7 ms·

Mega Commuters in the U.S. [pdf]

45 points by colinscape 10y ago

stirbot 10y ago
I hope the people commuting from Northern New Jersey to DC are flying. Should that even be considered commuting?
walshemj 10y ago
50 miles is a mega commute :-) that would be an average commute for many uk commuters into London
- zzalpha 10y ago
  Is that an average commute for the average commuter? If not, sounds like they, too, are simply mega commuters. Poor bastards...
- melling 10y ago
  Driving? Btw, according to the document, 50 is only considered a long commute.
- noelwelsh 10y ago
  I think it's better to look at the time of commute, as that's what usually determines how one feels about a commute. In any case, Brighton is just under 50 miles straight line from London, and that's on the edge of what most people consider acceptable. Going North, it's about 50 miles and 45 minutes to Milton Keynes. Not many people commute from farther than that.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    They apparently define mega-commute as a combination of distance (>50 miles) and time (>90 minutes). I agree that time is probably the more relevant number for most. As is the degree to which you're driving in stop-and-go traffic vs. riding a train. Assuming I'm reading the study properly, solo driving does account for a significant portion of these commutes. Anecdotally, I had a commute that was at least on the cusp of this definition for a time. Driving it was pretty awful. Taking the commuter rail, as I typically did, was still something of a pain--it's just a big chunk out of the day--but was at least somewhat tolerable. (Fortunately, I also traveled and/or worked from home a significant portion of the time.) I wouldn't have wanted to do this long-term.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    Plenty commute on the inter city from Leicester to London which's > 100 Miles
- stu2010 10y ago
  I would also guess that the majority of those commuters are not driving solo. Longer train commutes are less mentally exhausting and also don't cause congestion.
- pacala 10y ago
  50 miles from Downtown London places one in Brighton or 5 miles away from Oxford. The diameter of London is about 50 miles, hard to believe that the average commuter moves from one end to the other on a daily basis. I'm also fun at parties.
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    Facts are fun! And I also think that while he's not wrong ("many" is subjective) that claim really needs a citation.
  - dx034 10y ago
    It's certainly not the average commute but there's a fair amount of people who do it. Don't have any statistics by there are several people in my office who do it. If you live close to a train station it's not much of an issue (as long as the trains not on strike). You can easily make it to the office in ~1 hour as most offices in the city are close to one of the train stations. Annual tickets are very expensive but so is living in the city. The major difference to the US is that here in London basically no one commutes by car. Train services are nearly always faster. And it has the advantage that you can use your time more productively.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    People in my office here at work commute 50 miles and more to central London, from places like Hatfield Peverel and Ashford. If you're near a mainline rail station, it's not rare at all.
- ciaranm 10y ago
  I live & work in London. I can't imagine doing that kind of commute everyday. Utterly soul crushing.
dictum 10y ago
"Mega Commuters" makes it sound like a great subject for a Hoarders-like television series.
santaclaus 10y ago
I had friends who commuted from Philly to NYC, and from NYC to Princeton. Insanity!
- RmDen 10y ago
  Princeton to NYC Penn is 45 minutes on the express train, first stop from Princeton is Newark. Back in the day, you could go on the Amtrak (Clocker/keystone) with a monthly NJT pass..they stopped that 10 years ago or so
goostavos 10y ago
I was a mega commuter for about 6 months. It did terrible things to my mental health. On a really, really lucky day I could make it home from work in about 75 minutes. Those were good days. Average was around 90min, and god help me, if there was an accident on the bridge, it could sky-rocket to 2.5 hours. I have never been more depressed in my entire life. After the drive home on Wednesday, I had already spent over the equivalent time of a standard work day in my car. At the end of the month, I had spent well over a work week's worth of hours commuting. That is time you don't get back, and it is near impossible to use it for anything worth while if you're stuck driving. Audiobooks helped _a little_ some weekly podcasts made some days better than others, but on the whole, it was just 3 hours of bored raging every day. When you're finally home, you've got about enough time to cook, say hello to the family, and then nip off to bed because you've gotta wake up before dawn to beat the bulk of the traffic. It was such a fucking grind. Never again. I'll happily trade 10s of thousands of dollars off any potential salary to not endure traffic again.
- cdubzzz 10y ago
  We have one mega commuter at our office who seems perfectly content with the travel and he has been doing it for as long as I have been here (so at least four years). He has a 20 min. drive from his home in WV to the train station and then a 2+ hour train ride in to the city. Yesterday on the way home, there was an accident ahead of his train and it took him _five hours_ to get home. I really can't comprehend it. I recently went from a 25-30 minute commute to a 45-60 minute one and I'm already regretting it a little because I just feel much more tired when I get home.
  - castratikron 10y ago
    A train ride is easier on you than a drive in traffic. He probably naps on the ride home.
    - cdubzzz 10y ago
      In the same way that commute preferences are different for my colleague and me, they are different for everyone. My commute is also by train (metro) and I find the additional time that I have tacked on to be surprisingly draining. My previous, shorter, commute required a line change so I was only on each train for about 5-10 minutes. My new commute is all on one line for at least 30 minutes (and more often 45+). So I have more than tripled my time on the train, and I think it is precisely this that makes me get to the end of the commute feeling so much more tired.
tsunamifury 10y ago
Of course San Francisco is at the top of the list. This city seems to have de-evolved into one of the worst places to work in America, not even justifying the 2x or 3x national average wages. Its the perfect storm of Gen X tech scene who settled in the suburbs and Y and beyond who refuse to leave the city, turning even 20 mile commutes into 90 min plus Ultra-marathons. I regular experience 120 min commutes with the occasional 2hour 30 min each way commute. It has gotten to the point that I believe people are forgoing families because they simply don't have the time to get to work, work, and spend time with their kids, while still affording to live here. And no, natural market forces are not rebalancing this.
- christophilus 10y ago
  Yeah. I took a big pay cut leaving Seattle to move back to small-town USA and work remotely. I'm much happier with this arrangement.
  - tsunamifury 10y ago
    I'm curious how big big is. 10's of thousands or 100's of thousands if you don't mind giving a range?
  - jplahn 10y ago
    Curious where you were living in Seattle that the commute was so bad?
    - existencebox 10y ago
      Not OP; but as someone who recently bought a house near seattle and has started feeling the pain: I couldn't afford to compete in redmond proper/seattle proper (low end ~500k+, regularly escalated with 20+ bidders 100k+ in cash over listing) so I got a house out in the suburbs (duvall, off in the northeast about ~20-30 miles) for ~430k. Grew up/worked on the east coast for many years, and regularly lived 60-80 miles outside of cities but could rely on light rail to get in to center <40 minutes of very regular, very easy travel. Here, a fraction of that distance regularly takes me 60-70 minutes to drive. I'm VERY LUCKY that I have a bus route, so that I can at least work, but as others have said, if any of the 1 lane roads have an accident, my drive rapidly becomes 2 hours+. I have to wake up before 6 to avoid rush hour, and even then it's a coin flip. I would frankly never make this tradeoff again. I now burn 2-3 hours every day (assuming I get home at 5-6 and sleep at 10-11) this just ate ~50% of my leisure time for a given day. I fucking love nature, having a yard, having autonomy to run my house how I want, but this is slowly destroying my sanity as I go to sleep each night with an even more pressing feeling of "not enough time in the day" than I ever had in an apartment near work. I'm... not too happy with the job/home life tradeoffs that I've seen available thus far. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but in most cities with high tech job concentration and reasonable stability I don't see a way around having to live like this unless you happened into money. (I was priced out of Seattle even with over a decade of life savings)
CalRobert 10y ago
Maybe if we didn't make it illegal to put homes next to jobs this wouldn't be an issue.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  The funny thing is mixed-use zoning and density have becoming increasingly allowed basically everywhere in the US ... except for SF. Here in NYC a lot of the NIMBY voice has been silenced by "look, they tried your policies, and it failed. Let's try these instead."
  - hx87 10y ago
    There's this weirdly common idea that density = skyscrapers, which ignores the fact that a community of 5-story walkups can easily support 70,000+ people per square mile.
    - JBReefer 10y ago
      I never got that. SF is 17k per sq mi., Queens is 21k. Queens is 4 stories with greenery, courtyards, parks, etc - forever. It's really calm and easy to get around. People think SF will be Beijing when it needs to be Queens.
- ghaff 10y ago
  That's a vast oversimplification for a study that's about the US as a whole. In the case of DC for example, which the study highlights: - A lot of people are commuting into government offices in the city. DC does indeed have a strict height restriction. But it's also worth observing that DC was generally considered to be a pretty dangerous city to live in and lots of people moved out to the suburbs because they didn't want to live in the city. - It's also just a sprawling metropolis with a beltway that's famously congested. It's not so much that people can't live nearby where the companies are but people want to live in particular communities and they change jobs and they end up having long commutes on busy roads. The fact is that there are lots of places around the US with plenty of places where companies and people can be nearby each other. But especially with two-income families where the couple work at far apart companies, or when someone just has a strong preference to live in the city or live in the exurbs--and that's not where the company is--you end up with long commutes.
rayiner 10y ago
I used to commute about 80-90 minutes each way by train (Baltimore to Union Station, Union Station to Foggy Bottom). It was okay--you can get a lot of work done on the train. The worst part was how much it cut into your sleep. Basically have to get up at 7 to get to work by 9.
- perryh2 10y ago
  I'm in the same train right now (literally as I type this) and have been commuting from Santa Clara to SF everyday. This takes me 2hrs 40mins combined of just being inside the train and another 20-30 mins of getting to the train station each day. Being in a train is not that bad as long as I'm preoccupied with my laptop, but I now have to sleep and wake up 2 hours earlier.
JoeDaDude 10y ago
With a self driving car, a long commute could become a nice quiet time to read, meditate, sleep, or whatever. I commuted 90 miles one-way for several years. Most of it was on a turnpike, and I could almost see myself reading a book or something during my drive (I never did though).
jabbanobodder 10y ago
I wonder how automated cars will change this. I would expect we will see larger and larger commute times, as people will be able to work in their cars (given their job), and it won't be so onerous as many of the things we do at home to relax can possibly be done while the car drives us where we need to go.
mfonda 10y ago
I wasn't a mega commuter, but I had a commute of around an hour. A few years back, I moved into the city. One of the most life changing decisions I've ever made. I didn't love commuting at the time, but it wasn't the worst thing. After experiencing what it was like to not commute, I realized how truly awful it was. Killing the commute is one of the best things I've ever done for my overall well being. If you're able to cut out your commute, even if it means sacrificing other things, I definitely recommend it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
brahmwg 10y ago
Related thread; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232111
vermontdevil 10y ago
I commuted 40 miles each way for four years living in Vermont. Not by choice as I got the job after moving there when my wife got hers first. As housing options are limited in Vermont due to restrictive development laws, we had to pick a place that is reasonable for my wife to commute. It ended up that my commute was much longer when I got the job. It sucked esp during the brutal winters! Never again. Now I'm happy with an easy 10 mile commute.
muad 10y ago
I took a $80k pay cut to leave LA and work fully remote.
rplnt 10y ago
I'm pretty spoiled when I automatically discard job postings that are in a remote part of city, some 30 minutes away on a bicycle.

45 points by colinscape 10y ago

stirbot 10y ago

I hope the people commuting from Northern New Jersey to DC are flying. Should that even be considered commuting?

walshemj 10y ago

50 miles is a mega commute :-) that would be an average commute for many uk commuters into London

zzalpha 10y ago
Is that an average commute for the average commuter? If not, sounds like they, too, are simply mega commuters. Poor bastards...
melling 10y ago
Driving? Btw, according to the document, 50 is only considered a long commute.
noelwelsh 10y ago
I think it's better to look at the time of commute, as that's what usually determines how one feels about a commute. In any case, Brighton is just under 50 miles straight line from London, and that's on the edge of what most people consider acceptable. Going North, it's about 50 miles and 45 minutes to Milton Keynes. Not many people commute from farther than that.
- ghaff 10y ago
  They apparently define mega-commute as a combination of distance (>50 miles) and time (>90 minutes). I agree that time is probably the more relevant number for most. As is the degree to which you're driving in stop-and-go traffic vs. riding a train. Assuming I'm reading the study properly, solo driving does account for a significant portion of these commutes. Anecdotally, I had a commute that was at least on the cusp of this definition for a time. Driving it was pretty awful. Taking the commuter rail, as I typically did, was still something of a pain--it's just a big chunk out of the day--but was at least somewhat tolerable. (Fortunately, I also traveled and/or worked from home a significant portion of the time.) I wouldn't have wanted to do this long-term.
- walshemj 10y ago
  Plenty commute on the inter city from Leicester to London which's > 100 Miles
stu2010 10y ago
I would also guess that the majority of those commuters are not driving solo. Longer train commutes are less mentally exhausting and also don't cause congestion.
pacala 10y ago
50 miles from Downtown London places one in Brighton or 5 miles away from Oxford. The diameter of London is about 50 miles, hard to believe that the average commuter moves from one end to the other on a daily basis. I'm also fun at parties.
- CalRobert 10y ago
  Facts are fun! And I also think that while he's not wrong ("many" is subjective) that claim really needs a citation.
- dx034 10y ago
  It's certainly not the average commute but there's a fair amount of people who do it. Don't have any statistics by there are several people in my office who do it. If you live close to a train station it's not much of an issue (as long as the trains not on strike). You can easily make it to the office in ~1 hour as most offices in the city are close to one of the train stations. Annual tickets are very expensive but so is living in the city. The major difference to the US is that here in London basically no one commutes by car. Train services are nearly always faster. And it has the advantage that you can use your time more productively.
- barrkel 10y ago
  People in my office here at work commute 50 miles and more to central London, from places like Hatfield Peverel and Ashford. If you're near a mainline rail station, it's not rare at all.
ciaranm 10y ago
I live & work in London. I can't imagine doing that kind of commute everyday. Utterly soul crushing.

dictum 10y ago

"Mega Commuters" makes it sound like a great subject for a Hoarders-like television series.

santaclaus 10y ago

I had friends who commuted from Philly to NYC, and from NYC to Princeton. Insanity!

RmDen 10y ago
Princeton to NYC Penn is 45 minutes on the express train, first stop from Princeton is Newark. Back in the day, you could go on the Amtrak (Clocker/keystone) with a monthly NJT pass..they stopped that 10 years ago or so

goostavos 10y ago

I was a mega commuter for about 6 months. It did terrible things to my mental health. On a really, really lucky day I could make it home from work in about 75 minutes. Those were good days. Average was around 90min, and god help me, if there was an accident on the bridge, it could sky-rocket to 2.5 hours. I have never been more depressed in my entire life. After the drive home on Wednesday, I had already spent over the equivalent time of a standard work day in my car. At the end of the month, I had spent well over a work week's worth of hours commuting. That is time you don't get back, and it is near impossible to use it for anything worth while if you're stuck driving. Audiobooks helped _a little_ some weekly podcasts made some days better than others, but on the whole, it was just 3 hours of bored raging every day. When you're finally home, you've got about enough time to cook, say hello to the family, and then nip off to bed because you've gotta wake up before dawn to beat the bulk of the traffic. It was such a fucking grind. Never again. I'll happily trade 10s of thousands of dollars off any potential salary to not endure traffic again.

cdubzzz 10y ago
We have one mega commuter at our office who seems perfectly content with the travel and he has been doing it for as long as I have been here (so at least four years). He has a 20 min. drive from his home in WV to the train station and then a 2+ hour train ride in to the city. Yesterday on the way home, there was an accident ahead of his train and it took him _five hours_ to get home. I really can't comprehend it. I recently went from a 25-30 minute commute to a 45-60 minute one and I'm already regretting it a little because I just feel much more tired when I get home.
- castratikron 10y ago
  A train ride is easier on you than a drive in traffic. He probably naps on the ride home.
  - cdubzzz 10y ago
    In the same way that commute preferences are different for my colleague and me, they are different for everyone. My commute is also by train (metro) and I find the additional time that I have tacked on to be surprisingly draining. My previous, shorter, commute required a line change so I was only on each train for about 5-10 minutes. My new commute is all on one line for at least 30 minutes (and more often 45+). So I have more than tripled my time on the train, and I think it is precisely this that makes me get to the end of the commute feeling so much more tired.

tsunamifury 10y ago

Of course San Francisco is at the top of the list. This city seems to have de-evolved into one of the worst places to work in America, not even justifying the 2x or 3x national average wages. Its the perfect storm of Gen X tech scene who settled in the suburbs and Y and beyond who refuse to leave the city, turning even 20 mile commutes into 90 min plus Ultra-marathons. I regular experience 120 min commutes with the occasional 2hour 30 min each way commute. It has gotten to the point that I believe people are forgoing families because they simply don't have the time to get to work, work, and spend time with their kids, while still affording to live here. And no, natural market forces are not rebalancing this.

christophilus 10y ago
Yeah. I took a big pay cut leaving Seattle to move back to small-town USA and work remotely. I'm much happier with this arrangement.
- tsunamifury 10y ago
  I'm curious how big big is. 10's of thousands or 100's of thousands if you don't mind giving a range?
- jplahn 10y ago
  Curious where you were living in Seattle that the commute was so bad?
  - existencebox 10y ago
    Not OP; but as someone who recently bought a house near seattle and has started feeling the pain: I couldn't afford to compete in redmond proper/seattle proper (low end ~500k+, regularly escalated with 20+ bidders 100k+ in cash over listing) so I got a house out in the suburbs (duvall, off in the northeast about ~20-30 miles) for ~430k. Grew up/worked on the east coast for many years, and regularly lived 60-80 miles outside of cities but could rely on light rail to get in to center <40 minutes of very regular, very easy travel. Here, a fraction of that distance regularly takes me 60-70 minutes to drive. I'm VERY LUCKY that I have a bus route, so that I can at least work, but as others have said, if any of the 1 lane roads have an accident, my drive rapidly becomes 2 hours+. I have to wake up before 6 to avoid rush hour, and even then it's a coin flip. I would frankly never make this tradeoff again. I now burn 2-3 hours every day (assuming I get home at 5-6 and sleep at 10-11) this just ate ~50% of my leisure time for a given day. I fucking love nature, having a yard, having autonomy to run my house how I want, but this is slowly destroying my sanity as I go to sleep each night with an even more pressing feeling of "not enough time in the day" than I ever had in an apartment near work. I'm... not too happy with the job/home life tradeoffs that I've seen available thus far. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but in most cities with high tech job concentration and reasonable stability I don't see a way around having to live like this unless you happened into money. (I was priced out of Seattle even with over a decade of life savings)

CalRobert 10y ago

Maybe if we didn't make it illegal to put homes next to jobs this wouldn't be an issue.

JBReefer 10y ago
The funny thing is mixed-use zoning and density have becoming increasingly allowed basically everywhere in the US ... except for SF. Here in NYC a lot of the NIMBY voice has been silenced by "look, they tried your policies, and it failed. Let's try these instead."
- hx87 10y ago
  There's this weirdly common idea that density = skyscrapers, which ignores the fact that a community of 5-story walkups can easily support 70,000+ people per square mile.
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    I never got that. SF is 17k per sq mi., Queens is 21k. Queens is 4 stories with greenery, courtyards, parks, etc - forever. It's really calm and easy to get around. People think SF will be Beijing when it needs to be Queens.
ghaff 10y ago
That's a vast oversimplification for a study that's about the US as a whole. In the case of DC for example, which the study highlights: - A lot of people are commuting into government offices in the city. DC does indeed have a strict height restriction. But it's also worth observing that DC was generally considered to be a pretty dangerous city to live in and lots of people moved out to the suburbs because they didn't want to live in the city. - It's also just a sprawling metropolis with a beltway that's famously congested. It's not so much that people can't live nearby where the companies are but people want to live in particular communities and they change jobs and they end up having long commutes on busy roads. The fact is that there are lots of places around the US with plenty of places where companies and people can be nearby each other. But especially with two-income families where the couple work at far apart companies, or when someone just has a strong preference to live in the city or live in the exurbs--and that's not where the company is--you end up with long commutes.

rayiner 10y ago

I used to commute about 80-90 minutes each way by train (Baltimore to Union Station, Union Station to Foggy Bottom). It was okay--you can get a lot of work done on the train. The worst part was how much it cut into your sleep. Basically have to get up at 7 to get to work by 9.

perryh2 10y ago
I'm in the same train right now (literally as I type this) and have been commuting from Santa Clara to SF everyday. This takes me 2hrs 40mins combined of just being inside the train and another 20-30 mins of getting to the train station each day. Being in a train is not that bad as long as I'm preoccupied with my laptop, but I now have to sleep and wake up 2 hours earlier.

JoeDaDude 10y ago

With a self driving car, a long commute could become a nice quiet time to read, meditate, sleep, or whatever. I commuted 90 miles one-way for several years. Most of it was on a turnpike, and I could almost see myself reading a book or something during my drive (I never did though).

jabbanobodder 10y ago

I wonder how automated cars will change this. I would expect we will see larger and larger commute times, as people will be able to work in their cars (given their job), and it won't be so onerous as many of the things we do at home to relax can possibly be done while the car drives us where we need to go.

mfonda 10y ago

I wasn't a mega commuter, but I had a commute of around an hour. A few years back, I moved into the city. One of the most life changing decisions I've ever made. I didn't love commuting at the time, but it wasn't the worst thing. After experiencing what it was like to not commute, I realized how truly awful it was. Killing the commute is one of the best things I've ever done for my overall well being. If you're able to cut out your commute, even if it means sacrificing other things, I definitely recommend it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

brahmwg 10y ago

Related thread; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232111

vermontdevil 10y ago

I commuted 40 miles each way for four years living in Vermont. Not by choice as I got the job after moving there when my wife got hers first. As housing options are limited in Vermont due to restrictive development laws, we had to pick a place that is reasonable for my wife to commute. It ended up that my commute was much longer when I got the job. It sucked esp during the brutal winters! Never again. Now I'm happy with an easy 10 mile commute.

muad 10y ago

I took a $80k pay cut to leave LA and work fully remote.

rplnt 10y ago

I'm pretty spoiled when I automatically discard job postings that are in a remote part of city, some 30 minutes away on a bicycle.