4 ms·

3.4 Million Americans are Extreme Commuters (2005)

24 points by MikeCapone 17y ago

protomyth 17y ago
It is often easier to drive and extra hour each way, then try to move yourself / your family in the current housing and job market.
- aphyr 17y ago
  Really? That's 460 hours per year, spent sitting on your ass in traffic. If you worked hourly at $20/hr, that's over $9000/year. If you average 30mph, and it costs 24 cents/mile in depreciation, maintainence, insurance, and gas to operate your vehicle, you're spending over $3300/year on that extra distance. The equivalent of thirty days of your life not spent with family, training for marathons, writing code, building furniture. What would you give for an extra month of your own time each year?
  - protomyth 17y ago
    It is not free to move, and it is unlikely that a person in this situation can find work closer to home. You miss the problem of selling old house, getting new house or (more likely) rental versus low additional payment per week. Maybe you have kids, and the school where you are is better than the one you would move to. Maybe both spouses are working and you had to make that "whose work do we live closer to" decision.
    - duck 17y ago
      You're right it isn't free to move, but what I think their point was is that not many people do the math to see how much it is costing them in money and time. I've done both, but when I was driving an hour each way I never sat down to think of how much it was costing. Normal people probably just don't even think that way, but once you see it on paper it is scary and I think a lot of people would reevaluate things like the cost to move, schools, and your job. This calculator seems pretty useful: http://www.commutesolutions.com/howmuch.html http://www.commutesolutions.com/howmuch.html Lastly, although I can't find a statistic on, you have to think the more miles you drive the higher the risk of dying/getting hurt in a car accident.
      - protomyth 17y ago
        People often don't have the upfront money to change their situation. It really doesn't matter the final cost, if you can't afford one of the options. You do what you can do.
  - anamax 17y ago
    > Really? That's 460 hours per year, spent sitting on your ass in traffic. If you worked hourly at $20/hr, that's over $9000/year. Why are you assuming that he'd have been paid for that time if he hadn't been commuting? And, if he had, he'd have been taxed on it. Assuming that it's additional work time, he'd be paying at his marginal rate. > The equivalent of thirty days of your life not spent with family, training for marathons, writing code, building furniture. What would you give for an extra month of your own time each year? That's probably closer to the truth.
    - aphyr 17y ago
      I agree; it really depends on the individual situation. Most of the hourly folks I know who are commuting long distances are in the 30-45 dollar/hour range. Sometimes you have flexible hours, sometimes not. Other times you can freelance. Other times, those extra hours can save you money on childcare, parking, cooking, housecare... there are many factors. I chose $20 as a reasonable example that fits some real-world people.
mattmiller 17y ago
I drive an hour to work b/c there is no reasonably nice and affordable housing with good schools anywhere near where I work.
nonrecursive 17y ago
Below is my personal experience with different job situations: Between 17 and 20 I never travelled more than a few miles for work. I worked as a server at a resort ($14/hr), as a night auditor at hotel where I had 1 hour of work to do and 8 hours to do it ($8.25/hr) and as an entry-level web developer ($10-15/hr). All of the jobs paid more than I needed and I had ample free time. The main drawback for these jobs was that I wasn't treated as well as I wanted. With one of the web companies, I happened to see a recent hire's check and saw that he made more than me. I asked the owner why this person made more than me when I had more experience, and her answer was that I made a lot for my age and that the other person had a degree. From 20-24 years of age I worked as a freelancer, starting at $25/hr and going to $90/hr, billing about 30 hours a week and working about 50. I always worked remotely, and for a year during this period I lived in Hawaii. The perks of working from home are many. I always lived near the beach and could take beach breaks during the middle of the day. I had a lot more time because I had no commute at all. The main drawback was that I didn't have enough social interaction. I'm still discovering what a huge, negative effect this has had on my life. These days I make $100/hr, 40 hours a week, and I commute between an hour and half and two hours every day, depending on traffic. I listen to audiobooks on the ride in, but going home they make me too sleepy. Because of the audiobooks, I don't mind the commute as much as I would otherwise. I feel like I learn valuable things during my time in the car. Also, because I earn more and bill for more hours, I make about twice as much as I did previously. This year I'm planning on traveling around the world, something I've never been able to do. I've also been able to afford a lot of little niceties like improv lessons and snowboarding lessons. I'm very glad that I'm able to buy these experiences. I'm also trying to make friends with the people I work with. I already consider my immediate colleagues to be good friends and great people, and it makes me very happy to know them and see them every day. The long-ass commute does get me down sometimes. I'm still trying to figure out how to make more time for my personal projects. With the amount of money I'm making, though, it's feasible that I'll be able to take little vacations just to work on my ideas, something which wasn't possible before. So overall, the long commute is definitely worth it.
- MikeCapone 17y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to write all this. Question: Is there anything keeping you from living closer to where you work?
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
I'd be interested to see what has happened to these numbers in the past five years - particularly through the great run-up in oil prices that peaked in summer 2008 and the sharp economic crash that followed. Disclosure: my daily commute is a refreshing 15 minute bike ride.
- code_duck 17y ago
  No doubt people with a 3 hour commute suffered with the higher prices and had second thoughts. Really, considering how wasteful these commutes are in terms of pollution, time and energy expenditure for little gain, it wouldn't be so bad if energy prices rose again and discouraged this behavior.
  - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    Stable high energy prices would do a great job of discouraging this behaviour, as they've done in Europe. Unfortunately, in North America we're stuck with "an energy policy that encourages consumption" and leads to energy price volatility (with the accompanying economic volatility), coupled with governments that are terrified to do anything that looks like raising people's gas prices.
    - protomyth 17y ago
      Well, since much of the US was built on cheap energy prices, and no alternative seems to be able to roll out in the next 5 years, all high energy prices will do is cause people to give up other things. Many cities and rural areas have no effective alternatives. Heck, I once consulted at a place in Minneapolis, MN that had no bus stop for miles.
wallflower 17y ago
I am one of those extreme commuters, by choice. I spend about 18 hrs/week commuting on public transit. The daily commute includes 15 min walking to the train station (which I love), an express train, a 20-minute bus ride (which I dislike), and buffer time (if you take the train every day, you do not want to stress yourself out running for the train) and (schedule gaps between bus arrival and train departure). I don't recommend it to anyone but the fact is there are costs and benefits to everything. Sometimes the costs seem to outweigh the benefits of living in the city, but, in all, I think living in the city has made me able to meet people who I connect with. There are times when I am too tired to go out with friends and times when I should be tired because I did go out with friends. The times (which are more frequent now) when I am heads down in iPhone programming - the train ride goes by quickly, almost too short. Tethering is an absolute requirement. There are many times when I simply rest and leave the MacBook in its case. Lots of time to think and start executing on app ideas. It all comes down to: what do you benefit from living where you choose to live and working where you choose to work.
- duck 17y ago
  This brings up how public transit is a LOT different than driving. You have the ability to do other things safely so it's not like it is a total lost in productive time.
wheels 17y ago
For 5 of the 7 years that I worked full time before doing a startup I had a 1 hour commute. For 4 of those years it was with a train, which I actually kind of missed when it was over. The net result was that I spent 10 hours a week reading books. The amount that I read dropped off sharply after the commute was gone.
esers 17y ago
I think its worthwhile considering the possibility that work is broken. It's easy to accept the status-quo. Before the Internet, consumers accepted that there was an inherent trade-off between selection and convenience: you could either have the convenience of the corner store with its limited selection, or the selection of a WalMart if you were willing to take the drive out to their regional supercenter. The Internet allowed companies like Amazon to deliver both more convenience and more selection. Consumers could have their cake and eat it, too. Today, most people accept that there is a trade-off between living where you want to live, and working where you want to work. What if that were not true?
- dabent 17y ago
  Well, at least the idea that we all have to physically travel to a certain location is. It may be needed for certain jobs and may not be for everyone, but I think working from home could work from both the employer and the employee if it's implemented correctly. It also could reduce traffic and greenhouse gasses tremendously. It's completely possible for IT jobs to be shipped overseas, yet the thought of a developer working remotely one day a week is still too much for most management to handle.
  - thirdstation 17y ago
    Fully agree. Having a developer work remotely requires the manager to also be more organized and work differently.
  - larsberg 17y ago
    A single developer working remotely one day a week is easy to manage. On a team of 13+, coordinating remote day per week plus late starts for kid-drop-offs / early leaves for kid-pick-ups, vacation days, etc. makes it very hard to figure out when you can actually get the team together. In practice, the members of the team also suffer because you can't plan when you're going to block on needing to talk at a whiteboard with someone. I've also found colocation to be the only way to handle complicated design tasks. Team members who are around tend to exclude people who work remotely during key hours, relegating them to the easily separable work, which results in less impact and ultimately less pay and promotions.
joe_the_user 17y ago
I wonder if the figures are the same now, after the housing bust.
blackguardx 17y ago
New Paltz is a sweet town, but that bus costs $20 one-way. Doing that everyday adds up to a lot of money very quickly.
lukev 17y ago
I recently moved and reduced my commute from an hour and twenty minutes (one-way) to about twenty-five. It has made an incredible difference. I'm much more relaxed, and I feel like I actually have a life during the week again. I'd probably take up to a 20% pay cut to avoid doing it again.
JohnnyBrown 17y ago
First, I freely admit this is probably not even a meaningful comparison, I'm just gloating. I'm a student (CS major) at a mediocre school in a tourist city. I live within walking distance of the bar I work at, and school is a 20 min bike ride away. last week I turned in a file compressing application I wrote in MASM assembly language. right now I'm high on mushrooms.
bokchoi 17y ago
I traded a stressful 50min car commute across a jam packed bridge for a 15min walk. I'm making slightly less money, but my quality of life has gone up dramatically. My wife likes it too.
philwelch 17y ago
New thought exercise: add the hours you spend commuting to your "work" hours and calculate your new rate per hour. If your commute is significantly more stressful than your job (metropolitan traffic jams), bill yourself time and a half or more to account for the impact to your health.
thirdstation 17y ago
I'm one of those extreme commuters too. I work from home two days a week so, I try to look at it like I spend 4-out-of-7 days at home. It helps only a little. My previous job was 100% telecommuting. That lasted almost five years. It's better than not working (did that too).
tokenadult 17y ago
Have the national trends changed since a half-decade ago when the submitted article was published? I work from home, except that I have contact hours for teaching about a twenty-minute drive from here. We live near a city bike and hiking trail, and walk to much of our shopping and to the public library where I do much of my research.
minouye 17y ago
Wow - I thought my 50 min. one way commute was bad, but I guess I should be considering myself lucky. For those commuting long distances by car, has anyone figured out how to optimize that time? I usually try to make calls, listen to podcasts, or just take some time to think about projects that I'm working on. I figure that about 50% of my commute is being used productively--if anyone feels much more efficient than that, I would love to hear strategies...
ax0n 17y ago
I got laid off in January, but I really, really miss my commute. It cleared my mind, woke me up on the way to work, made me feel healthier, and let me blow off some steam on the way home after the really stressful days. It was an hour each way, give or take... By bicycle. ;)

24 points by MikeCapone 17y ago

It is often easier to drive and extra hour each way, then try to move yourself / your family in the current housing and job market.

aphyr 17y ago
Really? That's 460 hours per year, spent sitting on your ass in traffic. If you worked hourly at $20/hr, that's over $9000/year. If you average 30mph, and it costs 24 cents/mile in depreciation, maintainence, insurance, and gas to operate your vehicle, you're spending over $3300/year on that extra distance. The equivalent of thirty days of your life not spent with family, training for marathons, writing code, building furniture. What would you give for an extra month of your own time each year?
- protomyth 17y ago
  It is not free to move, and it is unlikely that a person in this situation can find work closer to home. You miss the problem of selling old house, getting new house or (more likely) rental versus low additional payment per week. Maybe you have kids, and the school where you are is better than the one you would move to. Maybe both spouses are working and you had to make that "whose work do we live closer to" decision.
  - duck 17y ago
    You're right it isn't free to move, but what I think their point was is that not many people do the math to see how much it is costing them in money and time. I've done both, but when I was driving an hour each way I never sat down to think of how much it was costing. Normal people probably just don't even think that way, but once you see it on paper it is scary and I think a lot of people would reevaluate things like the cost to move, schools, and your job. This calculator seems pretty useful: http://www.commutesolutions.com/howmuch.html http://www.commutesolutions.com/howmuch.html Lastly, although I can't find a statistic on, you have to think the more miles you drive the higher the risk of dying/getting hurt in a car accident.
    - protomyth 17y ago
      People often don't have the upfront money to change their situation. It really doesn't matter the final cost, if you can't afford one of the options. You do what you can do.
- anamax 17y ago
  > Really? That's 460 hours per year, spent sitting on your ass in traffic. If you worked hourly at $20/hr, that's over $9000/year. Why are you assuming that he'd have been paid for that time if he hadn't been commuting? And, if he had, he'd have been taxed on it. Assuming that it's additional work time, he'd be paying at his marginal rate. > The equivalent of thirty days of your life not spent with family, training for marathons, writing code, building furniture. What would you give for an extra month of your own time each year? That's probably closer to the truth.
  - aphyr 17y ago
    I agree; it really depends on the individual situation. Most of the hourly folks I know who are commuting long distances are in the 30-45 dollar/hour range. Sometimes you have flexible hours, sometimes not. Other times you can freelance. Other times, those extra hours can save you money on childcare, parking, cooking, housecare... there are many factors. I chose $20 as a reasonable example that fits some real-world people.

mattmiller 17y ago

I drive an hour to work b/c there is no reasonably nice and affordable housing with good schools anywhere near where I work.

nonrecursive 17y ago

Below is my personal experience with different job situations: Between 17 and 20 I never travelled more than a few miles for work. I worked as a server at a resort ($14/hr), as a night auditor at hotel where I had 1 hour of work to do and 8 hours to do it ($8.25/hr) and as an entry-level web developer ($10-15/hr). All of the jobs paid more than I needed and I had ample free time. The main drawback for these jobs was that I wasn't treated as well as I wanted. With one of the web companies, I happened to see a recent hire's check and saw that he made more than me. I asked the owner why this person made more than me when I had more experience, and her answer was that I made a lot for my age and that the other person had a degree. From 20-24 years of age I worked as a freelancer, starting at $25/hr and going to $90/hr, billing about 30 hours a week and working about 50. I always worked remotely, and for a year during this period I lived in Hawaii. The perks of working from home are many. I always lived near the beach and could take beach breaks during the middle of the day. I had a lot more time because I had no commute at all. The main drawback was that I didn't have enough social interaction. I'm still discovering what a huge, negative effect this has had on my life. These days I make $100/hr, 40 hours a week, and I commute between an hour and half and two hours every day, depending on traffic. I listen to audiobooks on the ride in, but going home they make me too sleepy. Because of the audiobooks, I don't mind the commute as much as I would otherwise. I feel like I learn valuable things during my time in the car. Also, because I earn more and bill for more hours, I make about twice as much as I did previously. This year I'm planning on traveling around the world, something I've never been able to do. I've also been able to afford a lot of little niceties like improv lessons and snowboarding lessons. I'm very glad that I'm able to buy these experiences. I'm also trying to make friends with the people I work with. I already consider my immediate colleagues to be good friends and great people, and it makes me very happy to know them and see them every day. The long-ass commute does get me down sometimes. I'm still trying to figure out how to make more time for my personal projects. With the amount of money I'm making, though, it's feasible that I'll be able to take little vacations just to work on my ideas, something which wasn't possible before. So overall, the long commute is definitely worth it.

MikeCapone 17y ago
Thanks for taking the time to write all this. Question: Is there anything keeping you from living closer to where you work?

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

I'd be interested to see what has happened to these numbers in the past five years - particularly through the great run-up in oil prices that peaked in summer 2008 and the sharp economic crash that followed. Disclosure: my daily commute is a refreshing 15 minute bike ride.

code_duck 17y ago
No doubt people with a 3 hour commute suffered with the higher prices and had second thoughts. Really, considering how wasteful these commutes are in terms of pollution, time and energy expenditure for little gain, it wouldn't be so bad if energy prices rose again and discouraged this behavior.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  Stable high energy prices would do a great job of discouraging this behaviour, as they've done in Europe. Unfortunately, in North America we're stuck with "an energy policy that encourages consumption" and leads to energy price volatility (with the accompanying economic volatility), coupled with governments that are terrified to do anything that looks like raising people's gas prices.
  - protomyth 17y ago
    Well, since much of the US was built on cheap energy prices, and no alternative seems to be able to roll out in the next 5 years, all high energy prices will do is cause people to give up other things. Many cities and rural areas have no effective alternatives. Heck, I once consulted at a place in Minneapolis, MN that had no bus stop for miles.

wallflower 17y ago

I am one of those extreme commuters, by choice. I spend about 18 hrs/week commuting on public transit. The daily commute includes 15 min walking to the train station (which I love), an express train, a 20-minute bus ride (which I dislike), and buffer time (if you take the train every day, you do not want to stress yourself out running for the train) and (schedule gaps between bus arrival and train departure). I don't recommend it to anyone but the fact is there are costs and benefits to everything. Sometimes the costs seem to outweigh the benefits of living in the city, but, in all, I think living in the city has made me able to meet people who I connect with. There are times when I am too tired to go out with friends and times when I should be tired because I did go out with friends. The times (which are more frequent now) when I am heads down in iPhone programming - the train ride goes by quickly, almost too short. Tethering is an absolute requirement. There are many times when I simply rest and leave the MacBook in its case. Lots of time to think and start executing on app ideas. It all comes down to: what do you benefit from living where you choose to live and working where you choose to work.

duck 17y ago
This brings up how public transit is a LOT different than driving. You have the ability to do other things safely so it's not like it is a total lost in productive time.

wheels 17y ago

For 5 of the 7 years that I worked full time before doing a startup I had a 1 hour commute. For 4 of those years it was with a train, which I actually kind of missed when it was over. The net result was that I spent 10 hours a week reading books. The amount that I read dropped off sharply after the commute was gone.

esers 17y ago

I think its worthwhile considering the possibility that work is broken. It's easy to accept the status-quo. Before the Internet, consumers accepted that there was an inherent trade-off between selection and convenience: you could either have the convenience of the corner store with its limited selection, or the selection of a WalMart if you were willing to take the drive out to their regional supercenter. The Internet allowed companies like Amazon to deliver both more convenience and more selection. Consumers could have their cake and eat it, too. Today, most people accept that there is a trade-off between living where you want to live, and working where you want to work. What if that were not true?

dabent 17y ago
Well, at least the idea that we all have to physically travel to a certain location is. It may be needed for certain jobs and may not be for everyone, but I think working from home could work from both the employer and the employee if it's implemented correctly. It also could reduce traffic and greenhouse gasses tremendously. It's completely possible for IT jobs to be shipped overseas, yet the thought of a developer working remotely one day a week is still too much for most management to handle.
- thirdstation 17y ago
  Fully agree. Having a developer work remotely requires the manager to also be more organized and work differently.
- larsberg 17y ago
  A single developer working remotely one day a week is easy to manage. On a team of 13+, coordinating remote day per week plus late starts for kid-drop-offs / early leaves for kid-pick-ups, vacation days, etc. makes it very hard to figure out when you can actually get the team together. In practice, the members of the team also suffer because you can't plan when you're going to block on needing to talk at a whiteboard with someone. I've also found colocation to be the only way to handle complicated design tasks. Team members who are around tend to exclude people who work remotely during key hours, relegating them to the easily separable work, which results in less impact and ultimately less pay and promotions.

joe_the_user 17y ago

I wonder if the figures are the same now, after the housing bust.

blackguardx 17y ago

New Paltz is a sweet town, but that bus costs $20 one-way. Doing that everyday adds up to a lot of money very quickly.

lukev 17y ago

I recently moved and reduced my commute from an hour and twenty minutes (one-way) to about twenty-five. It has made an incredible difference. I'm much more relaxed, and I feel like I actually have a life during the week again. I'd probably take up to a 20% pay cut to avoid doing it again.

JohnnyBrown 17y ago

First, I freely admit this is probably not even a meaningful comparison, I'm just gloating. I'm a student (CS major) at a mediocre school in a tourist city. I live within walking distance of the bar I work at, and school is a 20 min bike ride away. last week I turned in a file compressing application I wrote in MASM assembly language. right now I'm high on mushrooms.

bokchoi 17y ago

I traded a stressful 50min car commute across a jam packed bridge for a 15min walk. I'm making slightly less money, but my quality of life has gone up dramatically. My wife likes it too.

philwelch 17y ago

New thought exercise: add the hours you spend commuting to your "work" hours and calculate your new rate per hour. If your commute is significantly more stressful than your job (metropolitan traffic jams), bill yourself time and a half or more to account for the impact to your health.

thirdstation 17y ago

I'm one of those extreme commuters too. I work from home two days a week so, I try to look at it like I spend 4-out-of-7 days at home. It helps only a little. My previous job was 100% telecommuting. That lasted almost five years. It's better than not working (did that too).

tokenadult 17y ago

Have the national trends changed since a half-decade ago when the submitted article was published? I work from home, except that I have contact hours for teaching about a twenty-minute drive from here. We live near a city bike and hiking trail, and walk to much of our shopping and to the public library where I do much of my research.

minouye 17y ago

Wow - I thought my 50 min. one way commute was bad, but I guess I should be considering myself lucky. For those commuting long distances by car, has anyone figured out how to optimize that time? I usually try to make calls, listen to podcasts, or just take some time to think about projects that I'm working on. I figure that about 50% of my commute is being used productively--if anyone feels much more efficient than that, I would love to hear strategies...

ax0n 17y ago

I got laid off in January, but I really, really miss my commute. It cleared my mind, woke me up on the way to work, made me feel healthier, and let me blow off some steam on the way home after the really stressful days. It was an hour each way, give or take... By bicycle. ;)