post off: how long is your commute?
Everyday, during my daily commute, I read the New Yorker. If I’m lucky, I will read it while sitting down. By the time Friday hits, I’ve usually managed to consume most of the issue in my ten or so 20 minute subway rides. In this week’s New Yorker is an amazing story by Nick Paumgarten called “There and Back Again:The Soul of the Commuter”. It’s all about how we Americans commute. Most of us (nine out of ten) don’t ride mass transit, but rather drive alone in cars (about 90 percent) averaging 51 minutes to and fro. That’s average. Others have daily commutes that can be two hours each way — or more. Usually, the reasoning behind this kind of time sacrifice is that at the end of your journey waits a home you love. As someone who longs for a home that is a house and not in apartment building, this balance — home vs. time spent commuting — is something I think about all the time. I don’t know what the right equation is, but sense it might be changing for me. — Angela M
What about you? How do you get to work everyday? How long is your commute? Is it worth it?
hm. how long does it take me to get from my bed to my desk…. three mins, maybe five if there’s congestion in the hallway.
Well, I drive alone in my car. It’s about a 15 minute drive, and it is worth it, even though I feel guilty about it. I’m in Providence, and it would take me upwards of an hour to get to my destination by mass transit – same with walking.
Also, from Port Washington to 120 Wooster St. this past summer took over an hour and half each way (LIRR/subways), but that was also worth it. I never would have driven in on that commute – forget the environment, that’d be torture!
Unrelatedly, nice new site design.
I’ve got a 15-minute commute, with no available mass transit (I’m in a more rural area), so I drive on my own. I must always have a book on tape in the car, or I get antsy (NPR is usually repeating by then).
I have a walk/train combo. I leave the house at 8:15, catch the 8:27 Metra (the commuter train, as opposed to better-known El) and then another 5 minutes of walking gets me to work by 9:00. It always boggles my mind that a 6-mile commute takes 45 minutes! But driving or taking the El would take well over an hour (aside from the fact that I ditched my car when I moved here).
My commute takes me about 20 minutes, but I don’t have to take the freeway. As for mass transit, we only have buses here, and that would take at least an hour. My boyfriend and I carpool to and from work, so that’s good.
I have a 20 minute walk which I enjoy very much. The job is not so great but walking to work is a real pleasure (even in bad weather) because the traffic is awful.
I drive 1.5 hrs without traffic and 2 hrs with, each way to and fro Manhattan – Central Jersey. I can’t complain since my boss drives 2.5-3 hrs from PA to Central Jersey. It’s really crazy when I think about it. Listening to Sirius radio helps.
I commute 30 minutes each way every morning. Where I previously live, I commuted about 5 minutes. The big change was a lifestyle thing.
I figure there are two kinds of people. The kind that would rather have a nice place in the burbs, or the kind that would like to have a smaller, urban place near all the stuff. I work in the burbs, live near all the stuff. It used to be the other way around, but I ended up driving so much to go to dinner, etc that it wasn’t worth it.
Do I like it? No. But it gives me time to listen to NPR podcasts and audiobooks.
I live in a pretty small town (pop. 30,000) – have a 12 minute walk to work. Being able to walk to work is so great.
I live in the Bay Area and my commute is about 45 minutes door to door. This includes a short ride in my car, a longer ride in casual carpool and a short bus ride. I do get a lot of reading done (newspaper in the AM, book or magazine in the PM) and I like the transition from home to work and vice versa – makes it easier to decompress at the end of the day.
I read that article last night and really enjoyed it. Although I feel really bad for the middle aged women driving more than two hours each way to work.
I commute via bike or car 1 1/4 miles and it takes me 25 minutes because I drop my daughter off at school along the way. I love my commute!
I, too, live in the Bay Area. My commute is roughly 40 miles one way and I commute solely by mass transit (and have done so for five years now). I live in the city and commute to the burbs, and my door-to-door travel time is roughly 1.25 hours each way. I used to drive this commute, and found myself stressed out and nearly homicidal at the end of my commute each day. Switching to mass transit added maybe an extra hour per day to my commute, but that time has turned into a wonderful little buffer zone between work and home — I can read, knit, listen to podcasts, even nap! Best of all, when gas prices shot up, I didn’t notice — my transit costs are, for the most part, fixed.
Not to mention the whole better-for-the-environment thing.
I am a stay at home mom now but when I was working it was a 45-60 min commute. (approx 35-50 mi depending on where I lived). I live in a more rural part of the state and there isn’t mass transit in the small town I lived in. Where I worked was very rural and it would have been a 30-40 min drive for any errands if I chose to live where I worked and there wasn’t any rentals in the area. My husband works in the opposite direction. He has a 60min (45mi) commute and no possiblities of carpooling. The area he works in isn’t one that is good to raise children.
I walk or bike about a mile to get to work (in Berkeley). I have had longer commutes in the past and have always taken mass transit and/or relied on my own two feet (and a bike, sometimes). I have been willing to go to great lengths to avoid driving alone in a car — I have opted not to take jobs or live places that would require me to commute by car, and I’ve done bike/transit commutes that leave some of my friends aghast. The commutes may have taken me a bit longer, but I got a good amount of exercise in the process, which is, if you think about it, a timesaver (I hate gyms, btw). I don’t even own a car — I can’t see my way clear to owning an expensive hunk of metal and plastic that sits outside my house most of the time, waiting for me to drive it. I am a carshare member — occasionally I do need a car for local errands and I don’t want to be dependent on my friends. (In fact, I can sometimes help out friends who need to be picked up at the airport or move large-ish items.)
Knowing what I know about climate issues and the way oil dominates all sorts of economic and political policies, I just can’t live a car-centric life. (Sorry to be so PC about it, but it’s a very real factor . . . )
I live in Columbus, OH. I drive about 30 minutes each way. The city isn’t really setup well for mass transit (we do have buses); there is lots of sprawl. It seems like no matter where you live, you’d have to drive to your job! Unless you live next to work and never change jobs….sadly, it seems for me to make my way up the pay scale I’ve had to change companies a few times so I can never count on living close to work….
For six years of living in San Francisco I either did the walk-train combo or rode my bike. Either mode of transit took between 30 and 45 minutes for the roughly 4.5-mile commute. Actually, biking was often just 15-20 minutes to get to the office but I dreaded biking uphill to get home!
Now I live in L.A. but have the great fortune to work from home, so my commute is nil.
For the past five years I’ve had a 14 minute walk to work. On Monday, I will start work in New York and I will be commuting there from Philadelphia. Oh boy.
My options: Amtrack which is expensive, SEPTA to NJT which is slow, Chinatown bus which is possibly unsafe.
Wow, I’m so jealous of those of you who walk to work. Sciencegeek, I’ve heard about a lot of people who commute to NYC from Phili… hard to believe. Will you be doing that trip five days a week?
I have a 30 minute commute to work, 15 minutes of it along the Pacific Ocean, 15 minutes up a canyon road. In the morning Robert Siegel and crew are my companions until I get to the canyon road which I have to switch to CDs. I used to take mass transit at my last job, which I miss sometimes because it gave me more time to read then I have no. But my current commute has beautiful scenery and almost no traffic, so I suppose its an even trade. I just wish I had a Prius or something to off set the gas intake I use….someday someday.
I used to commute 1 – 2 hours (depending on traffic) each way from an east-side suburb of Toronto to a west-side suburb. I’d have to leave by 6 a.m. to miss the worst of the traffic and even that was often not enough.
I found it so stressful, that I started getting migraines, my hair started falling out, and I was a very mean and nasty person all of the time. I was so vastly unhappy, and it didn’t help that I really wasn’t a big fan of my job (I had a lot of downtime), or the company I worked for.
I finally quit to take a telecommuting job. It’s a little lonely sometimes, but I *love* working from home. A two-second commute is awesome.
I work freelance in NYC, so my daily commute changes, well, daily.
I prefer when I work downtown because unless it’s pissing rain or wickedly cold, I’ll walk for about 20 minutes to get to where I need to be.
If the subway is involved I generally give myself about 45 minutes and if I’m running early I’ll stop for a cup of coffee before I reach the studio I’m working in for the day.
My weekend commute to the country is about 2 hours, sometimes 2.5 hours if there is alot of traffic leaving the city. I couldn’t imagine doing this everyday; I think I’d shoot myself (or someone else!)
There is a bus that goes near my house outside the city, but it’s not convenient or safe to walk the 3 miles in the dark on a road with no shoulder, so I drive a car with good gas mileage (35 MPG)
sciencegeek, I’m a Philly to NY girl myself …. it’s rough. I lived / worked in Philly for 2 years with a 20 min walk to the office, but then got a great job in NY …. since my husband had just started grad school in Philly, we opted not to move. I’m fortunate in that my mom lives in NYC and I stay with her 2 nights / week, plus work from home 1 night / week, but the days I commute are rough, 2 hours door to door each way. And about to get rougher, as we’re expecting a baby – which means no more overnights in NY! I
opted for Amtrak b/c Septa takes a full hour longer. Yes, it’s expensive – $1000 / month for unlimited rides – but we built in that expectation into the cost / benefit analysis of taking this job. If I were trying to take Septa, I would have quit 6 months ago. And the Chinatown bus – totally not safe. I’ve been on 2 Chinatown buses that have run off the highway and into the median – not flipping thank god, but a scary experience nonetheless.
I live in South Loop, so taking the bus to work in the loop usually takes around 15-20 minutes; it takes me the same time when I bike in the summer as well.
I live in St. Paul, and my job is 3.5 miles from my apartment. The trip takes about 15 minutes, and I don’t consider it a commute at all. It’s just heading to work. Before I found my apartment I had a 20 minute commute for a little over a month, and couldn’t bear the thought of doing that every day. I feel somewhat guilty about driving to work, when I could be taking the bus, or even riding my bike when the weather is decent. But I work 2nd shift and don’t head home until 11pm, and at the very least, my mother would be very nervous about me taking either of those routes at night. And so would I, really. Maybe I’m being somewhat of a chicken in that respect, but I was raised in a small town, so the some level of urban paranoia is probably inevitable. ;) And at any rate, most weeks I probably only put 20 miles on my car, tops, so I try to tell myself that my impact on the environment could be much worse.
I commute to manhattan from Jersey City Heights. My husband and I moved out here for good in January (after 7 months of slowly fixing up our “fixer-upper”). So far, I love it up here. The area by the Congress St elevator has been getting press as being the next “it” area of JC, but it’s already way overpriced. We’re back by Kennedy Blvd, which has busses every 3-4 minutes during rush hour, that take me right in to Port Authority.
My commute has ended being 1 hour door-to-door. I feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds.
Two downsides though: there aren’t many restaurants up here yet, and most of our friends are in Brooklyn. But other than that, I do think it’s a very reasonably priced alternative to for people who want a little more space, but don’t want to spend their lives commuting.
My old job my commute was 30 minutes–we lived in an urban area and work was in the suburbs; yuck. Now I work from home and we are LIVING in the suburbs. I really hate it, though the neighborhood is a really great little place built in the early ’50s. We love the views, but feel isolated enough that when our lease is up and we have a chance to get to know Seattle better, we’ll move somewhere in where we can walk to shops and grocery stores. My husband’s commute is 30 minutes currently–he works in Georgetown (near downtown).
I’m an artist and designer and I live in rural Maine. My studio is attached to my home, so my daily commute is zero. But unfortunately I make up for it when I need to travel, because the drive to the airport is 3.5 hours. There is a closer airport, but the flights to NY run about $600-800 (for an hour flight!) unless you stay for more than five days. It’s a tradeoff I guess, but I sure would love to be able to more easily hop on a plane.
I have a 30-minute walk to work in L.A. The nicest parts are the dogs (and people walking them) that I’ve met, and the fact that the walk home slopes downhill so it’s not very strenuous at the end of the day when I’m tired. The dangerous part is the large number of good restaurants I pass on the way home — always makes me want to abandon all thoughts of cooking and just get take out for dinner! Luckily we don’t have “weather” here, so it’s a pretty consistently pleasant experience.
I commute from CT to midtown in NYC everyday and it takes about 3 hours a day. I drive to a train station, get on a train ride thats over an hour long, then take the shuttle, then another subway, and finally I’m at work. It is really excruciating but for those of us with student loans that can’t afford to live in Manhattan, there seems to be no other way.
I commute from Fort Lauderdale to Miami for work. Highway driving takes about 40-60min. depending on traffic, one way. I used to live closer to work and would drive through street traffic, sometimes, it would take just as long due to congestion. There is a way (convoluted, though it is) to take public transit to work but by the time I get out of work, it’s not the safest route to get back home at night.
I work at home. So my commute is less than a minute and I can get my laundry done during my work day. So now only boring projects and dim clients can suck my soul and not my commute.
I commute to Westchester County, NY from NYC weekdays and some weekends. I leave my house at 5:45am and get to work about 8:45. Walk 10 blocks/subway/train/bus work 10-13 hours bus/train/subway/walk.
A 6 hour daily commute plus a 10 hour work day leaves me with a calculated 8 hours to eat, sleep, and everything else in my life. This is my first major job out of college and I am already wondering why I didn’t learn a skill like welding or house painting.
As I like to brag, 40 minutes door-to-door on the subway from Brooklyn to Times Square in Manhattan. I love it because I get to read and write poems. The only thing I’d like more would be walking and riding a bike.
I used to take the the B61 out of Red Hook, Brooklyn (or walk) to a train station in Brooklyn Heights and then get on the dreaded 4/5 to Grand Central -and then- take the 6 to 51st. All and all it was only about an hour and half, but damn I *do not* miss the 4/5 during monring rush hours.
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ugh, mine’s anywhere from an hour and 15 minutes to 2 hours each way. it’s sucking the life out of me!!!!