I wake up? And then perhaps take a nap again on the way home.
This is why remote work is the future. Live wherever you want, spend 0 time commuting to work. Even if you have a modest 30 minute commute, you are losing 1 hour every day that you could be spending doing something else.
I was contract working in London, commuting from Glastonbury and that was a good 2.5 hours+ each way.
I moved to Bath and cut the commute to only 1.5 hours :D
I was lucky. I had an innate ability to sleep anywhere.
BUT my key requirement with any role is that I should not have to drive. Train + Cycle is my preference giving me time to work/relax and exercise/chill.
Any contract where I end up driving 1hour each way just takes my edge off.
My commute is about two hours each way (a bit longer in the afternoon), and about to get longer due to the office moving locations. I've commented on here before when super commuting came up. Since then, things have improved for me a lot.
Why do I do it? I love living in the mountains. I'm in SoCal and I live with great views, bears, deer, mountain lions, raccoons, bird songs, summer time crickets in the evening, frog croaks, mountain biking, creeks, snow, rain, seasons, and nearly no light pollution. I'm raising my kids in the same house I grew up in around many of the neighbors I grew up with. I have dogs, cats, fish, and chickens, a nice garden, a large yard, and still have high speed internet.
I get up at about 4:15am, commute about 30 minutes to the gym, workout for an hour, drive for 5 more minutes and hop on a train at 7am. I work on the train for a little under an hour. About 8am, I get off the train and walk for about 5 minutes to the office. This train ride is increasing about 20 minutes about 8 months from now. I leave the office and hop back on the train about 4pm, get off the train about 5pm (having worked while on the train most of the time), and walk in the door around 6pm. Getting home at 6? Yeah, not bad at all. Getting up at 4? Meh, I'm a morning person.
With the new office move, I get to keep the same train schedule. I'll just be working more on the train.
Oh, and I negotiated working from home two days a week. Previously, I was on a different train schedule and working form the office five days a week. I was out of the house from 6am to 7:30pm every day. Now things are sustainable and great.
Yup. Wife and three kids. I tend to go to bed around 9pm. So usually around 7 hours of sleep. I still get up early on the days I don't commute to go to the gym.
Used to spend 40+ min in Austin traffic. I don't believe that people working in tech should have to commute, since all the work can be accomplished over the Internet. Yet, several friends of mine are not allowed to work from home (SysAdmins and Developers), and so have to endure the pain of commute for no reason.
I live in Austin and sometimes commute via bicycle. When I do, it takes me about 40 minutes to get there. Enduring the pain of the commute is kind of the point. :)
The traffic does get bad, but it's very predictable. I drive through a few school zones and if I time it poorly, it takes probably 40 minutes for me drive. When I time it well (that is, leave early or late), half that. During the summer, 15 minutes.
Everybody complains about the traffic, but it really isn't all that bad most of the time. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I enjoy my time in the car.
What point do you live in the office? If you ignore time asleep at 56 hours a week, that leaves 112 hours a week. If you work 60 hours a week you're already living at the office.
I'd like to encourage employers and corporate leaders to consider whether they have sustainable salaries for their employees. Can employees raise a family while affording the requisite housing and commuting a reasonable amount?
I'm not saying extreme commutes are the employers fault alone, but employers obviously do math when they locate their employees in Manhattan. Things that don't end up in the equation like commute times are paid by someone else, like employees.
Flexible scheduling, remote work, satellite offices, etc. should be considered as part of being a responsible employer, not just a begrudged "perk" because it's too hard to keep good employees.
"Sustainable salaries" won't fix this issue, as real estate is a competitive market. If you double the salaries of everyone who works in Manhattan, you will still have the same number of people living near work, just paying more rent. A salary increase only helps you move closer to work if other people don't get an increase and you can price them out.
In the end, there are only three options: build more housing where people want to work and live (but it has to be high-rises, not houses with backyards), better remote work options, or better transport infrastructure.
I'm saying employers contribute to the poor salary/rent ratio in cities, especially when we factor in commute times. They should acknowledge the problem and help solve it as a strategic priority.
Working towards your list of ideas is a viable approach. Having core butts-in-seats hours that coincide with rush hour and not paying people enough to keep the commute down is not.
IMO there is no way around having to abandon the house+yard dream if you live in a big city. High density housing + efficient transit, or don't live in a megacity.
For 2 years I commuted from central Virginia into DC. Would wake up at 0300, arrive in DC around 0500, go to the gym, then head into the office around 0700. This job was near 100% travel as well, so I would be in the DC office for a day, then another city for a day, etc...
I calculated that each week I was only at my house from Saturday at 0100 - Monday at 0300.
So, why did I do this? There are a number of reasons.
1) Money. Where I live in Virginia there are no information security jobs OR they pay 60K. The amount of money I was making allowed me to pay down debts and provide a nice lifestyle for my family.
2) Housing. If we were to live in DC, we could not afford a house, so we would be stuck in a 1300SF apartment. Nice if your single or have a significant other, not so much fun with a wife and twins. For the same price of this 1300SF apartment in DC I can afford a 4000SF house where I am currently at.
3) Industry experience. I knew that by working at this organization in DC it would legitimize me as a security professional - I would be able to get out when I needed to and find another info sec job.
4) Landscape. No offense to DC, but it is flat and ugly. I live in the Shenandoah valley - the scenery alone gives me great joy.
I now work near 100% remote. I have to commute once every 6 weeks or so into our corporate office (about 4 1/2 hours away), but it allows me to be home for 5 weeks with the kids.
Without the sacrifice earlier working out of DC, I would never have landed in the role I have now.
Montreal to Brooklyn. Not as bad as it sounds: You walk a few blocks to the Metro station, take that downtown, walk to the train station. Take the train to Grand Central Terminal. Then the subway to a stop a few blocks from your destination. Total blocks walked about ten.
The train ride was though some very beautiful country. Crossing the border took a while but wasn't onerous. No wi-fi at that time but if you had a good book or some offline work to be about it was great.
One thing I'm noticing in the article and the comments is the disconnect between daily commute hours and weekly commute hours. Both are high, but the weekly time seems to be holding much more steady as people work from home one or two days.
So yes, you may commute for 4 hours a day, but only commuting 60% as often means you're in the ballpark of a 1 hour commute (each way). Average 'commute tolerance' isn't drastically changing.
I am seriously baffled, I have some extended family in Newburgh, NY and I have no idea why this woman would commute two hours to live there. Not only is there absolutely nothing special about it (other than seeing the American Chopper cast in the grocery store) it's got a problem with crime [1][2] and is #5 on some random "10 worst places to live in New York State" list.[3] if you're just looking for "not Manhattan" you could do a lot better.
I have 15 minutes by car or 40 minutes by bike and I think that is far and I only commute on the days I do not work from home. I moved to a smaller city to get a more relaxed lifestyle and that is also what I've got.
I used to have 40-50 minutes commute in a packed train and hated every second of it. Compared to taing the train or bus I love driving that 15 minutes to work.
Just me and my dog, excited to being allowed to tag along.
I actually agree with your first sentence. At a minimum, it doesn't seem sustainable over any significant period without something giving.
That said, there are reasonable places that are in-between living very near the office or commuting for two hours. Given that the link is mostly focused on the monetary aspect, let's think about it. For people who do not work from home, he is basically saying that 1.) the constraint probably can't be satisfied for a two income couple; 2.) if you own a home you will probably have to sell it every time you switch jobs--which doesn't seem very economically sound; and/or 3.) you will have to be very selective about switching jobs.
I actually did have an extremely short commute for a long time but it went up to an IMO still reasonably sensible 25 minutes when I bought a house. I've kept the house through several job changes. The commute veered into the somewhat unreasonable range for a year or so but it's otherwise been well under an hour with an increasing amount of WFH and travel mixed in.
I live in a neighbor city of São Paulo city, Brazil.
I have a 2hrs+ commute , 4hrs+ a day. I take a train (~1hr), a subway(~30min) and another train(~30min), I work next to train station.
The train use to be crowded with no seats to take. I try to make the travel as pleasant and productive as I can, I read news and books - almost finishing Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" -, listen to podcasts and music, watch movies etc..
I am SW developer in a big electronics vendor, we are not allowed to work from home, I lived some time in São Paulo during graduation and working full time, but it was expensive and lonely for me, I live with my parents and near of all my relatives now, but I am thinking to move back soon.
We have no many jobs in my city, so even people that no have skilled jobs use to have long commutes.
Cool! My commute is on here (Newburgh / Beacon, NY), although mine is a hair better.
My commute usually ranges from 1:50 to 2 hours. I get up at 6:30, a 10 minute walk to the Beacon train station for the 7:08 train which brings me straight to Grand Central.
I'm working from home right now, but I was literally always there first person into the office at about 9am.
The fact that no car is involved and it's only one mode of transportation to get into the city is what makes the commute very easy for me.
With my phone or iPad as a hotspot I can easy work, Reddit, or just play on my computer.
Grab a book and now you've got some good dedicated reading time.
To top it all off, you ride along the Hudson for the entire trip.
At times I certainly didn't love it, but I found it surprisingly bearable.
I was almost in extreme commuter territory--for two years, my wife and I commuted 1.5 hours each way in opposite directions from Baltimore (her to Delaware, me to D.C.). It was okay. The unpredictability of Amtrak bothered me more than the time.
We then did a shorter commute for a bit (15 minutes Uber for me, 5 minute walk for my wife). But recently we traded it in again for a long, but very predictable (hour and ten minutes each way) commute from Annapolis to D.C. I don't really miss the short commute. My wife chat during the mostly-shared part of our commute, and the cab ride from union station lets me catch up on emails. On the upside, I don't have to live in D.C. or send my kid to school in the D.C. bubble.
I commuted to North Beach from Los Altos twice a week in 2013. Each round-trip commute took around four hours on public transit. I felt like an idiot. Yes, humans can adapt to almost anything, but why bother for a lousy job that can easily be done from home?
Some of those people work on the train, and then spend 8 hours in the office. Madness. It could be palatable if you work for 2 hours on the train, 4 in the office and then 2 on the train again. Or you spend your 4 hour commute sleeping.
2 hours is extreme? I live 60 miles (Bedford) or so from work in London and my commute is 1.5 hours and there are thousands of commuters do the same trip and there at are plenty who commute from further out on the same line.
10 years ago I knew guys who loved in eastern Kent who would spend 5 hours a day commuting.
I'm a home worker now, but still have to go to London far too frequently. Getting from Cheshire to Euston isn't bad - leave home at 0820, 0841 train arrives Euston at 10.25. The next 30-50 minutes slogging it out to zone 2 is a pain though.
Going the other way is where it all falls apart, as the train is only really hourly due to the connection. To guarentee making it it takes an hour to get the first 6 miles to Euston (I really should dust off the bike), 90 minutes for the next 160 miles to Crewe, then the last 5 miles can take all sorts of time.
Now I think about it giving the Brompton a service would make this far more consistent, although for maybe once every 2 weeks doesn't seem worthwhile
If I ever founded a company, we'd be remote only from the start simply so that I wouldn't force people to do silly commutes. I would see any of my employees doing a 2 hour commute as a major failure on my part.
As difficult as doing a 2hr+ commute is (I did it for years), at least the people featured in this article don't have to drive. NYC, as an old city whose structure predates the automobile, has a centralized business zone (Manhattan) with established and comprehensive public transit infrastructure (bus, rail, etc).
Areas where transit systems were built as an afterthought, and where places of employment are sparsely distributed and far from transit hubs (i.e Silicon Valley), lead to situations where people have 1 hour commutes to travel little more than 10 miles in their cars.
This doesn't seem too fair to their spouses, who essentially are responsible for all weekday chores. Perhaps the commuters can do stuff like personal finances on the train... but that's basically it.
That only solves one chore. There's general cleaning of the house, cooking, doing the dishes, laundry. Taking the dog to the vet, taking the car in for an oil change. Picking up the dry cleaning. I probably spend 2 hours every day after work doing various chores.
You can solve this 1 of 2 ways. One is you outsource much of this; hire a maid, eat out every day, maybe someone to do your chores (what was that startup called?), hire a nanny, but once you do this are you really saving money by living outside of the city?
The second is just push all chores onto the weekend. But damn. During the weekend you only use your house for sleeping and on the weekend you only have time to catch up on chores. Pretty much 0 relaxation / fun time.
When my wife and I visited Japan, her Tokyo-based friend came with us on the Shinkansen for the first part of our trip. If I remember right, it cost her something like $200 to ride the train to Nagoya and back. Now, that was something like 200 miles, but still, commuting via Shinkansen would not be cheap.
Edit: it was cheaper for us because we paid $250 for a 7-day Japan Rail Pass which let us ride almost every Shinkansen and almost every local train as much as we wanted. Highly recommended if you're planning a trip to Japan and want to get out of Tokyo.
Shinkansen is extremely expensive for daily commute. The vast majority of Tokyo commuters are certainly using regular trains. Also I'm sure you've seen the pictures... Let's just say, "a guy who forcefully pushes people into a full train so that the doors can close" is an actual job over there.
I was in Japan a couple of months ago. Used a lot of trains and metro. Never saw guy pushing people into the trains, neither there was any need of that.
Elon Musk is making noises about a DC-NYC "hyperloop" with stops in Philly and here in Baltimore. Best of luck to him, I suppose - maybe in fifty years or so the Sprawl will be an actual thing.
The Northeast Corridor is one of the few places in the US where density makes ambitious rail projects viable, at least on paper. Of course, that same density makes them extremely challenging to imagine actually building. Just the current tunnels into NYC are a real issue right now.
Most of what's discussed in that article has very little to do with the main Northeast Corridor Amtrak line. It would be nice if the Acela were faster and there are various improvements slated--it's pretty much at capacity for peak times. But the decision was made when it was originally built not to go for a complete greenfield high-speed rail. It actually works pretty well most of the time. You just can't really do daily commutes from NYC to DC.
I have a 45 min to 60 min commute one way to work each day. If I take Metro North it turns into a 2 hour commute.
It really consumes a ton of time if you add it all up across the years.
I currently have a 4 hour commute each way. On Monday morning, 15 min taxi from home to the airport (medium sized midwest city). 3 hour direct flight to LGA (incl. security and whatnot). 30 min taxi to the office in Manhattan. Stay in a hotel next to the office until Friday then fly back. I do this commute about 4 times per year. The rest of the time I work from home.
Northern Virginia. Used to commute to silver spring from lorton/woodbridge every morning via metro. Took about two hours each way depending on traffic.
Then Arlington to Ashburn, that lasted about 6 months.
Then Aberdeen MD to Fairfax Va, about a year. That was the worst.
Now work from home. Maybe go into DC 2x weekly.
This area is terrible for commutes.
I just ended a job that involved a 1:45 minute drive each direction... interesting to know that doesn't count as "Extreme" commuting since it wasn't 2:00+.
It's not something I would do forever... but the experience was worth it and the pay was/is better than I get nearby. Nearby being the 140 acres of family farm land I'm lucky enough to live on.
I wonder how driverless cars will effect this. Similarly I'm wondering if ride-sharing apps already are. Single cars picking up 4 adults that would otherwise be driving could potentially hugely reduce the number of cars on the road, making commutes shorter for all involved.
The first impact of self-driving cars will be much worse traffic. While ride-sharing and public transit are helpful, they are nowhere near as good as self-driving cars.
If you had a self-driving car you'd be able to set up a truly productive or relaxing environment, which you're unable to fully replicate on public transit. For example, stick in a mattress with your favorite pillow, add a shower, have a desk with nice big monitors, a webcam to take video calls, etc. Aside from just being transportation, a car is also a bubble of quiet, cleanliness, and personal security. It is a mini house on wheels, a portable locker, and a refuge.
And since you're not driving, who cares about the traffic?
Eh I can't find citations right now because I am trying to be productive but modellers and people who study this argue that a lot of traffic is caused by sub-optimal driver behavior. Specifically issues with merging/ and phantom waves that build up and cause phantom jams. Accordingly people think the self driving cars will not be susceptible to this -> less traffic(?). I do not know I agree with these claims since I haven't looked at the math but I am not so sure self driving cars will lead to "much worse" traffic than human driven cars.
When I was commuting, I would have done anything to sit on a bus or a train. Drove 89 miles door-to-door (each way) to the office, typically anywhere from 2-3 hours' commute.
Waze helped, but could only really spend time making calls or listening to the radio or podcasts.
I also do a form of extreme commuting, but on the other side of the spectrum - I commute 1 mile (1.6km). I had to endure one hour long commute for a year, and it simply was not worth it.
My commute is far longer - takes longer than a minute to boil the kettle l, and I don't start the morning stand up without first sitting down with a cup of tea.
Yep the time will change for sure if we coun the detour to the kitchen for the espresso machine and after that to the "throne" room for a bit of self reflection and posting few articles to the HN...
The other way around. One day, few years ago, I told my boss, I am not going to the office anymore and since then I am working from home, except for 1 day in the month I am going onsite for a district person to person meeting = 30 minutes commute by car in one direction...
If only there were parts of Manhattan north of 110th and/or other boroughs nearby.
More seriously, lots of the comments here talk about the closeness of relatives to help with kids and so on. And I get that. But for people not in that situation, I'm never quite clear on the protein folding level computation that seems to go into just finding where you want to live, and then moving linearly out along transit routes until you find a reasonable mix of cost and distance.
Let's play a game, can I find homes (not Apartments) near NYC and SF for around $500k (a home a family making around $100k/yr can easily afford...that's two people with $50k/yr jobs) that are around 1 hr daily commute on public transit.
Let's let the NYC round begin:
[1] Yonkers, estimate is under $500k.
Okay, that's a shitty commute to midtown, but I spent 30 seconds figuring out this life quandry.
[2] a half hour shaved off the commute
[3] if you don't mind other people's houses touching yours and can pay $50k more, daily commute under 1 hr on public transit
Mission accomplished - total research time, 5 minutes.
Now for the San Francisco round:
[4] 30-40 minutes from this ~$500k property to the Castro in SF.
[5] - I did this one absolutely blind. Just picked a spot on the map that was about an hour commute by public transport. <$549k.
Mission accomplished - total research time, 3 minutes.
The first guy in the article, I mean goodness, is there nothing he can do around where he lives so he and his wife can afford a $375k home? A combined income of <$65,000 can afford that house. They each need full-time jobs that pay around $15/hr to make that work. What the hell kind of chef job does he have if he's not breaking $30/hr in NYC? That's small restaurant manager pay.
Here's an entire craigslist for their area full of jobs that pay what they need. [6] Now they can both see their kids.
It was grueling and miserable. I would wake up at 5:30, stand outside in the cold at 6:45, arrive at PABT at 9 to be in at work by 9:30 - 10. Leave at 6:30 to be home by... 10:30 , eat cold dinner in bed then go to sleep to start all over.
I broke down one day and couldn't do it anymore so I got an apartment in the city (It was harder than it sounds. Searching for a non-craphole place in a good area then throwing down like $6k just to get in. Yikes.)
I don't understand people who do this as a lifestyle. It is miserable and you spend an inordinate amount of your life on a bus: Get a new job.