I did this exact commute (Phillipsburg, NJ) to Port Authority for a few months when I first graduated college and was living with my to-be-in-laws.
It was grueling and miserable. I would wake up at 5:30, stand outside in the cold at 6:45, arrive at PABT at 9 to be in at work by 9:30 - 10. Leave at 6:30 to be home by... 10:30 , eat cold dinner in bed then go to sleep to start all over.
I broke down one day and couldn't do it anymore so I got an apartment in the city (It was harder than it sounds. Searching for a non-craphole place in a good area then throwing down like $6k just to get in. Yikes.)
I don't understand people who do this as a lifestyle. It is miserable and you spend an inordinate amount of your life on a bus: Get a new job.
None of my friends or coworkers grasp why. I sometimes don't either. At least if my train is late again, and doesn't show up for hours.
I guess a big part for me is where I came from, which is underclass. Expanding my radius allowed me to overcome pay gaps because I was able to find more companies who would hire me even with my soft skill shortcomings, which always showed my underclassyness.
Did multiple of these arrangements with 1h45 each way 5d/w, then 4h each way once/w, an exhausting 2h10 each way 4d/w, then 1h30 each way 4d/w. But on each job, I was able to renegotiate after some time and gotten more remote working days.
I do feel the wear and tear of it, but I've gotten exposure which in turn infused me with soft skills. Plus the reputation of the teams I've worked with opens more and more doors for me. Overall I've increased my income by 500%-600% and am in the top-10-decile income group of my country. The only reason I don't use that income now to move closer to my workplace is because in the meantime became a father and the kids will grow up in a quiet town with gradparents who have a farm.
And because of my exposure, I can now work 4d/w remote with highest pay I've ever had for work I'm overqualified for.
I can relate - commuted 2 hours from NJ into Brooklyn for a while.
At some point you have to ask yourself if that's the quality of life you really wanted for yourself. I never saw myself as a rat making a grueling trip into NYC for cheese.
So I decided to find a WFH gig and grow a company on the side (which is now my full time gig, paying me more than I was paid in BK).
I did this from Northern NJ to NYC. 2hrs each way by bus. Awful. The only benefit was that you almost (98%?) always got a seat. A small laptop and you've got 4 hrs of potential productivity on your own "time" for whatever you want.
But wow, does it suck away the joy from your life.
Did this for ~ 1 year. If you aren't driving and don't have to change buses or trains its possible to structure your life to take advantage of this personal time. While I miss that personal time, I wouldn't trade my current situation for it.
NJ is currently dealing with the NJTransit summer of hell too. Trains lose power, A/C and lights get shut off (sometimes while underground in the tunnel), tracks get closed and Amtrak always get priority anyway. I lived 15 miles from NYC and it would usually take me two hours door to door.
I'm on the train now. I take a very early train in and that's pretty reasonable. Then the extra time at work and the morning hacking have me pretty well satiated hack-wise. So then it's just time to space out on video, random phone apps, or if I'm a little motivated, coursera.
I agree with you. But in their defense, many of the people in the article have children. As a parent, I can understand why you would want to give your children a space away from the city. Some people are willing to make a personal sacrifice to improve the rest of the family's life.
I understand that as well. I'm not sure going from 2 parents to 1.2 parents is worth a yard though.
And there are other options, like taking another job in a smaller city. Running a small business in a suburb isn't sexy, but you can afford a yard and have time to teach your daughter about robots and be there when your son gets bullied on the bus ride home.
Not only the children don't get to see you, but neither your partner. American nightmare, I'd say. Relationships break, and all the grass in the world will not make up for it.
And kids are smart and pick up on things fast—a kid who sees their parent suffering through a grueling commute every day is going to absorb that as some kind of life lesson.
I've heard too many people justify a horrible commute and shitty job with "my dad did it, it put me in school and food on the table". If you don't absolutely have to, don't. It isn't a right of passage
It's not just a yard. This is declining now, but for example, for decades children's blood lead levels were correlated to their proximity to the inner city.
I grew up in a medium sized city and it was awesome! I wouldn't trade it for the world. Sure, I had to share a room but it really doesn't matter because I only used my bedroom for sleeping anyways. I had tons of access to other kids in the neighborhood [1] and kids are great keeping each other entertained. We also had access to tons of various public parks, playgrounds, and facilities in which to play. Most were a short walk or bike ride away. My days were filled with adventure. I would be bored spending my time alone in a backyard all day.
[1] The Jerry Seinfeld bit about making friends as a kid is on point - "Of course when you're a kid, you can be friends with anybody. Remember when you were a little kid what were the qualifications? If someone's in front of my house NOW, That's my friend, they're my friend. That's it. Are you a grown up? No. Great! Come on in. Jump up and down on my bed. And if you have anything in common at all, You like Cherry Soda? I like Cherry Soda! We'll be best friends!"
Why do parents think that being in the middle of nowhere is good for children? It might be good for small children, but as they get to their teenage years, many will undoubtedly hate it. Will these same parents move when their children get older or just leave them to suffer and ignore them even more with the convenient excuse of their super-commutes? It truly boggles the mind that parents don't realize that as their children get older, they will want to interact with others outside of their family and that their choices will severely limit this. Not only that, but being in the middle of nowhere severly limits their children's future job prospects. As one of the people quoted in the article says, “When the kids graduate from school around here, they leave.” Gee, I wonder why.
I would much rather spend a bit more time with children while not commuting (and I sure as hell don't want to be stay at home for years) then that yard.
Which is why distance from work was important for me as a parent.
My kids and dog have a yard to run in and wild animals, even coyotes that visit. Once had two ducks raise their ducklings in our pool. And if thats not enough room there is a golf course and two parks in walking distance. Each can have their own room.
Yea, my commute is worth it. And unlike you i've lived long periods in the suburbs, downtown in a large city, and even on a farm. The farm was easily best, suburbs a clise second, and city only good when you don't have kids.
I've grown up in cities, dense suburbs and typical suburbs. As a kid I loved the city and dense suburb way more. It's great to be able to walk or bike to school/friends places or the park and have independence as a kid. In the suburbs it's crippling not being able to go anywhere without having your parents drive you.
To put that in perspective, 700 sq ft (65 sq m) is above average total usable space in a London 3-bed two-storey house.
(75 sq m is the notional English average for a 3-bed, but in reality that includes bathrooms, hallways, stairwells, and other unusable internal space. When buying a house in London, I wrote a scraper that extracted room dimensions, and 55 to 65 is a much more realistic range.)
The UK is notorious for building homes with tiny rooms in my experience. I've often felt personally that the housing market there is too obsessed with bedroom count as a metric for comparison rather than actual usable square footage.
My father's house in the UK was built in last 10 years and promises 5 bedrooms, I've often thought that knocking this down to 3 and making reasonable sized rooms would have made for a much nicer home. I imagine it also would have knocked however many thousands off the seller's asking price as well though...
Oh I fully agree. My scraper made up a list of properties that could be sorted by a balance of commuting distance and size - I was particularly interested in a larger place given how small the standard is.
I ended up with a 3 storey, 4 bed 120 sq m town house with garden + garage 35 minutes motorcycle ride from my workplace, or 55 minutes if I have to take train + tube (which I very rarely do, because waiting for the train sucks if it's delayed or missed).
The finished square feet are tracked by the government, for tax purposes, and yes, they tax your bathroom and closet, even if it's shaped weird. Measuring and omitting those when selling your house would be a huge headache just for the purpose of ... screwing yourself out of potential buyers?
As a counter-example, for France anything under 5ft is not counted. Areas under the stairs, that edge area of slanted ceilings, areas above a loft can't be counted. You can include it but the official number is footspace that is standing height.
My realtor described it as everything under air meaning that if the space is heated or cooled, then it's counted. So the garage is out, but bathrooms and hallways and closets are in.
That's not exactly correct - part of my basement is heated/cooled but I'm pretty sure that doesn't count towards square footage (at least, the appraisal didn't count it).
Are you somewhere where people don't have basements?
Usually it's about finished vs. unfinished. I've never thought about whether my basement is heated or not. I mean it doesn't have radiators but that's where the furnace is and if the basement got too cold that would be problematic because of pipes. But it's very unfinished :-)
I don't think it's completely unreasonable, particularly in the case of bathrooms. Larger bathrooms (to a point) are nicer than smaller bathrooms, and that should be reflected in the square footage.
As a kid I'd rather have my parents around when I got back from school more than I'd want a backyard or more expensive clothes and toys.
People who think they're doing their kids a favor by commuting 4 hours a day to work 10 hours are at best misguided and most probably have a martyr complex.
Anecdataly ;) it has been my experience that they sincerely believe that they are doing it for the children, but are actually doing it to satisfy the socially scripted demands of their non-working spouses.
My commute is 2 hours and change, each way; I'm out of the house for a little over 12 hours a day. My job is flexible, so I can leave for work at a little before 9 and return home a little after; I can also work from home 1 day a week.
This amounts to being away from home ... about 50 hours a week, 60 when I go into the office all five days. Is this forum really going to tell me being out of the house 50 or 60 hours a week is excessive?
Compared to a parent who has to work 2 jobs, or who has a job that requires long shifts, or who has to be away from home for weeks or months, a well-managed long commute hardly interferes with a family life at all.
In the original comment, the person speaks about being commuting to work or at work literally all their waking hours. That's the scenario, not 50-60 hours a week.
I work 9-5 with a 30 minute commute and see my kid for about 2 hours a day during the week.
If you leave at 9 I imagine you get some morning time, so maybe that's your time (and you'd get probably roughly 2 hours there?). Totally cool if that works.
I grew up with a single mom who worked 60+ hours a week and I really only spent time with her on weekends. In retrospect I wish I had parents around when I was growing up. She didn't really have a choice, and she feels the same way I do about it — we wish it was possible.
I don't want to criticize someone's life and what works for them too harshly, since this is just my personal experience, but I've been on the side of the child and the parent in a situation like this and I didn't like it on either end.
There are definitely trade-offs involved, and I cannot emphasize "well-managed" in "well-managed commute" enough.
For anyone considering it, I'd definitely encourage you to keep the following factors in mind when designing a super-commute:
1. Workplace flexibility; if your workplace requires you
to be a butt in a chair from 9-5 (or 9-6), it is going
to be difficult to engineer a workable commute.
2. Can you engineer an early or late commute? If you
can arrange things to be home for either breakfast or
dinner, and see your family for a couple of hours in
the morning or night, it's way less isolating.
3. Stick with mass transit; there is a big difference
between 90 minutes in a car and 90 minutes on a train.
4. Optimize your work arrival/departure for train/bus
times. If you have to wait 45 minutes for a train
after getting off work, your commute is 45 minutes
longer.
5. Keep a rigid schedule. Commuting 2+ hours each way
with tight margins means you can rarely work late,
come in early, or go out after work with your coworkers.
6. When considering a new home/job with an extreme commute,
evaluate your entire commute. If you only consider
eg the train time, and not the trip to and from train
stations and wait times, you will get in over your
head. Two houses in the same town may have radically
different door-to-doors for two different jobs in the
same city.
It's not for everyone, and if you can't design it well it eats into every part of your life, but my point is just that, if you do it right, an extreme commute ... may not be the most salient part of your life. You go to work, you spend time with your family, and you get whatever you were trying to get by living 80+ miles from your workplace.
And you come to relish your time on the train, where you sit quietly and don't talk to anyone or do anything.
I have what people would probably describe as an extreme commute. 2+ hours each way (maybe 1.5 hours in the summer when there's less traffic). I leave the house before kiddo wakes up and am usually back after she goes to bed. It sucks. But my spouse is stay-at-home which is barely do-able financially in the Bay Area. I think it's important to let my kid have her own room and sharing walls with neighbors sucks, so apartments and townhouses are not acceptable. I'd move elsewhere but there are very few areas in the country that actually have more than a handful of good tech jobs that are also close to housing.
You may be putting too much value on having separate bedrooms and no shared walls, and too little value on your presence.
My parents had 4 children and we lived 3 bedroom 1 bath house, my brother and I shared a bedroom, my sisters shared the other. No shared walls with neighbors, but I don't think that would have really mattered. At the time (and to this day), I never really felt slighted by having to share a room, it was just "normal", since I didn't really know any difference. One of my close friends had just one sibling and his own room, but I didn't really think anything of it -- he had only one brother so he got his own room, I had a brother and 2 sisters so I didn't. Not a big real.
Of all of my childhood memories, the only thing that I wish was different was that my father would have been more involved in my life.
Mom was a stay at home mom, dad worked long hours at his job. I have vivid memories of mom at all of my school and after school functions, but I really only saw dad on the weekends, and even then he was often doing some sort of work from home.
Dad later said he regretted the same thing -- though he felt he had no choice in order to make ends meet.
"I'd move elsewhere but there are very few areas in the country that actually have more than a handful of good tech jobs that are also close to housing."
You're living in a bubble. There are plenty of good tech jobs all across America.
There are good tech jobs all across America. There are plenty of tech jobs all across America. The intersection of "good" and "plenty", however, is limited to a few generally expensive areas.
What's wrong with living close to people as a kid?
This line of thinking is entirely new and really foreign to me. Even my grandparents, and the people around them, living in a tiny town and owning quite a few large pieces of land chose to build their homes close to each other. Sharing walls even.
How is not seeing your father better than sharing a wall with someone?
Sharing a wall means becoming a recipient of whatever sounds and smells my neighbors (whom I cannot choose) decide to let emanate. My family has lived in apartments/townhomes and had to deal with, among other things:
* Deep wall-shaking bass music
* Game show TV turned up to the highest level, at 3 in the morning
* The smells of fried rotting fish heads
* Power tools
* Continuous dropping of items ranging from silverware to books to unidentifiable large metal objects onto tile (shared ceiling)
* A vast variety of sex noises
* The smells of sewage backed up into a bathroom
* Horse-like foot traffic on a set of shared wooden stairways late into the night (drug deals going on upstairs)
Never again. Yes, you can have shitty neighbors in the single-family-home suburbs but the extent to which they can ruin your quality of life is reduced.
This depends a lot on where you live. I've rented a few apartments that were cheap, by local standards, and learned exactly why this was. Loud obnoxious neighbors, who liked getting high and playing techno at 3 am, or having sex in the middle of the ground floor garden, or going crazy and screaming crazy stuff for hours.
But then I bought a decent apartment in a decent neighborhood and had none of that, and later traded it for a row house where every room has a wall shared with a neighbor in an even better neighborhood and now I pretty much don't notice my neighbors at all.
When I lived in Mountain View, my apartment was located on the middle floor. I consider myself a night owl, but my neighbor who lived upstairs liked to practice playing the drums at 5 AM in the morning.
I think working from home some days changes the dynamic potentially quite a bit. I have a relative with a ludicrous commute from Lincolnshire down to London -- but they only have to do it one or two days a week I think.
It's too bad the hyperloop idea is focused on city->city transportation. It could be an incredible tool to combat the increasing cost of living in cities. Imagine living this far away but getting to work in 30 minutes. Housing prices would return to sanity in cities.
You don't need hyperloop. Existing train technology could easily provide this. With modern signals and a good track, high speed trains can deliver good throughput with high comfort.
The problem appears to be the old tracks (speed restrictions) and old signalling system which increases delays and lowers throughput.
EDIT: To use the route here as an example. According to google maps the distance is 83 miles on road, so probably around 80 miles for a train. This can easily be done within 45 min on a train. Have a look at the German cities of Cologne and Frankfurt. There's a high speed train running and I know some people commuting there. It's not nice either but a distance of 150 miles with <1hr commute each direction. The ticket costs ~$4,500 per year which includes free rides on all trains within Germany. There are 3 stops on the way and some people only commute half the way which makes it a 20-25 min commute for the same distance of Philipsburg to NYC.
To give a point of comparison, Riverhead in Suffolk County is about 80 miles from Penn Station. Monthly tickets would add up to $6,000 a year. There's one train in the morning that you have to catch, leaving at 6:08 AM. It requires two transfers and gets to Penn Station at 8:23 AM. On the way back you again only have one train to catch, at 5:41 PM. It has one transfer and gets to Riverhead to 7:37 PM.
For not much more than 8 hours at the office (depending on how far away from Penn it is) you'd be away from your house for more than 14 hours every day.
At least it can serve to distribute the cost of living to multiple cities. Philly is incredibly cheap in comparison to NYC -- As mentioned in this article (and others) people are already commuting daily from their homes in Philly to their office in New York.
This actually isn't anything new. Growing up, one of our neighbors in exurban Philadelphia commuted into New York City for the week. I think that's probably the more common situation. Doesn't work for everyone of course, but traveling somewhere and staying there for the work week is a pretty common pattern for a lot of consulting roles, for example.
It's common in consulting roles where the company you consult for is paying for your apartment/hotel. Probably not so common for W2 employees unless you are an upper level executive perhaps. I'm sure the people in this article would elect to stay in a hotel for the week if given the option.
Yes, but if you are taking Amtrak from Philly to Manhattan every day roundtrip you already have a pretty hefty commuting bill--probably $100/day fairly easily. This is admittedly less than a Manhattan hotel but there is a fairly significant financial cost associated with these extreme commuting situations.
Yeah, for sure, but the people in these articles were buying $350k homes so they are already pretty well off. I don't think any of these people chose the commute option because they couldn't afford a place in the city (just not as big/nice of a place as they have where they live).
Yeah, good point. It could also serve to grow smaller cities. I imagine something like Albany would be an attractive option, if they could afford to build a hyperloop there.
Why bother with Hyperloop to Albany? The train right-of-way already exists (and it's beautiful), the terminals already exist. Plus, people want to go to Hudson, Poughkeepsie, Tarrytown, etc. Just make it very high speed rail and suddenly the full trip is <1 hour instead of >2.
A hyperloop terminal would probably be located in a vastly less convenient location than Penn Station. I expect for many NYC residents it'd be a shorter trip to take a high speed train through the existing right-of-way than to take a hyperloop, similar to how it's often faster to take the train from NYC to DC than to fly.
I really do not see the appeal of hyperloop in any situation involving high density land use, and I also do not see how it could work in locations without high density.
I wonder how well you could do with a planned town and a hyperloop or high-speed rail line? Offering a 1-hour commute to somewhere 150 miles away from San Francsico sounds like a risky-but-worthwhile development.
Difficulty would obvious vary quite a lot by city, and I imagine NYC is basically irreparable since you can't even get a line into it. But it would at least have potential for less dense locations.
I'm not sure you could get a line into SF. CalTrain has been trying to electrify their line, and even that appears to have been a mini-nightmare, e.g., with Atherton suing.
Not just that, but in many ways a strange business decision. Traditionally, it's not uncommon for railways to build a line to the middle of nowhere where they own the land, then make their money developing and selling the land, rather than from fares.
I know :) That's why I said "too bad". We can't fix the cost of living in cities problem if the only place it's convenient to live is already-big cities.
The Boring Company is planning 200kph for local tunnels and 1000kph for hyperloop between cities. This can be the biggest ever impact in commuting times at all distances.
I started taking my personal laptop with me and using my phone as a hotspot (because the bus WiFi is a joke).
I would get stressed just looking at the traffic the bus had to endure, I can't imagine having to do that then work for 8 hours then do it over again (plus the cost of parking!)
My longest commute (admittedly weekly) involved leaving my house near Ipswich in Suffolk, England, at 0430, driving to Stansted Airport, taking a flight to Zaventem, taking a train to Brussels, taking another train to Liege, then taking a bus to Sart Tilman, finally arriving there at 1120 (1030 UK time).
That was my first thought, but the article sort of doesn't support that?
Like, this is an expensive lifestyle. Gas and new cars are obviously very pricy, but even with busses and biking this isn't a cheap way to live. Most of the people mentioned are working upper middle class jobs but want to own desirable or spacious land. That's an outlook I very much don't have.
I've known people in the other situation, doing 1-3 hours of commuting because they had no choice. But it mostly seems to be about limited transit access, like taking a 10 mile trip that takes two hours because there's no direct bus route, or getting two jobs far from home and one another.
It was grueling and miserable. I would wake up at 5:30, stand outside in the cold at 6:45, arrive at PABT at 9 to be in at work by 9:30 - 10. Leave at 6:30 to be home by... 10:30 , eat cold dinner in bed then go to sleep to start all over.
I broke down one day and couldn't do it anymore so I got an apartment in the city (It was harder than it sounds. Searching for a non-craphole place in a good area then throwing down like $6k just to get in. Yikes.)
I don't understand people who do this as a lifestyle. It is miserable and you spend an inordinate amount of your life on a bus: Get a new job.