Hey, a relevant article to me. I ride the metrolink from the same station she used to ride from. I have a 35 minute drive to the Riverside metrolink, and I take it down to Orange, another 55 minutes. This is about to expand to 1 hour and 15 minutes when my work moves its office to Irvine.
My typical day, I wake up at 4am, drive to Riverside to do some crossfit from 5:30-6:30, and hop on the train at 7am. I get to the office shortly after 8am. Fortunately, I leave around 4pm and am usually home by 6pm. I tend to work on the train, but I can use that for side projects or leisure when I feel like it.
After 5 years of doing that, I shifted to working in the office usually 3 days a week, and then remote the last two days of the week. It really has helped.
Why do I do it? I really love where I work. It is fantastic. I also really love where I live in the mountains of SoCal. My coworkers have a hard time wrapping their head around dealing with wildlife like bears and things like ice and snow in the winter :). Many also can't process that my mortgage is under half of what they spend on an apartment (that they split with a roommate). My wife is a part time crossfit coach and full time mother, doing home school with our two youngest kids.
I've thought about moving close to work, but housing is just so expensive there. Counting commute costs, I would have to spend 4x on a mortgage in the city. I would like to do things like save money for my future and eat healthy foods. So I stay where I'm at. And I'm happy.
You described what I kind of hope my future to look like, I'd love to live somewhere like that and commute/work remotely. Question: was it hard to get reliable internet out there? With the mountains and all.
For a long time, the internet was terrible. We have FiOS where I'm at, and it tends to work well. There are other areas on the mountain with broadband that is slower. If you get too remote, you are left with satellite which has too high of a ping for video conferencing or games.
This is close to home for me, too — although I count myself extremely blessed to have a good job in Redlands, within biking distance. (I used to commute 2 1/2 hours a day from here to school.)
you are obviously making your health a priority, which us key. lots of people with megacommutes end up losing what little exercise they had and are probably reducing their lifespans
seems like you are also on your way to squeezing out more WFH as time progresses
as long as your company continues to honor your arrangement, it sounds like you have it made, congrats!
I imagine if his wife was a tennis coach and he practiced tennis every morning, he would have brought up tennis specifically... Crossfit is a workout regiment anyway, not really a sport.
It is a play on the observed phenomenon that many who are either vegan or into CrossFit bring it up all the time, even when it does not directly relate to the situation at hand. For example, my post above. The style of my workout routine doesn't add much to the context of long commutes.
Thanks. I thought there was a specific relation to people in medical emergencies ("heart attack", "might be dying"), but those words were just there for emphasis.
I've done 4+ hours of commuting per day before, in the Toronto region. I nearly went crazy. I'd leave at 6:45am and get home after 7pm absolutely exhausted. I'd eat dinner, go to bed by 9, and repeat the process the next day.
I couldn't have hobbies other than reading. I couldn't get a gym membership. I couldn't have any real social life outside of weekends. Grabbing a beer after work with coworkers was possible, but it meant a 3 or more hour bus trip home instead, getting home at 11 if I left the bar by 7.
It's no way to live. After a year, my wife got a job in the city. She now walks to work and I take the subway.
What blows my mind though was the number of people doing this. Why? So that they're kids could have a yard. Never mind that the kids don't use the yard and miss their parents. Any future child of mine will grow up in a condo, but at least they'll grow up with present parents.
I’ve just moved from a 3 hour commute from the suburbs to a 15 minute walk to work.
While there are lots of positive changes to living so close to work, I’d just like to add some of the negative ones I’ve found since I moved:
1. A 3 hour commute would leave me exhausted when I got home. I would wake up at 7:30, get into the office at 10:00, leave at 19:00 and be home around 20:30. I’d eat dinner and then settle down for to bed. Since moving I now have so much time in the evenings for practising guitar, video games, reading and social events, but I’m no longer tired in the evenings which is preventing me from sleeping.
2. Living in London is stressful. I’m on a quiet street, but it’s a lot of people, a lot of light pollution and a lot of noise pollution. I’m used to pitch darkness and dead quietness. The air is also no where near as fresh.
3. I find that living so close to work makes it harder to unwind. Upon getting home I’m still in work mode. The commute was a nice chance to forget about work and calm the mind.
4. I used to walk almost 25 miles a week, it’s less than 10 now. Sure I can go running more often, but it requires more effort to enforce the habit.
5. I spend so much more cash living in London on rent, food, social life and dating, which leaves almost none for savings and motorsport/track events/cars.
This is the weird part for me: moving into the city saved me money overall.
In the suburbs where we lived, every person needs a car. It was a 30 minute walk just to get to the nearest store. So we paid insurance, gas, maintenance, etc on two vehicles. In the city, we have one car that we rarely use. If it dies, we'll get a car-share membership. (Frankly, I'm not certain we wouldn't save money if we just did that immediately).
The commute wasn't just long before, it was expensive: $400 CAD or more per month. Inside the city, $140 has me covered. Utilities on the small house we rented were nuts, especially in the winter. We pay a fraction of that now.
Adding it all up, the increase in rent was less than the saved amount.
The only real danger I find now is that I can go out with friends. I have more opportunity to spend money- but at least I'm enjoying spending that money.
I discovered this as well, that's why I moved to downtown Toronto. GTA is a blight of suburban sprawl ... if you live outside the city and have to commute in for work, daily, it's an absolute nightmare AND expensive. After years of doing this the value proposition just didn't make sense anymore.
It seems like you just need to set a schedule for yourself instead of doing what your surroundings force you to. Can you exercise in the evenings to get your activity up and be tired for bed? Can you take a longer route from work to unwind? Maybe set a budget for social activities every month and stick to that. Blackout curtains could help with sleep as well.
My partner and I also do the six-hour commute. From Connecticut, I take a train to Boston and he takes one (plus subway) to Brooklyn. But only two days a week and only during the college semester (about 28 weeks a year). In my case, the train has decent wifi and tables, so I use it as office time. It's really been just fine, though sometimes I do regret the expense.
> I've done 4+ hours of commuting per day before, in the Toronto region. I nearly went crazy. I'd leave at 6:45am and get home after 7pm absolutely exhausted.
How did you manage that? I have 1.5 hour commute and I leave at before you do and arrive after you.
But I agree with you. It is just exhausting and you are left wondering where the time goes.
I really wonder if that's the best she can do. Article states her rent is $800 instead of double that, $1600. But it also states she has $400 in commuting costs. (and citing the environment is a reason to take the train, heh).
But she's moved into that home when her children were still kids. Surely she doesn't need the space now that they've moved out, and surely something else must be available.
I mean, she works 9 hour days, travels for 6... If you add a normal sleep pattern of 8 hours, she's got 1 hour left for life, so she breaks down her sleep structurally. But even then, there's just no time on any of her working days to actually live.
In addition, it's as if she had to spend 6 hours in a room every day, unpaid, on a noisy chair.
I can't imagine she can't optimise that. I'm hearing: I spend $400 per month to sit in a room 6 hours a day without pay/productivity/leisure, to live in a home with 2 redundant bedrooms, because equivalent rent is $800 more expensive.
Surely: 1) can live in a smaller home. 2) can find a slightly better rent. 3) can reduce her commute costs. 4) can earn money through extra work (to trade for leisure) or get more leisure time by cutting commute costs.
What's crazier is only 4.5 hours of sleep each day. That makes me feel sick thinking about. Makes me feel even more grateful for my 15 second commute from my bed to computer :/
Honestly, the 4.5 hours of sleep each day really makes me question the veracity of the story, or at least if it's somehow exaggerated.
While there are a small percentage of people who genetically require less sleep, 4.5 hours day in-day out would result in severe sleep deprivation symptoms in the vast majority of people. I know after a couple nights in a row with 6-7 hours of sleep I basically become pretty non-functional and I always get sick.
> Honestly, the 4.5 hours of sleep each day really makes me question the veracity of the story, or at least if it's somehow exaggerated.
It's true.
I've met people who slept 3 hours a night regularly to make ends meet. They seem and act normal until you try to have a conversation with them or ask them to do something outside their routine or that requires thought.
You'd be surprised how much of human social and work behavior comes automatically. You can sleepwalk through modern life and never have to wake up.
They were even capable of getting passing grades in university. Even some kinds of learning come mechanically.
It depends, there are many in working in place like Hong Kong and Tokyo sleeping 4 hours a day. Including many of my colleagues. No idea how they do it because i need minimum of 8 and preferably 10 for my brain to function at decent level.
Any less sleep will means my productivity drop off rapidly and makes error and judgement that I need days to recover from.
You mentioned two places which have troublesome levels of both amphetamine abuse among workers, and in the case of Japan, has a word for “working oneself to death.”
Hence that is why by in wages per hours they are properly much lower, something that GDP or GDP per Capita dont measure, of course long working hours has absolutely nothing to do with productivity.
Another reason why I believe there should be some government regulation, or little regulation but worker union.
> Another reason why I believe there should be some government regulation, or little regulation but worker union.
Unsurprisingly there is such regulation in Europe. It's illegal to work over certain amount of time -- it's the employer that potentially gets into trouble so this is usually observed as far as I know. There are allowances for short periods of overtime, but strict limits over longer intervals.
The word in Japanese is karoshi, literally "death from overwork."
"Death march" as commonly used in English-speaking nations is typically used as hyperbole or dark humour, whereas in Japan "karoshi" is used in a clinical sense for documented cause of death.
The article does say that she sleeps on the train sometimes. I also wondered if this is her primary commuting activity, and that it's downplayed because the story wouldn't be as compelling if she slept 4.5 hours plus another 90 mins on the train each way, which would add up to 7.5 hours.
It's normal, but we don't really know why people tend to sleep less as they get older. A lot of things we traditionally viewed as a normal part of aging are now seen as disease pathology. She's also been doing this for 16 years, so age doesn't really explain it anyway.
Well as someone over 45 I can say if I get less than 6 hours I'm functioning on half my normal IQ. Engineering requires deep concentration for me that means 8 hours sleep if I want to perform as aggressively as my juniors.
Don’t have the reference, but I believe that one of the most universal determinants of happiness is the length of your commute, i.e. in cities across the world people who commute longest are least happy.
I’ve done commutes ranging from 10 minutes walk to 90 minutes by bus, with lots in between, and strongly recommend that minimising your commute should be a top priority.
There’s no point living in a nice place if you don’t see it five days out of seven. Live somewhere convenient and “commute to the country” on the weekend.
> "I believe that one of the most universal determinants of happiness is the length of your commute"
1000x this. I've done commutes ranging from 0 to 4,5h daily and I can even affirm that commute discomfort is exponential: a 4,5h commute is way more painful than a 3h commute. I would also add that the sweet spot, IMO, is not zero but around 20 minutes of daily (walking/biking) commute.
> "Live somewhere convenient and “commute to the country” on the weekend."
It's an important factor, but other factors also come into play. For instance train is way, way more relaxing than any road based commute. And if you struggle to make it to the end of the month because of too high rent, then you are unhappy as well.
>>There’s no point living in a nice place if you don’t see it five days out of seven
The point would be your family see's it even if you do not...
>Live somewhere convenient and “commute to the country” on the weekend.
You act as if people choose to live in the country for ascetics, not economic reasons...
Some do, I did at one time, but this article is about people moving to where they can afford to live, and I dont thing they are talking about home in the country side with a stream and woods....
The problem is affording a central living in a crowded city. And it actually almost don't matter what salary you have, if everybody tried to live near the city centre those prices would go up until only a few select could afford them.
It's not uncommon to hear these stories in LA because the math generally works out very favorably. That 280k house in Riverside easily goes for 2-3x where he works in Norwalk. If you could effectively triple your pay by "working" an extra 3 hours a day, would you do it? Especially if those extra commute hours are by train where you could be doing a wide variety of leisure activities, like reading, games, crocheting. No part time second job that I know of can be more enjoyable than a hobby on a train.
There was a slightly more complicated calculus for the main person, she had to give up participating in her children's before/after school life except on weekends/adopt a 4.5 hours sleeping regimen, and she had to / wanted to earn enough of a cushion in earnings/savings because a Los Angeles job with seniority paid more than any job she could get closer to her home in Hemet including commute costs. I can feel the pain in the writing about what sacrifices she made so her children could have a better life, but it worked out for them all it sounds like.
Alan Hale Jr used to live at the edge of town. Bill Murray's mom lived in town for some reason... A couple movie sequences and music videos shot there, as well as a sex scandal before they were even popular.
> If you could effectively triple your pay by "working" an extra 3 hours a day
6 hours a day - the commute is 3 hours both ways.
In other words, she works 9 hours a day, commutes 6 more, and then has 9 more hours to do with what she will, like sleeping (which normal folk like to do for 6-8 hours). So she has about an hour-three hours a day of actual non-work involved free time.
Additionally unstated is the fact that she is in all probability using the weekend hours to informally catch up on the sleep deficit she's building up during the weekdays. Nor does it account for the unbooked health costs associated with such a lifestyle which will likely see her lose an additional N% off her total lifespan, and substitute some of that pay off into america's err... interesting... health system.
Which is a sinister part of the whole "buy a nice house far away & commute". The further from work, the less time you even get to spend at that nice house...
The benefits of that nice house (and the neighborhood, schools, etc.) are ostensibly more so for the benefit of the family than the long-commuting employee themselves -- whether misguided or accurate.
When one is single and (relatively) unattached, the calculus is different, as Silicon Valley neatly shows.
This breaks the HN guidelines by being flamebait, by being partisan battle, and by not doing this: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and do better when commenting here.
Edit: you've unfortunately also posted a ton of unsubstantive comments to HN. Please don't do any more of that.
Problem is, the only trains here in Southern California go in the L.A. → San Diego direction. I would love if the 91 had a railway running in parallel, but unfortunately that doesn't seem likely.
I did a 2hr commute from Irvine to la via Metrolink. The actual Metrolink route took 1hr but from home to station and from union station to 8th and grand the total was 2hrs.
People asked me why I wouldn’t just drive to work which would take me about an hour. I for one did not care for traffic and having to stay alert for an entire hour whereas on the Metrolink I could just fall asleep, read, listen to podcasts or eat some food. Needless to say the commute was kind of hellish If I had to do it for 16 years. I was happy to quit just 2 years later.
After that job I worked remote from home for several years and now freelance full time. I feel pity for anyone who has to commute to work.
I should point out that I left work at 4 and was usually home by 6. Nobody left as early as I did but I just didn’t care and made up my own schedule. Nobody objected.
I'm primarily remote as well. I bounce between the Bay Area and the mountains, depending on time of year. That said, lately driving reverse commute down 680 towards San Jose in the afternoon, I see all those people doing what you yourself mentioned avoiding -- multi hour commutes. In the Bay Area, heading towards Vacaville/Fairfield/the Central Valley, there isn't a real viable non-car option.
> In the Bay Area, heading towards Vacaville/Fairfield/the Central Valley, there isn't a real viable non-car option.
The Capital Corridor Amtrak line goes from San Jose to Sacramento, up the East Bay and through Fairfield/Vacaville (where there is a stop). Its the 4th busiest Amtrak line in the country, and largely used by commuters. Connections to Caltrain in San Jose and BART in Oakland are available. No matter how you do it though, an 80+ mile commute into Silicon Valley isnt quick during commute hours.
I used to commute from Redlands (60 miles east of LA) to downtown. I rode the Metrolink train. It cost $26 round trip and was 4 hours per day. This was better than driving which I also did. I could work on the train (Ruby on Rails, on Rails). However now I WFH which is far superior.
We did only pay $1450 per month for a 2bd/2ba townhouse though.
Or another way to look at it, you spent and additional $563/mo on transportation costs. It's an interesting optimization...how much further in could you have moved to get the same housing for the ~$2000/mo you spent for housing + transportation? (my guess is not enough to make the transportation costs drop to near $0)
LOL, I wonder how many people do "Rails on Rails" as I've worked on multiple projects in the Chicago area where we did just that (1 hour train ride plus 40 minute drive each way for me BTW)...but yes WFH or fly-in fly-out is far better...
"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." - Henry David Thoreau
Specifically speaking for tech jobs, why are we still commuting? I honestly don't think why a distributed team can't just work. I have seen teams that are entirely distributed, or with a few members remote that work great. The times I have seen it not work is when there are other things that smell, but remoteness of team members becomes an easy scapegoat to pin the blame.
Also, I don't think working from home as a norm is radical. Why do we all have to swarm back and forth to some magical place? Making employees commute is an awfully expensive proposition for quality water-cooler time.
Sometimes normal verbal communication is just faster. You will never wait 30min to get a simple answer. Want to debug something together? You just do it right away on your computer.
And if the office is like 30 min away from home, there's no commuting problem. Yes, that's an hour a day, which is still potentially significant, but on the other hand you don't work at home. I hate working at home and I'm not alone.
> I honestly don't [know] why a distributed team can't just work.
So much of human communication is non-verbal. When you're building not just a product, but the team behind the product, getting people in the same room is often crucial for building empathy and trust.
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't normalize remote work - most development tasks require uninterrupted concentration in front of a computer and there's no reason why somebody can't spend time at home or a co-working space or wherever else getting it done. But team members need to meet in-person on a regular basis in a non-formal setting to develop that team "jelling".
Depends on amount of communication and informal "connectedness" of the team required for the task at hand. There are projects where tasks are clearly separable and all communication required can be done through a task tracker. There are also projects with a lot of active research, tasks constantly shifting, and cultural connection between employees critical (like game dev, with everyone on the team making creative decisions affecting the final product).
I've seen people doing the same in South Korea, where people used to travel from a whole other town to work. They used to leave office around 10 in the night, and would be back in office by 7:30 AM the next day. I used to wonder if they even slept !
Even here at Bangalore/India, I spend close to 3 hours in travel. Fortunately I've pick-up/drop facility to office from home. So, I just sleep in the office cab.
It's only strange until you get used to it. Once you are used to the travel routine, you can start to explore newer ways to make the commute time more productive (reading/writing a book, learning a new programming language, taking a power nap etc).
So 3 hour commute in Bangalore is what...5km? :) It routinely took me 30-40 minutes to go about 1km...I'd have walked if there was decent sidewalk to be found. THAT city needs to have it's planners fired...but that's a different discussion.
I lived in the TL in SF for 2 years. A studio in a new construction building for $1795/mo with a rooftop (with bbq area and small gym!). My walk to work downtown was 15 minutes.
It's actually very funny how the (perceived) worst/cheapest area in SF is right in the center of the city with easy transportation everywhere.
Of course, after 2 years I felt mentally exhausted from walking around so many mentally ill homeless and seeing garbage everywhere, but it was a calculus I made at the time and looking back the pros of a short commute, cheap rent for sf, and being centrally located with short walk to lots of transit at civic center muni/bart outweighed the cons.
TBH - It makes no economic sense for startups to get $$$$ address in downtown SF than to massage the ego of the founders. This obsession to locate in downtown SF is costing both the company and employees tremendously.
If they really want to be located in the city have an ego office in downtown and open satellite offices in the east bay or south bay. Makes for happy employees and cheaper costs.
One of the factors that permits Bay Area employees to take risks on startups is the density of alternatives. Few people are willing to move across the country as frequently as a normal startup employee changes jobs.
SF is a little unique in that post apocalyptic way
A fifteen minute walk with the Walking Dead theme song playing on spotify always beats the commute from hell.
You get exercise, cardio, and All of us here are able to monetize those additional 2-9 hours daily to amplify our salaries #yayinequality. Plus lets be honest you can always just walk on Van Ness or summon an uber.
I actually never felt unsafe...it was more just a feeling of pity. I was on the "edge" of the TL next to UC Hastings/City Hall and a block away from a Philz Coffee.
The TL has some good things going for it. Good Vietnamese/Thai food, some cool bars. But agreed, I lived there because it was central and relatively cheap, not because I enjoyed hanging out there. But a 5-10m Uber ride in any direction made it much more bearable than it would've been 10 years ago.
I'm pretty committed now to a no-car-ownership lifestyle in the Bay Area, and my commute to and from work is optimally 45 minutes to go ~8 miles. It still feels like a huge sacrifice that I moved down the bay and added ~15 minutes both ways.
I'm not sure I could even imagine commuting six hours a day - that has to be soul crushing. And I love riding trains...
In my previous location I rode the bus about an hour each day to work. Noise cancelling headphones, plus some good podcasts and a subscription to audible made me quite enjoy it. I almost miss the fact that I'm about two hours a day short on my podcasts and audiobooks.
Same here. My commute is opposite to traffic and is just 30 minutes both ways. It is fun cruising at 70mph and watching a parking lot on the other side of the freeway.
Public transit at commute-hours crowding levels is a vigorously and overwhelmingly repulsive place to be. Getting away from squeezing into standing room on the 110dB screaming-in-your-face jerking, putrid interior of BART and onto my own feet has been incredible for my mental health, even though the end-to-end time is similar.
Tried the Transbay buses also; I can barely stay standing since the drivers seem to rapidly alternate between slamming on the brakes and flooring it. At least the acceleration curve on BART isn't designed to kill you.
I live in San Jose and commute into downtown SF three days a week (fortunate to have a manager who allows 2 WFH/work from SJ office days a week).
My commute is typically 1.5-1.75 hours each way per day, door to door, and that excludes days when Caltrain has some incident or another.
But right now I pay a third what I'd be paying, at least, to live closer. I get to save a lot more money, which is nice, but the commute is awful when you realize you're basically throwing away 4 hours a day on the commute. I'm not the type that can get work done on the train either; it's hard enough sitting comfortably for an hour when people elbow me because they think they own the middle arm rest and beyond into my space.
In the mornings when I luck out and get the older trains I always try to get those single seats. But it's tough to luck out and get that rather than the slightly newer stock (I take the bullets).
Wish the newer trains (and the next gen ones coming in the next decade) had single seats. Rather unfortunate.
That article has some caveats - like she gets up at 2:15... but doesn't actually leave the house until 4:00. She gets up so early because 'she likes to take her time'.
So while she does have an arduous commute, she just chooses to get up even earlier which makes it sound more extreme than it is.
Thanks for this. I seemed to recall reading the exact same thing a few months ago, but the persons commute was from Stockton... and here it is. Modularized journalism!
A very similar article from August 2017 in the NYT on a 4 1/2 commute from Stockton to SF.
"A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M" - discussed previously on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15038433
One reason why we need Full AV. And its lucky to be working in places where 8- 9 hours are norm. In places like South Korea, Japan and HK where you are expected to work from 8 - 8 or more, hours of commute is literally torturing.
When people clamour about housing development projects destroying their way of life because they increase density etc, this is the other side of the story. The blockade on building might keep some comfort for the fortunate owners of those homes, but forces other, less well off people into pretty terrible living conditions.
Only a few milliseconds at the speed of light. We could eliminate the problems of traffic, infrastructure, energy, and housing costs if we could only agree that forcing everyone to meet in the same place at the same time is no longer necessary for most work.
Is it really just a matter of getting people to agree, or do people work more effectively face-to-face?
Google, Apple, Facebook all have the means to afford any possible telecommuting technology, yet they also bus their employees 40 miles south from San Francisco to the office.
I have no doubt that telecommuting works well for some teams and some employees, but does it work well in the general case?
I don't think that encouraging spread out housing in large homes on large pieces of land is going to solve any energy problem. People still need to go out for food, errands, entertainment, etc. And single family homes in general are less water and energy efficient than more high density housing.
>Traffic is a by product of the single family detached home and lack of transit options.
That's a small part of it. Traffic is also a byproduct of increased population, jobs consolidating into a few large cities, in the US, middle America jobs going outside the border (gotta move to cities), requiring workers to be in the office, even when it's mostly unnecessary, and probably plenty I'm missing.
> Traffic is also a byproduct of increased population, jobs consolidating into a few large cities
There are plenty of large cities in the world where most people have reasonable (e.g. <30m each way on transit) commutes.
The problem with the US is that the infrastructure and regional/urban planning is largely designed to only support low-density development, with unscalable and extremely space-inefficient car transportation for every trip, so when population goes up beyond the capacity of key bottleneck roads everyone is screwed.
If you instead build subways, BRT, pedestrian friendly streets, and both office space and medium-density housing near transit corridors, then scaling is much easier by just adding more frequent trains/buses.
* The denser the area, the slower the transportation (by any mean).
* People in dense areas spend more time commuting than people in sparse areas.
* When you upgrade the infrastructure making transportation faster, people move farther, keeping their commuting time constant.
It's just that packing people around the same area is not a very good idea, whichever way you do it; there is no true solution to the problems it causes.
The problem with that is that large metros in general have dramatically healthier job markets. If your choice is either (a) live in a sparsely populated place with no job at all but not much traffic, or (b) move to the affordable outskirts of a metro area with a hellish commute, a sizable proportion of people end up choosing b.
There isn’t really a “good idea” alternative to packing people around the same area; higher density is dramatically more cost-efficient for providing the same quality of public services and infrastructure and the same kinds of employment opportunities.
The question then becomes: if n people are going to live in the metro area, where someone in any nearby housing might plausibly work at any nearby job, what is the most convenient and effective way of organizing the space? The answer is: put a high density of housing and jobs directly next to transit corridors, so that many people can find work within a reasonable commute from their house (or can find housing within a reasonable commute from their jobs) without creating traffic bottlenecks. If instead you follow the LA model where density is mostly uniformly low, and commuting is via low-bandwidth freeways, then what you end up with is people living 2 hours from downtown and leaving home at 4 AM every day to beat the traffic, and other people stuck crawling down the highway twice a day.
Why do you think that the transportation speed is inversely related to density? I can ride my bike at approximately the same speed in the city as I can in the countryside. It's just that in the city I can reach anything I need within 30 minutes.
This might be true for a particular city depending on population density and commute habits of the people, but after a certain population density is reached the premise that transportation speed is inversely proportional to density holds true for the most part. Fixed line transport such as trains may not be directly affected by the density but there may be a bottleneck if the density is sufficient to saturate the lines. If the trains are running full - this would lead to increase in wait times and longer commute time.
If you fill your whole city with 30+ story high rises and subways are overwhelmed even when running cars every 1-2 minutes (e.g. some Chinese cities), you can definitely create a bottleneck at the subway during commute hours. That's very high density we are talking about though.
Increased housing population would not cause traffic if it was connected to work in a way that did not cause traffic.
It is demonstrated at this point that sprawl results in traffic pretty quickly, while dense cities with good public transit have a much smaller commute time (e.g. NY, London).
In places like Manhattan you could walk to work on Manhattan, so other types of transit is a convenience rather than a necessary.
Large cities in Europe have (comparatively) few detached homes and plenty of transit options, yet traffic can still be terrible because the road infrastructure is less huge. I guess we need american roads in european cities, but I'm afraid it's too late for that.
It's a Bombardier[1] which are the most common Coach used in California. It's MUCH tighter than it looks in those photos. For example, at the table seats it does not fit two laptops entirely on the table at the facing seats. It's squishy, but serviceable.
I would go home for weekends, and during the week sleep in a van in the parking garage.
This works even better if you can make your work week 4 long days, then 3 day weekend away from the city.
Sleeping in a van doesn't sound much better to me, when I was contracting away from home I would often stay in some shitty B&B during the week. It was miserable.
First year when I was living in Ireland, I used to commute 1.5h in the morning, and same in the evening. It was a total nightmare, and would never go back to commute like this.
The horrors of the american (lack of) urban planning and fixation with the suburban house. A satelite view of LA area shows vast areas of suburban houses with pools and lawns - people living in those areas don't want tall buildings in their backyard and enjoy the appreciation in property value, but the society as a whole is losing 10 times as much by commuting, infrastructure to suport it and lost productivity.
If the place she works can't pay enough for the workers to afford to live closer then shouldn't it be somewhere else? Presumably there's a cost saving (or revenue increase, whatever) for them being there, but they're not pushing on that money to the workers?
Could just/largely be a case of controlling forces leeching off workers?
> “I chat, I sleep, I listen to music, my mind wanders, I think about the past and the future,” Cherry says as the train from the land of affordable living arrives on time, halfway through another day of compromise.
Automated cars will make this kind of commute a lot more practical and enjoyable. A warm, comfortable and clean Uber will pick you up and drive you directly to your destination while you start your work day.
> Trains don't pick you up where you live and drop you off where you work.
Trains manage to do that in most countries, given a few minutes walk to and from a station.
I don't commute now but I used to commute two hours in the UK, and I walked 3 minutes to a train station, and then took a couple of trains all the way, and then a 3 minute walk at the other end to my office. And I lived in a small village not a major area.
Because the UK is a bit over half the size of California. Many folks in Europe tend to under appreciate the sheer size of the United States. To your point though...certain metro areas are largely this way...(NY/Chicago)...but others (LA/Detroit) are not... Not sure why some cities invest and others don't.
Everyone says it's due to the size difference. That doesn't make any sense to me!
Take just the Northern California region, then, around the same size as the UK. Now there's no argument about size difference. The population is around a third of the UK, so while that's less and so lower density, it isn't a crazy difference and the major areas of population themselves where you need the stations are high density.
I can go from any city in the UK, to any other city in the UK, via a couple of trains pretty effortlessly. Why couldn't that be replicated in an area of the same size and more of less the same population, in California?
Why can't it be replicated just in the Bay Area even! Why aren't there lots of trains there?!
1.) The Bay Area is made up of 100 cities and towns and several counties. There is not a single “Bay Area government.” Every single transit project has to be approved by several levels of government and funded by the state and federal government. Moreover, that funding and consent has to last for decades to keep the project on track. It rarely does. Every train line in the Bay Area was the result of a fight.
2.) Trains require density to be feasible. Density increases the supply of housing, driving down the value of existing single family homes. Owners of single family homes store a significant amount of their net worth in the equity of those homes. Municipalities rely on the property taxes from those high value homes.
3.) The Bay Area is not zoned for density. Trains will not catch on here because 60 odd years ago the people who designed the highway system did not consider the possibility that many people would need to live close together to make the place affordable. No one was thinking of affordable housing then.
But the density of even the wider Bay Area region (the CSA) is higher than the entire UK! How come that's dense enough for lots of trains in the UK but not dense enough for trains around the Bay Area?
I think this definitely depends where you live in the UK and how much your local rail network was screwed by the Beeching cuts. I live in Somerset and the two nearest railway stations are more than a 30 minute drive.
Imagine a combination of self-driving cars and trains. Perhaps the self-driving car can take you to the train station that is nearest, if there is a train that is coming in a reasonable amount of time.
For trains to be truly useful, we needed to not build our cities around the highway, around sprawl. We didn't do that. So self-driving cars will prove to be far, far more useful than trains, especially since trains require long term public investment, which Americans generally do not favor.
We can change that. The current city is built around an combination of parking minimums, subsidized free parking, and a system that supports building detached single family homes and not dense mixed use housing.
If we change the policies that ruin the cities and design them around the human and not the car, we can make transit work more.
We absolutely can change that and we absolutely won't. Rich people don't like transit, they like personal vehicles and sprawling neighborhoods, not loud trains and dense apartment blocks. Rich people write laws.
I'm not sure why the inaccurate statement that a train can pick you up at your house and drop you off at work made you think about how "car-centric" some regions are.
A train picks you up where you live only if you are a 1%er who can afford the extreme real estate premium for transit access on an infrequently spaced system (i.e. BART), or the train stops so frequency that it barely adds value relative to a bicycle (i.e. Muni).
I suggest, if you haven't you visit London, many places, not all expensive, are a 5-10 minute walk to a regional train stop that can get you to city center in 45minutes.
I will have to check that out! I suspect that these neighborhoods have a level of density that, if proposed in a typical American suburb, would spark cries of "Manhattanization."
There is a big middle ground between suburban ranch homes on 0.25 acres and "Manhattan", see some nice areas of dense row (aka. townhouses) houses in London suburbs.
I have travelled in London for 5 years and it is anything but predictable. My commute of 45 minutes would last anywhere between 45 minutes to two hours depending upon the excuses they will cookup. Sometimes my train travel will be converted to a nice picnic on London bus as train will be cancelled abruptly. Their list of excuses is legendary[1].
And then comes these patronising messages "This [Chrismas|Easter|Weekend|Holiday] I am working for you." I saw those messages for 5 years and still saw services going downhill.
One funny anecdote probably illustrates their lethargy. Station I used to board from was upgraded and platform extended to allow boarding from 10 carriages. This happened long before I started living their.
But announcement always said only 9 carriages will open. I lived their for two years and same message was played everyday.
I didn't downvote you, but something about systematic on-time performance metrics might have been more helpful than your personal dissatisfaction with delays?
Blaming transit workers for system performance is also pretty controversial; most would probably attribute that to incompetent management or stingy taxpayers?
”The train leaves at 4:43 a.m. and Cherry, 60 years old and a couple of years away from retirement, rides it all the way to the final stop, more than two hours away. That’s Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Scheduled arrival time: 7:05.”
Trains are nice too. I can hack on my projects, that's the only time I can work on them during the day. I used to take the subway and it was hell, specially during Canadian winters.
If that sort of commute becomes popular, it'll just lead even more massive congestion around job centers. In the limit, you'll reach your destination halfway through the workday and immediately turn around to go home.
It's not legal to camp in your car in a parking place but with a self-driving car, people can just sleep in the back while the vehicle drives aimlessly around.
If this process makes traffic go very slowly, so much the better - less gas spent and a gentler ride.
I don't think our roads have the capacity to allow everyone to be sitting on them in their own personal automobiles all day. And even if they do, the roads won't actually function as transportation infrastructure.
I was being a bit facetious above and aiming to show the multiple contradictions that seem to be in play in the idea that self-driving cars could solve the interlocked high-rent/absurd-commute problems.
I mean, sure, maybe the final absurdity is going to be a mass of people telecomuting from the back of their self-driving RVs as these inch along in some random location but maybe the complex will fall to pieces before this.
Believe it or not, I experienced the non-self-driving version of that scene. It was the mass of vehicles heading from the eclipse festival to Burning Man a few months ago, a block of traffic puttering along at 30 mph all day while passengers sat on their laptops.
If all cars were self driving, road capacity could be optimized by 2-3X, at least (they could move smoothly bumper to bumper). It won’t happen in the states first, but highly contested Asian cities in autocratic countries sure.
A. References for a claim a self-driving car could navigate that much more efficiently. As far as I know, current self-driving cars drive more conservatively than humans.
B. Such a claim would require all current cars off the road. How well do you think anyone could manage that? In any car-using nation, including Asia, there's a huge investment in current cars and ending that would be harder than simply introducing self-driving carts.
C. Even 2-3x the capacity can be used up quickly if people are willing to waste it and self-driving cars have much less incentive for not sitting in rush hour traffic than regular cars - which already spend a lot of time in rush hour traffic.
A. Today is definitely not tomorrow. Self driving cars also don’t have any network advantages atm.
B. See autocratic country claim. China has done this before with certain cars in certain cities (e.g. breadbox vans). Japan deprecates all cars after around 5 years to make them basically unusable. Singapore has that $60k car plate thing going on that I think only lasts five years.
C. People told me LA traffic was bad. When I moved there from Beijing, I thought I was in paradise. Same with Seattle, the USA does not have traffic problems, at least relative to China; the problems are just at different scales. Also, taxi ridership is much much larger in these countries (it isn’t unusual that every other car on the road is a taxi). Enforcing self driving only on the ring roads would already be a huge win; capacity is easily controlled already by plate lotteries.
Sure, a sufficiently strong state could impose a sane and efficient commuting system in some fashion if it chose to.
That would require some central control for whatever resources the transport system use (road, car position, etc).
Just about all the profit centers for cars and transport today hinge on entities that just control some parts of transport - so prying loose their hold would be quite a challenge. We shall see.
That is incredibly American centric. There is plenty of diversity in the way things work in the world. It will only take one country to use self driving cars as an economic advantage (by optimizing infrastructure investments) for the other countries to follow to keep up their competitiveness.
It would not be very comfortable to sleep strapped to the bed in a strange position. Sleeping in sitting position does not count as comfortable. At most you can count on sleeping like in an airplane.
Self-driving car can't beat physics. In case of an accident everything inside will fly continuing direction of movement. Including the passenger. There will be no two couches facing a table. Because in case of an accident the face of a passenger sitting facing the back of the car will be hit with: his book, his hot coffee and opposite sitting passenger's laptop.
Immediately? Surely the reason you trekked all the way in (while actually working remotely) was to have that one-hour, face-to-face meeting insisted upon by some manager.
Paying the driver is a pretty big cut. If there's no driver to pay and fuel is cheap (because electric / hydrogen / whatever futuristic efficient tech) then the numbers start to work out. You've also got a persistent customer, so you can probably operate on lower margins since you have a fairly stable customer base.
And then some data miner will discover most workers live near each other and will cut costs by getting a bigger self-driving bus to pickup several people.
And then another data miner will discover the bulk of the traffic time is spent on traffic, so they will buy land to create a right-of-way lane to optimise the commute times.
Finally, the Ouroboros eats his own tail by creating a private subway system.
Heh, what I had imagined in my own little scifi vision of the future was a hub system. Everybody gets their own little single seat self driving car pod thing that drives you to the train station. But here's the twist, instead of getting out and boarding the train the pod just drives up and latches in. You're then whisked away in the comfort of your own personalized vehicle, which automatically undocks at the appropriate station and delivers you to your workplace.
This is what happens with private cars now, except in a much more wasteful way.
Commuter train cars generally weigh about a ton per 3 passenger seats, but packed-full cars are considered uncomfortable. So a pod weighing 600 kg would be equal in weight per passenger to a train car where everyone sits alone on a double-seat place. Which is a pretty reasonable comfort standard. An EV pod could also be charged in the train during the journey, so you would have its full range available at both ends of the train journey.
The point wasn't to avoid people (I consider that a downside actually), it was to save having to have a vehicle come pick you up twice a day or generally having to drive around without a fare. It'd be your own personal vehicle and it'd have to be as small and light as possible for this exact reason - I had imagined golf cart sized. The vehicle would only need a minimal battery because it only has to take you from the station to work and home to the station (and could charge on the train and at work). You're right though, I dunno if the economics would ever work out.
With the disclaimer that this was just a fantasy and probably shouldn't be taken too seriously.
I thought the final step would be that they'd realise there was a geographic centrum, create a parking lot to save fuel, then realise they didn't need wheels, ... and you've got a "trailer park".
My typical day, I wake up at 4am, drive to Riverside to do some crossfit from 5:30-6:30, and hop on the train at 7am. I get to the office shortly after 8am. Fortunately, I leave around 4pm and am usually home by 6pm. I tend to work on the train, but I can use that for side projects or leisure when I feel like it.
After 5 years of doing that, I shifted to working in the office usually 3 days a week, and then remote the last two days of the week. It really has helped.
Why do I do it? I really love where I work. It is fantastic. I also really love where I live in the mountains of SoCal. My coworkers have a hard time wrapping their head around dealing with wildlife like bears and things like ice and snow in the winter :). Many also can't process that my mortgage is under half of what they spend on an apartment (that they split with a roommate). My wife is a part time crossfit coach and full time mother, doing home school with our two youngest kids.
I've thought about moving close to work, but housing is just so expensive there. Counting commute costs, I would have to spend 4x on a mortgage in the city. I would like to do things like save money for my future and eat healthy foods. So I stay where I'm at. And I'm happy.