Anything beyond 45 minutes is a schlep and there better be something good for me losing an hour and a half or more of day in transit. Especially a car where I can’t even read or relax.
Especially a car where I can’t even read or relax.
I don’t commute anymore, but spent close to 20 years with an hour commute each way. Audio books are the only way I can tolerate traffic.
There are people at a place I worked that did a 2 hour trip each way each day.
That’s me.
I work in a very small city entirely surrounded by a much larger one. The one I work for is an enclave for the 0.1%. The average new home build here is over 10 times the price that of the major city that surrounds us, which is also very expensive for the region.
Suffice to say, I can’t live here. I live in a shitty trailer that’s about 2 hours away with traffic, but costs $700 a month as opposed to $3000+ for a tiny 1-room apartment near work.
The commute sucks, but I save $115 every day I commute.
Fortunately, I like audio books.
Do you work in the Vatican?
Fortunately, I like audio books.
fam, try Pimsleur Speak & Understand language learning. A lot of libraries have them in CD form. That’ll kill half hour to an hour easy.
Obviously, this is a statistical truth. It doesnt necessarily apply to all individuals at all times.
yep, I work in Montreal, an island… crossing a bridge the morning and the evening is 1h in summer up to 3h in winter (one way!!!). At least since COVID I WFH, save 2h+ a day.
Fuck having to use a bridge to get to or from the South Shore for a commute. As soon as there is an accident your are screwed.
I have diabetic retinopathy and about 10 years ago, I saw enough blind spots that I stopped driving. My company accommodated me by letting me work from home. We already had another employee who was doing that for vision issues, it was simple to do.
Because we were successful, they replaced our desktops with laptops at refresh time and started letting everyone work from home 1 day a week. Then when Covid hit, they just told everyone to bring their laptops home and WFH full time. The CEO talked about return-to-office for a year or two but decided to make it optional.
It’s an amazing benefit. It gave me back about 90 minutes every day, and my dog doesn’t have to be crated during the day. I can sleep later and have access to my own kitchen for lunch. Theres a reason that average tenure in my department is around 20 years.
This is totally bullshit, the Starbucks CEO hardly minds his 2-3ish hr commute from CA to Seattle by private jet.
If the poors weren’t so stupid and lazy they’d buy jets for a more comfortable commute too. /s
Marchetti never went to NYC.
Or LA
Or Kansas… there aren’t a great many urban centers with diverse job markets so people routinely commute in from over an hour at my workplace.
When I interviewed at a company some years ago, the commute would have been ~an hour on a normal day (potentially longer if I did park-n-ride). I was very forward about wanting to only come into the office once or maybe twice a week. The manager I was talking with brushed off my commute time by basically saying that the commute wasn’t that long and he knew others that commuted much longer. That was a huge red flag for me and I did not proceed with them. I don’t care what others will tolerate. If management is going to ignore concerns like that, I don’t want to work there. It was really apparent that he wouldn’t let me work from home more than maybe once a week if I was lucky.
I personally hit a wall at 41 minutes of in-car travel time for a daily commute. I’ve timed it. Every second after that feels like a whole level of abnormal waiting, a kind of cold torture or injustice that you must wade through to to your destination. It’s not a healthy headspace at all. I’ve naturally sought out shorter commutes after this revelation, and yeah, the 30 minute estimate seems right.
I used to have about an hour long commute, and I kinda enjoyed it. I had shit to do at work, and shit to do at home, so being in the car for a while really let me calm down and center myself most of the time.
I get it, but I just can’t get to that place mentally in stop-and-go-bumper-to-bumper traffic for that long. Not even half that long. If that was a nice 50mph cruise the whole time, sure.
About 73 for me most of the way. An hour of bumper to bumper, or commuting on a bus would probably make it worse.
Traffic jams make driving infinitely worse. It requires so much more attention.
Neat. Anecdotally I can confirm that as I work construction so have a variable commute. 30 minutes is fine, 45 an inconvenience, and an hour having me thinking about quitting.
There was a pretty large, family-run business near me, it was a pretty popular local landmark, and it sat on a pretty big property, probably a handful of acres.
The owner died, his kids didn’t really want to run the place, so they did everything they could to run it into the ground so that they say that it wasn’t profitable to avoid some of the backlash from closing it down.
They had some sort of scheme to turn it into housing for homeless veterans. Noble enough idea I suppose, though I don’t know how they thought that was going to work, let alone be profitable.
Of course there was a bit of the usual NIMBY backlash, veterans or not, a lot of people don’t particularly want some low income housing project springing up in their neighborhood.
But more importantly, it just didn’t seem like anyone was particularly interested in living there.
This is sort of the rural end of the suburbs. We’re not out in the country, I’d hesitate to even call it exurban, but things are less dense, not much is walkable, no public transportation, there’s not all that much around. A couple of the basics are nearby like a grocery store, but not much beyond that.
If you have a car and money for gas, it’s not a terrible place to be, pretty much anything you could want is within about a 30-45 minute drive, if traffic cooperates, you might even be able to get downtown in the city in about an hour.
But thinking about it in the context of a bunch of homeless people, what the hell are they supposed to do? Not many opportunities for them to find work around there, certainly not anything well-paying enough to help them improve their situation by much. If they need any sort of mental health or drug/alcohol treatment, their options would be severely limited there. It’s not at all convenient to the VA hospital nearest to us. And unless they manage to get their hands on a car, they’d basically be stuck there to sit at home, or maybe wander around town and do nothing in particular.
So that project never got off the ground.
I do an hour and a half single trip. It’s only twice per week and it’s by train. So I read a book or I bring my steamdeck. I really don’t mind it. I’d be less happy if it was 5 days per week. I’d still be going by train, but also looking for a better job.
If my commute isn’t a 30 second walk to my home office I won’t take the job.
Back in the 90’s and 2000’s my commute ranged between 30-60 minutes by car one way to a combination of 15 minutes driving and 30-45 minutes on a subway.
Since shortly before the pandemic my commute has been up a flight of stairs to our guest bedroom that’s now my office.
I’m never going back.
I hounded my boss for a year when COVID hit to make it permanent. Worth every bit of annoying him.
I met a lawyer working in Boston & living in the burbs a number of years ago. When Covid hit he worked from home for over a year. His job was one that could easily be remote, but like so many others, his boss eventually wanted him back in the office. His boss did admit that continuing to work remotely would have been an option if he lived further away.
He & his girlfriend moved to Vermont, and he still has that job.
And productivty drops for most people after 6 hours of working.
Looks at Toronto and 3 hour commutes…
Then his law has failed.
There are plenty of successful housing areas much farther out than 30 minutes one way (the 1 hour is daily). Nearly everyone I know has a longer commute than that.
Maybe it’s the commuters that failed to find a job that’s close enough to be tolerable. I worked one job for a few months where I had a 1-hour each way commute, and it sucked so I job hunted enough to find one with a more tolerable 30-minute commute.
I would rather live in a cardboard box in an alley than commute for more than 15 minutes
Where I live it is that people want bigger houses for their families, so they take a long commute instead of a small house with no yard. A guy at my company literally flies a small plane to work everyday. Another has a 100mi commute each way, so he comes in at like 5am to avoid most of the traffic.
I do wonder if the limit varies between personally operated transport (walking, bike, car) and public transport (bus, tram, train).
A 1 hour bus journey is much more relaxing than a 1 hour drive.
Not always. During rush hour, most buses will operate at their maximum passenger capacity, if you’re one of the many that’s not seated, it’s anything but relaxing or comfortable.
With good enough infrastructure and with good enough working culture, it stops being a problem. More transport options, more units in rush hours, better logistics, morr flexible hours, that sort of things
