7 ms·

A 2-hour round trip commute is insane. Let's look at a 1-hour round trip commute assuming 240 working days per year. This means 240 hours gone in a year to you

A 2-hour round trip commute is insane. Let's look at a 1-hour round trip commute assuming 240 working days per year. This means 240 hours gone in a year to your commute. That's 10 full whole days. A 2-hour round trip commute means 20 full whole days... almost a whole month gone. 3-hour round trip commute = 30 full days.. and so on.

0_____0 5y ago
I know people who had 4-5 hour RT commutes in the Bay. (Tracy <-> SF) It's ludicrous, but I suppose it's a bit of a boiled frog scenario. People just got used to having to commute from further and further away as housing has gotten less affordable.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  If you're not having to drive then commutes can be easily optimised. You can read a book, chat to your commuter buddies on the train/boat/coach (in some instances over a beer so it's little different than being down the pub). I've even used my commuter time to catch up of pending PRs on open source projects I maintain. This obviously depends on your city / county / state having good public transport infrastructure but if the option is there and its practical then I'd take the train over driving to work any day of the week.
  - rcpt 5y ago
    Door-to-desk plus desk-to-door was 3 hours for me. Even with the google bus that was pretty rough.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I had one of those--typically by train--for about 18 months though I didn't go in every day. I had to get up by about 6am to drive to the train station and it was just a big chunk of the day. I don't think I'd have found it sustainable over the long-term.
  - watwut 5y ago
    But it makes equal chores split with partner regarding kids literally impossible. Practically, you barely ever see them and your dad role amounts to being wallet.
    - bluefirebrand 5y ago
      So many of the arguments made by pro-office people seem to boil down to "If you have a family or other non-work responsibilities, screw you"
      - lanstin 5y ago
        Fortunately, they aren't the boss of me, and also fortunately, the job market means my skills gives me enough power to push back against this idea all on my own, with no support from a union or strong laws or anything. A family isn't just a responsibility, it's a delight, a fulfilling life, human connection, everything you need wrapped up into a big ball of inconvenience and imperfection.
      - hnlmorg 5y ago
        That may sometimes be the case, but it's definitely not the case with my post and nor am I a "pro-office" person. I don't miss the office. I miss the beers, the commute and city centre eateries. But I don't miss the office. People on HN often love to get on their high horse about parenting responsibilities but the fact remains that even the best parents need some "me" time occasionally. We do our best parenting when we're not mentally and physically exhausted. Much like a good company shouldn't allow their employees to burn out -- a good family shouldn't let either. So my point about the commute was about how that time can be optimised for relaxation so you can better serve your family once you are home.
        watwut 5y ago
        I was more off on the topic of offloading all or most of that to partner who then has all of them. And very little to no "me time". We are not talking about beer with friends once in a while either. We are talking about regular very time consuming activity.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  I'm in Livermore, so not as far out as Tracy, but depending on traffic, the one-way commute can be 1 hour 45 minutes (best case) up to 4 hours (worst-case Friday 4:00PM before a holiday weekend). Usual case is a little over 2 hours each way. The real soul killer is the unpredictability of it all. Every morning there's at least one jackass on each interstate highway leg that manages to crash their car into something, slowing everything down in a random, unpredictable way.
  - tjr225 5y ago
    I had a similar commute from Olympia to Seattle for about 6 months. Absolutely soul crushing. The amount of people on their phones is mind boggling. My solution was to figure out how to afford to live in the city. I am privileged in that sense, however.
    - 0_____0 5y ago
      imo we should design housing policy such that a barista can live 30m walking from work if they want to
myth_drannon 5y ago
Most people I know who have families and live in suburbs have longer commutes (Toronto or Montreal). 3 hours is the norm.
- pc86 5y ago
  "3 hours is the norm" is objectively false. The average commute is under an hour: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/07/nine-days-road-average-commute-time-reached-new-record-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/07/nine-days... And in case you think Canada is wildly different than the US, not only is it not, but it's actually even better: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190225/dq190225a-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190225/dq190...
  - gbear605 5y ago
    “3 hours is the norm” can both be true for people in a certain area while false for the country as a whole.
    - pc86 5y ago
      https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/171129/t002c-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/171129/t002c... "3 hours is the norm" is just not true for any area of the US or Canada.
pc86 5y ago
It's just someone prioritizing things differently. I would never commute more than 20-30 minutes (one way) pre-COVID. I will only work remotely from now on, maybe a scheduled day in the office every week for a killer opportunity with a resume-changing company. But if you live in a HCOL area, and you want a yard, you're pretty much locked in to hour+ one-way commutes.
- mcguire 5y ago
  Back between 1990 and 2005, I lived in Austin before moving to north Alabama. My commute when I was working on Redstone Arsenal was exactly an hour each way. I didn't really mind for several reasons. One of which was that my 6 mile commute in Austin took between 45 minutes to an hour.
ghaff 5y ago
For pretty much anyone going into a city or commuting in heavy stop-and-go highway traffic, an hour each way is extremely common.
robertlagrant 5y ago
It's not insane. It's what people do to feed their families and keep their kids in the same school. It would be better not to, but it is far from insane.
- batty_alex 5y ago
  Just because you say it doesn’t make it true. Hour-long commutes aren’t common
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Well at least "aren't common" is a step more reasonable than "are insane". That can be my good deed for the day.
deathanatos 5y ago
Do you pay the quite significant rent increase to reduce the commute, or do you pocket that money & try to deal with the lost time as best as possible? At some point, I'm going to want to buy a house (so money now can be saved), the total cost of which is >$1M in not just the Bay Area (which I've now left, for these very reasons); even where I am now, housing remains that pricy … unless you give up having a sub 2h commute. > A 2-hour round trip commute is insane. My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  If you live in big city in a country not totally ravaged by car culture, you can also subtract car price.
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  While this "enumerate all the costs and benefits" calculus is really appealing, the "how much is the land (de)appreciating?" factor dominates everything. This is why most people can buy homes without much serious thought and still come out very happy and ahead, because the land appreciation (or depreciation) sort of bakes in all your complex considerations for you.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis. There has to be a name for the logical fallacy of treating the market as some kind of oracle, as if it was a global optimizer, instead of a greedy optimizer that will happily ignore the costs it can externalize. "The Bay Area" doesn't "believe" the housing crisis needs to be addressed because for most interested actors, it's in their personal interest to further the crisis. You paid a lot for your house, and you want it to appreciate in value. You paid a lot for your house, because others who bought before you wanted theirs to appreciate in value. Someone else will pay a lot for their house, because you want yours to appreciate in value.
biztos 5y ago
I had a 2h round trip daily commute from downtown Sunnyvale (about 10 minutes walk to Caltrain) to downtown SF (2nd and Folsom). It was pretty normal. Basically an hour each way, of which 20m fast walking, if you timed it right. Hit a slow train, try for the 10 bus and miss, get rained on, train late, miss the train, train runs over someone — sometimes it took longer. I moved up to the city and had about 40 minutes each way by bus, and if you haven’t tried it let me tell you: an hour on Caltrain is much nicer, not to mention safer, than half an hour on a MUNI bus. On Caltrain I could at least read the news, on the bus it was pretty much watch your back. I haven’t commuted at all in the last 12 years but I accept that if I ever work onsite in the USA again I probably will need to, and the trick is to try and find a form of commute that isn’t a complete waste of time.
- poopypoopington 5y ago
  When my commute was biking 30 minutes from the inner sunset to SoMa a few years ago I found that I really enjoyed that. Honestly a 30 minute bike ride is my ideal commute I think.
mytailorisrich 5y ago
I think it's very common (I'm in Europe/UK). Things add up extremely quickly to reach ~1h door-to-door between home and office. Saving that time does make a huge difference, indeed. It's exactly my case, actually. My commute was just under an hour each way, walk and train, so I have been saving a lot of time and money since WFH. I go for a walk at lunchtime, though, in order to do some exercise but it's much nicer than walking on busy roads to train stations.
chrisseaton 5y ago
I wouldn't like a 1-hour commute either... but it's not time 'lost' - you can use that time to read, work on your hobbies, listen to music, have a drink or supper, or just sleep if you want. Doesn't have to be wasted if you don't want to.
- zentiggr 5y ago
  I commuted 45 minutes each way to a prior job for a couple of years. Yes, I ate my breakfast in the car on the way there. No, I didn't sleep, read, or do anything distracting on my drive because when you're in deer country, dawn and dusk are times to be vigilant and ready to brake or swerve if horribly necessary. Still had $4100 of damage one January. Commutes can be anywhere from 0 - ? percent multitaskable.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    I guess most people commuting as long as an hour or more are doing it on a train where you can do all these things.
    - zepto 5y ago
      You conjure up the idea of a Victorian train carriage with plenty of space and waiters to serve you dinner etc. Most people are experiencing a noisy packed out train car lit by bright fluorescence lamps, full of tired, irritated people, where they could easily be standing for half the trip. Not exactly the ideal environment to dine or work on your hobbies…
- mancerayder 5y ago
  You ever try standing on a NYC subway, surrounded by strangers, at least a few of which are playing video games or listening to music videos / TV out loud on their phones, having to move every 6 minutes as the doors open and close, and having to keep tabs on who's around you since there are sometimes shady and angry individuals -- for a 45 minute stretch mornings and night? I have, and I can assure you, it's no way to start your day - or end it. Reading is extremely difficult with a bag on one arm and a phone or kindle on the other, if you need to hold onto a pole to not fall over.

0_____0 5y ago

I know people who had 4-5 hour RT commutes in the Bay. (Tracy <-> SF) It's ludicrous, but I suppose it's a bit of a boiled frog scenario. People just got used to having to commute from further and further away as housing has gotten less affordable.

hnlmorg 5y ago
If you're not having to drive then commutes can be easily optimised. You can read a book, chat to your commuter buddies on the train/boat/coach (in some instances over a beer so it's little different than being down the pub). I've even used my commuter time to catch up of pending PRs on open source projects I maintain. This obviously depends on your city / county / state having good public transport infrastructure but if the option is there and its practical then I'd take the train over driving to work any day of the week.
- rcpt 5y ago
  Door-to-desk plus desk-to-door was 3 hours for me. Even with the google bus that was pretty rough.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I had one of those--typically by train--for about 18 months though I didn't go in every day. I had to get up by about 6am to drive to the train station and it was just a big chunk of the day. I don't think I'd have found it sustainable over the long-term.
- watwut 5y ago
  But it makes equal chores split with partner regarding kids literally impossible. Practically, you barely ever see them and your dad role amounts to being wallet.
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    So many of the arguments made by pro-office people seem to boil down to "If you have a family or other non-work responsibilities, screw you"
    - lanstin 5y ago
      Fortunately, they aren't the boss of me, and also fortunately, the job market means my skills gives me enough power to push back against this idea all on my own, with no support from a union or strong laws or anything. A family isn't just a responsibility, it's a delight, a fulfilling life, human connection, everything you need wrapped up into a big ball of inconvenience and imperfection.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      That may sometimes be the case, but it's definitely not the case with my post and nor am I a "pro-office" person. I don't miss the office. I miss the beers, the commute and city centre eateries. But I don't miss the office. People on HN often love to get on their high horse about parenting responsibilities but the fact remains that even the best parents need some "me" time occasionally. We do our best parenting when we're not mentally and physically exhausted. Much like a good company shouldn't allow their employees to burn out -- a good family shouldn't let either. So my point about the commute was about how that time can be optimised for relaxation so you can better serve your family once you are home.
      - watwut 5y ago
        I was more off on the topic of offloading all or most of that to partner who then has all of them. And very little to no "me time". We are not talking about beer with friends once in a while either. We are talking about regular very time consuming activity.
ryandrake 5y ago
I'm in Livermore, so not as far out as Tracy, but depending on traffic, the one-way commute can be 1 hour 45 minutes (best case) up to 4 hours (worst-case Friday 4:00PM before a holiday weekend). Usual case is a little over 2 hours each way. The real soul killer is the unpredictability of it all. Every morning there's at least one jackass on each interstate highway leg that manages to crash their car into something, slowing everything down in a random, unpredictable way.
- tjr225 5y ago
  I had a similar commute from Olympia to Seattle for about 6 months. Absolutely soul crushing. The amount of people on their phones is mind boggling. My solution was to figure out how to afford to live in the city. I am privileged in that sense, however.
  - 0_____0 5y ago
    imo we should design housing policy such that a barista can live 30m walking from work if they want to

myth_drannon 5y ago

Most people I know who have families and live in suburbs have longer commutes (Toronto or Montreal). 3 hours is the norm.

pc86 5y ago
"3 hours is the norm" is objectively false. The average commute is under an hour: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/07/nine-days-road-average-commute-time-reached-new-record-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/07/nine-days... And in case you think Canada is wildly different than the US, not only is it not, but it's actually even better: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190225/dq190225a-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190225/dq190...
- gbear605 5y ago
  “3 hours is the norm” can both be true for people in a certain area while false for the country as a whole.
  - pc86 5y ago
    https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/171129/t002c-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/171129/t002c... "3 hours is the norm" is just not true for any area of the US or Canada.

pc86 5y ago

It's just someone prioritizing things differently. I would never commute more than 20-30 minutes (one way) pre-COVID. I will only work remotely from now on, maybe a scheduled day in the office every week for a killer opportunity with a resume-changing company. But if you live in a HCOL area, and you want a yard, you're pretty much locked in to hour+ one-way commutes.

mcguire 5y ago
Back between 1990 and 2005, I lived in Austin before moving to north Alabama. My commute when I was working on Redstone Arsenal was exactly an hour each way. I didn't really mind for several reasons. One of which was that my 6 mile commute in Austin took between 45 minutes to an hour.

ghaff 5y ago

For pretty much anyone going into a city or commuting in heavy stop-and-go highway traffic, an hour each way is extremely common.

robertlagrant 5y ago

It's not insane. It's what people do to feed their families and keep their kids in the same school. It would be better not to, but it is far from insane.

batty_alex 5y ago
Just because you say it doesn’t make it true. Hour-long commutes aren’t common
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Well at least "aren't common" is a step more reasonable than "are insane". That can be my good deed for the day.

deathanatos 5y ago

Do you pay the quite significant rent increase to reduce the commute, or do you pocket that money & try to deal with the lost time as best as possible? At some point, I'm going to want to buy a house (so money now can be saved), the total cost of which is >$1M in not just the Bay Area (which I've now left, for these very reasons); even where I am now, housing remains that pricy … unless you give up having a sub 2h commute. > A 2-hour round trip commute is insane. My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis.

KptMarchewa 5y ago
If you live in big city in a country not totally ravaged by car culture, you can also subtract car price.
an_opabinia 5y ago
While this "enumerate all the costs and benefits" calculus is really appealing, the "how much is the land (de)appreciating?" factor dominates everything. This is why most people can buy homes without much serious thought and still come out very happy and ahead, because the land appreciation (or depreciation) sort of bakes in all your complex considerations for you.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis. There has to be a name for the logical fallacy of treating the market as some kind of oracle, as if it was a global optimizer, instead of a greedy optimizer that will happily ignore the costs it can externalize. "The Bay Area" doesn't "believe" the housing crisis needs to be addressed because for most interested actors, it's in their personal interest to further the crisis. You paid a lot for your house, and you want it to appreciate in value. You paid a lot for your house, because others who bought before you wanted theirs to appreciate in value. Someone else will pay a lot for their house, because you want yours to appreciate in value.

biztos 5y ago

I had a 2h round trip daily commute from downtown Sunnyvale (about 10 minutes walk to Caltrain) to downtown SF (2nd and Folsom). It was pretty normal. Basically an hour each way, of which 20m fast walking, if you timed it right. Hit a slow train, try for the 10 bus and miss, get rained on, train late, miss the train, train runs over someone — sometimes it took longer. I moved up to the city and had about 40 minutes each way by bus, and if you haven’t tried it let me tell you: an hour on Caltrain is much nicer, not to mention safer, than half an hour on a MUNI bus. On Caltrain I could at least read the news, on the bus it was pretty much watch your back. I haven’t commuted at all in the last 12 years but I accept that if I ever work onsite in the USA again I probably will need to, and the trick is to try and find a form of commute that isn’t a complete waste of time.

poopypoopington 5y ago
When my commute was biking 30 minutes from the inner sunset to SoMa a few years ago I found that I really enjoyed that. Honestly a 30 minute bike ride is my ideal commute I think.

mytailorisrich 5y ago

I think it's very common (I'm in Europe/UK). Things add up extremely quickly to reach ~1h door-to-door between home and office. Saving that time does make a huge difference, indeed. It's exactly my case, actually. My commute was just under an hour each way, walk and train, so I have been saving a lot of time and money since WFH. I go for a walk at lunchtime, though, in order to do some exercise but it's much nicer than walking on busy roads to train stations.

chrisseaton 5y ago

I wouldn't like a 1-hour commute either... but it's not time 'lost' - you can use that time to read, work on your hobbies, listen to music, have a drink or supper, or just sleep if you want. Doesn't have to be wasted if you don't want to.

zentiggr 5y ago
I commuted 45 minutes each way to a prior job for a couple of years. Yes, I ate my breakfast in the car on the way there. No, I didn't sleep, read, or do anything distracting on my drive because when you're in deer country, dawn and dusk are times to be vigilant and ready to brake or swerve if horribly necessary. Still had $4100 of damage one January. Commutes can be anywhere from 0 - ? percent multitaskable.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  I guess most people commuting as long as an hour or more are doing it on a train where you can do all these things.
  - zepto 5y ago
    You conjure up the idea of a Victorian train carriage with plenty of space and waiters to serve you dinner etc. Most people are experiencing a noisy packed out train car lit by bright fluorescence lamps, full of tired, irritated people, where they could easily be standing for half the trip. Not exactly the ideal environment to dine or work on your hobbies…
mancerayder 5y ago
You ever try standing on a NYC subway, surrounded by strangers, at least a few of which are playing video games or listening to music videos / TV out loud on their phones, having to move every 6 minutes as the doors open and close, and having to keep tabs on who's around you since there are sometimes shady and angry individuals -- for a 45 minute stretch mornings and night? I have, and I can assure you, it's no way to start your day - or end it. Reading is extremely difficult with a bag on one arm and a phone or kindle on the other, if you need to hold onto a pole to not fall over.