9 ms·
In the Bay Area, 1-hour commutes are generally for older and apartment people. Younger family people are in the 2+ range.
by worstspotgain 2y ago
In the Bay Area, 1-hour commutes are generally for older and apartment people. Younger family people are in the 2+ range.
- ryandrake 2y agoWhen I lived in the Bay Area, my commute was ~2.5 hours each way. I would have killed for a 1 hour commute.
- asyx 2y agoDamn I was ready to jump in front of a train after having a 2h commute to university by train. Can’t imagine doing that in a car where I have to be alert as well.
- barsonme 2y agoThat’s insane. 13 hours of work + commute. After 7 hours of sleep you only have 4 hours left in your day for literally everything else.
- commandar 2y agoThe push for the 8 hour work day over a century ago was often accompanied with slogans to the effect of "8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours for what we will." 5 hours round trip commuting a day is giving up over half of your prerogative time to simply shuffling from one place to another. The Bay Area is lucrative monetarily and all, but there's just no world where that's worth it for me.
- red-iron-pine 2y agoA lot of people had to literally fight and die for that 8 hour day too.
- spacemadness 2y agoI’ve worked in tech in the Bay for over a decade and met a handful of people with that insane of a commute. It’s not normal.
- worstspotgain 2y agoThat's because having children in SF is not "normal," a huge fraction of new workers are single male tech workers. SF is the city with the fewest children per capita in the country, Daly City is #6. https://www.aaastateofplay.com/the-u-s-cities-with-the-most-and-fewest-children/ https://www.aaastateofplay.com/the-u-s-cities-with-the-most-...
- spacemadness 2y agoPlenty of my colleagues have had kids.
- worstspotgain 2y agoWell, OK, there are ways for a young tech family to avoid the 2+ hour commute: - Be extremely well paid, and don't mind buying a $1.5m house that would go for $500K in, say, Pittsburg CA. - Squeeze into an apartment. - Buy near one BART station and find a job near another, e.g. if you buy right next to the Pittsburg station and work at Uber HQ it's 1 hour each way. This mostly rules out Apple, Meta, Google, etc. Another way of course is if your colleagues bought homes at around the time of the market lows, but that was ~15 years ago, so they would not be young families.
- linotype 2y agoWith hours like that, do they really though? Or did they just procreate?
- jjulius 2y ago>13 hours of work... ... what?
- FPSDavid 2y agoThat is a ... choice.
- ryandrake 2y agoI mean, I guess it's a choice in that I'm not willing to move my family into a tiny shoebox or split the cost with three other roommates in order to afford to live in my employer's city. I don't make $300K+ at a FAANG like everyone else on HN, so I have to live in a place farther away that is supported by my compensation.
- epolanski 2y agoI find it absurd how Americans can't give up on their suburbs and car centric development dystopia and then spend so much time in their cars.
- galdosdi 2y agoThat's the nice thing about the Bay Area, you get to have the best of both -- live in a shoebox with no green space AND commute for hours to your job.
- hiatus 2y agoWhat steps do you suggest an average person take?
- epolanski 2y agoNone? This has to be dealt with at city planning level by investing in proper public transport. Because money in US only subsidizes car drivers.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- worstspotgain 2y agoPeople would go for condos if there were cheap large ones nearby. Alas, the supply restrictionists blocked all vertical development decades ago in order to inflate prices 10x and capture tech wages. That left SFHs and townhomes in far away places.
- angmarsbane 2y ago+1 for family sized (3 bedroom condos) if they existed close to work we could have families and jobs - imagine!
- ktosobcy 2y ago
- kstrauser 2y agoI had a commute from East Bay that was a 30 minute bus ride to downtown SF and a 15 minute walk. I didn’t mind it so much when I had to do that daily. The bus ride was a great time to read a book or the news. The walk was a nice chance to get some air and exercise and practice mindfulness, or to go the opposite way and listen to a podcast or some music. I far prefer my current commute of walking downstairs. I could abide the 45 minute ride-and-walk commute if there were a legitimate reason I needed to be somewhere in person. No one would pay me enough to commute 5 hours a day.
- amy-petrik-214 2y agoThe bay area is godawful in terms of expense, traffic, regulations "WHERES YOUR LOICENSE". Prop 13 means the new home buyer has 10-100x higher property taxes than their old home neighbor. Permitting madness means that in the santa cruz mountains, any construction is on essentially a permanent freeze. Even driving an old car, generally considered to be an "antique" if older than 25 years in the other 49 states, why in California there is no set time, it is a set year, 1976. So, according to classically rabidly insane california logic, in the year 3000, a 1,000 year old car would be "new" and not "antique" the saving grace: whereas lane splitting (driving a motorcycle between two cars) is illegal in 49 states and grey-area in DC, it is outright totally legal in California. Thusly those with interest and probably low anxiety and medium-high deathwish are exempted from traffic
- hamandcheese 2y agoEveryone I know with a long commute can afford a shorter commute, they just trade the commute for a larger single-family dwelling.
- jrks11o 2y agoyeah, “can afford” doesn’t mean I should, props to them
- hamandcheese 2y agoI'm mostly just observing that long commutes for techies is driven by American cultural norms. I have some sympathy for the ones with kids, zero sympathy for the rest.
- smugma 2y agoMost of the tech employees I know in SF could have shorter commutes with larger houses but choose to have smaller houses and longer commutes to live in the city rather than the suburbs. Why? Access to people in parks, cafes, bars, restaurants, events, “culture”, single people.