Commuting Getting You Down?

Back in 1992 or there abouts, I decided I needed a serious life-style change. Part of that was driven by the frustrations involved in commuting from a neighborhood in which I could afford to live to where I was working (not the most important factor, for sure, but one of no small importance).

I ultimately landed in a situation where my commute is approximately 30 seconds (a walk from my living quarters on the second floor to my office on the first floor). What I consider a reasonable commute. Not possible in most of the US because of weird zoning laws. I am very happy with my commute these days...

5 minutes by car, 12 minutes on my pushy. I feel that commute is short enough for me. I feel sorry for anyone who has to commute for long periods of time on a daily basis, no wonder people have high stress and die of heart attacks. I live in a smaller town (170000 people approx), so that helps, but due to its close proximaty to the coast and geographical nature of the area, I know people who drive at least 30 minutes each way everyday. Thats 130 hours of your life you are never going to get back, every year. No thanks!

In some countries travelling during morning(7 to 9am) from a distance of 15miles(24km) takes 2 hrs by car,it is quicker to go by train or bus. Similarly in evenings from 5 to 7 very difficult due to old,curvy,narrow roads with many traffic signal lights as well as due to some roads declared one-way only. On rainy days it is worse.

I retired from a factory which was around 15 miles from my home. I used to travel 2 hrs daily by train as I found it fast and comfortable.Now this factory has shifted to bigger plot which is around 40 miles from the town. Most of the employees travel by bus provided by company. It takes 4 hrs daily travel which is highly tiring. It has resulted in staff turnover. It seems management never realised this problem and has now struglling to retain people.

I used to live 5 minutes from my job, but I was living in an apartment. When it came time to buy a house, the area I wanted to live in was a half hour away on a good day via expressway. Now because of a change in time when I leave for work, my commute would be a hour sitting in traffic on that same expressway. Instead, I've decided to take a back road to get to work. It takes me about 45 minutes, but I get some scenic value from it and I keep moving instead of sitting in stop-and-go traffic. This morning I got to see a four-point buck on my way in!

Travel is a scale to measure how much a nation has developed. In countries without a series of flyovers in any road there will be delays. Isolated flyovers won't solve the problem

About 14 miles, but i ride a large bore metric motorcycle so i enjoy the ride.

Ron

I live in a small city that's 42 miles away from the manufacturing facility where I work. Fortunately, the roads to the industrial park are good, so the drive takes under 40 minutes each way which is further than I care to drive daily. As others have commented I sometimes feel as though much of my life is being wasted staring through a windshield.

I could afford a place within walking distance of the plant, but homes in the area were mostly built during a coal mining boom in the 1970's, which ended more than a decade ago leaving many of them vacant and in obvious need of repair. The front porches of several of the homes are only 10-15 feet from the highway, so it is not uncommon to see pet carcasses along the road. On top of that, the area has a reputation for illegal activity (robbery and drugs). All things considered, I choose to commute so that my wife and kids can live in a cleaner and safer neighborhood.

I am fortunate to have a job that currently is pretty close to home. That limits my time costs and transportation costs for doing business. My commute is less than 30 min. and rather than waste that time listening to the radio, I make "non-productive time productive" by listening to leadership books on audio or business audios. I also sometimes use that time to pray for my family, our troops, our country and my day at work.

Those kinds of activities help set the tone for the day and help my attitude for all the things I have to deal with during the day.

Part of the problem in our society is that we fill our minds with a constant stream of constantly negative news or other trash that is on the radio or TV and that affects our outlook on life and our relationships. Much of what is on the radio helps to drain us emotionally. Whether it be the news, some music or talk radio (Stearns or people like him, etc. who are vulgar, crude and negative and have nothing of value to add to peoples lives).

In economic conditions such as these many people have to take whatever employment is available and temporarily put up with the downside time and transportation costs. Hopefully things will improve soon and people can then return to doing what they love to do, not just what is available.

Many people don't mind spending more time and money on transport instead of buying very expensive house or apartment within the city.

My wife and I work in the same office so we commute together. We were living in a condo and had a 30 min bus ride or a 10 min car ride to work. That wasn't the problem, the problem was the "condo from hell". Stupid owners, filthy loud tenants etc. So we rented out the condo and bought another house, but to find one we could afford we had to look outside the city. We now commute over an hour each way, a combination of car and train. Really don't mind the traveling but i do miss the time I could be doing other things. All in all though to smell the clean freash air and to bask in the silence of our new small town home is more than worth the traveling time. Now i just have to replace the gas guzzling SUV with something more sensible. Also I found what I think was a steal of a deal on this property and could easily double my investment with just a few small improvement projects.

Have to work in the city but like quiet country life? You are going to have a commute.

Self employment or working for industry...definitely has trade offs and perks either way. I owned a controls business and consulting firm for 5 years. My commute was 10 feet but worked 18 - 20 hours per day and most weekends. But I was home and could start and stop at any time to tend to the kids, wife, dog and just be there when needed. I also spent half of my time performing the tasks needed to own the business and the other half doing the business. I answered to no one but me and the IRS!

I now have closed that business due to the lousy economy and work for a television station taking care of two facilities. My commute is 75 miles each way. I work 10 - 12 hours and commute the other 4 - 5 hours each day. Some weekend work. I never see my kids, wife and dog and I am never home when they need me. The only perk here is a steady paycheck. But, as anyone will tell you who work for a company in this economy, no one is safe. You are at the mercy of your superior's emotions regardless of your experience and work ethic. My experience in the facilities industry is meaningless as I only have pennies to support the decaying building structure and equipment. Typical in this industry.

I long for my home office. The stress of "worrying" about the condition of these buildings constantly and competing for my own position, daily, will kill me. But I have a family to feed and need to pay my mortgage.

Self employment is the better way....the economy needs to turn around, soon! I can do so much more for clients who WANT to reduce their utility expenditures and preserve their infrastructure.

It's kind of an engineering issue, and it's definitely a social issue. I started looking at it about 30 years ago when I lived in Berkeley CA. I lived in a apartment building in the Berkeley "flatlands" and worked at companies that were usually rather close by. I would usually walk or ride a bike to work.

For a few months I got a job in "the city" (San Francisco.) The commute was not particularly long, but it was awful relative to what I had been doing. The public transport systems were always very crowded during commute hours. There were thousands of people riding and driving into the city from suburbs east of the hills, which were at least 15 miles away.

During my time in Berkeley I studied Georgism (political economy). George had a theory about why this situation had developed. It was that landowners were allowed to speculate on land values, leaving prime land near city centers undeveloped or underdeveloped and forcing workers to live further away from the cities, where land was more affordable. He wanted to create a system that would encourage land use and eliminate speculation on land values. His ideas have been partially implemented in parts of Pennsylvania and some other places, but were never really embraced.

Regardless of how it was created, what has been created is a system that has huge losses and inefficiencies built into it. These losses drain the economy and take their toll on the work force. They also contribute to environmental degradation.

During the time that I lived in Los Angeles, I worked in the same building complex that I lived in. This is the efficient way to organize production! Our group had nearly zero carbon footprint from commuting.

Of course, this works less well in a less stable employment environment. But the basic model of having work spaces and living spaces located close to each other is obviously worth working for.

Here in Seattle, the one job I have had so far involved about 3-4 hours of communting per day. I would leave at 7am and get home around 7pm. While I didn't find it "tiring" particularly, it was certainly wasteful of my time, and the fuel required to move me and all the other commuters I traveled with.

As a single person without kids, I can tolerate urban apartment living quite well. But many parents just don't want to live that way. In my neighborhood, which is quite close to downtown, there are a lot of real houses. But I know they are quite costly to own or rent. Most of the apartment buildings are designed for singles or young couples, and they are rather expensive, too. But a sustainable future is one in which less commuting occurs. It requires new ideas in urban design as well as new ideas in economic "design." I think it is doable and I think it needs to be taken a lot more seriously.

Apart from price of land proximity to good schools is also important in deciding location of residence. As most good schools are in the city centre parents buy a house there to show "proof of residence" to school authorities to get admission to their kids in those schools. As the very rich and very powerful live in citycentre good hospitals,schools etc are located there.