apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

i live in southern ct and work, what i consider, not far from home. my wife is in the same situation. i was on my usual train ride home the other day and realized that combined we spend something like 29 days out of the year commuting---really 29 days! don't get me wrong, there are people out there with far worse commutes than the two of us (particularly the CT to NYC commuters) but as was mentioned in the article we are thinking about starting a family and after tallying up the time wasted in our lives on probably what we both consider to be the most unpleasant part of our day it's time to reconsider the ol' priorities here.

just venting, that's all. need to spend some time with 'Walden'.

For me the short commute for both of us was an absolute "must" when looking for a new house (never mind high prices). If only I could walk to my work... Mostly it was dictated by a bad memory of my husband's ex-commute 80 miles one way every day, and while his schedule was somewhat flexible it still scarred me :), we saw him on weekends (mostly sleeping).

I commute about 40 minutes door to door (one-way) on the subway, and I LOVE it. It is the best time to read a book and not be distracted by cellphones, email, etc...

The problem with living close to work is that in today's world, jobs change a lot. I live in Baltimore-Washington and have worked everywhere from Hunt Valley, MD (the northernmost suburb of Baltimore) to downtown DC. In the end, you have to make your decision about where to make a long-term investment based on something longer lasting.

I have had up to a 1.5 hour commute each way on public transportation. While I'm glad to have the time back now, some of my "train buddies" became permanent friends, and I have never been so well-read in my life as I was when I had my train time.

I live (geographically) very close to my university, but the traffic on the bus line can get pretty ridiculous. It's about 30 minutes each way, but I like it because I can unwind with some music going in and coming out. Also, the ride gives me a chance to catch up on my reading or take a nap on the way home before heading to the after-school job. :)

When I picked neighborhoods to focus my housing search, ease of commute was a factor. I'm moving next week and will be shaving 45 minutes off of my commute. It can't come soon enough. And I'm getting the best of both worlds -- closer to work and closer to family and friends.

While is a huge time saver living close to the office, I feel a comfortable and peaceful home is more important than distance to work.

I've had commutes where it was a mere 10 minute walk to the office. I would go home at times during lunch to chill or eat, but being that it was midtown (56th and 6th), I felt I was always, always in the hustle and bustle of things. Hotels, tourists, traffic, etc.

Now my husband and I live in Forest Hills, NY and while my commute to the office is one hour, every time I step off the train at home, I feel more relaxed and it feels like home sweet home rather than hustle and bustle.

Plus, like terra maria said, people change jobs every so often now. It would be impossible to change your home (especially if you own) just as frequently.

http://www.donkeehouse.com

I think it's important to live near an area with several career opportunities, not just the one being your current job. Lets be honest, we're going to be in our homes hopefully longer than our current jobs.

We selected our home by the neighborhood and school district, with only a faint nod to our current commute length. Being scientists, we have limited areas we can live and debate switching jobs without moving hundreds of miles.... so we selected one, and that's where we will hopefully stay for a while.

As soon as a I started my new job, everyone in the small village where it's located began asking when I was going to move there. It's a nice place to live and walking to work would be better than my current 35-40 minute commute.

However, I began weighing the options and realizing that all of my non-work activities (and my occasional bartending gig) were within walking distance from my current home. This really cemented my decision to stay put. The commute can be an annoyance, but I think it would be an even bigger annoyance to have to take a commute into account every time you want to do something fun and non-work related.

LA is a black hole of traffic. Unless you live within a stone's throw of your office, or you can get there without having to get on a freeway, you're going to spend approx. 2 hours in traffic round-trip.
But then again, it's also subjective, based on your job and work hours.

Regardless, I really miss living in Boston and just hoping on the T to get wherever I needed to go. Sigh.

as long as my commute involves public transit and not driving, i'm ok with it.

taking the bus/train/metro relaxes me and allows me to unwind; driving turns me into a raving frothing misanthropic lunatic and that's just not good.

ergo, when we shop for houses, public transit is one of our top priorities.

Unless you own a home, it's not really that fair to assume you'll be living in the home longer than you're working at the job.

Even if you do own your own home, why would you want to spend hours just commuting? It's wasted time that could have been much better used. There's a middle ground between living five mins from work and two hours...currently I live 20 mins from the fiance's office. It's a fairly short drive.

My husband and I specifically bought our house due to its closeness to my job. We live in a city with virtually no public transportation and I now live only five blocks away from my office.

A while back I read the fabulous positive-psychology book The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, and one of the things that stuck with me was that your commute was very strongly (inversely) connected to your happiness, whereas, surprisingly your space/square footage was much less so. Obviously there are a lot more factors that he didn't really consider (having to drive vs. being able to read on the Subway, for example), but I thought it made a good argument.

We chose to live in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, despite the fact that I got a job on the UES. My commute will be about an hour each way, but at least it's on trains so I can get lots of reading done. The place I live is my haven. My cozy spot away from the city. Living on the UES would not have given me that.

Emily

i hate driving and i live in los angeles with a 45 minute commute. but it's so worth it to me; i live right by the beach and don't need to drive at all most weekends. i also like the psychological space this gives me from my job - my commute allows me to literally leave it behind. for a gal with workaholic tendencies, that's priceless!

I left a comment at the very beginning but later realized that it is not straight forward for me either. When I was a child I went to school that was almost an hour away from my home. Lightrail-bus-walking and backwards that;'s what was there for me 6 days a week for almost 9 years. I loved it. Train was my reading nook, twice a week I picked up books from the city library and "swallowed" them on the way to school and back. Librarians knew me, my tastes and my schedule. It was awesome. When I was a student I lived in a dorm, 5 minutes away from the university, it was an absolute necessity, with 6 classes a day 6 days a week, starting at 8 and ending at 6 with a lot of homework to be done at night, it would not be even possible to live at home, that was about 1.5 hours away on public transport. In grad school we lived 10 minutes walking distance from the labs, which was very convenient given that we could run to the building in the middle of the night if we needed to. So it all depends on the character of your commute (driving vs public transport) and the stage of life you are at.

I think being younger and less settled gives me a big advantage in this department - I don't have to care about school districts and there's no way I can buy in LA. I was sure I would be at my job longer than my apartment, so for six months after I got my job I walked around the neighborhood and called numbers on for rent signs until something worked.

I've been walking to work for three years, and I couldn't love it more.

Everyone has their own "what's it worth" meter. Every job and every house has its own balance. Finding peace includes finding that balance.

In DC, I lived across the street from work. For me, part of the love of city living was the freedom of walking. I loved not moving my car for a week at a time, and not being tied to the tyranny of the parking meter. I loved scaling my stuff down so I traveled light and could sit and drink tea at a coffeeshop or walk through the sculpture garden as part of my "commute". I loved crisp fall days and walking through blowing leaves, and the steamy summer and the relief of getting into AC, and walking for my groceries and biking to the gym. Living RIGHT THERE was the right balance.

When I lived in upstate NY, I once had a job 45 miles from my home. I loved that too. The hour long drive wound its way through rural country with drop dead gorgeous postcard views of the Finger Lakes. No traffic. It felt like being in a car commercial. The weather that year was perfect for open-window driving. For there, that was the right balance.

Here in CT, I have a 45 minute commute to one job. I hate it, hate it, hate it. It makes me feel like I'm in some corporate grind, and I'm not corporate. This is NOT in balance here. The roads exhaust me. I would greatly prefer to take the bus, walk, or bike. But it's just not in the culture of CT. And probably why I won't live here for much longer.

It's all about what works for each person in their environment. I tend to gravitate towards the living close, living small, and walking everywhere. But I also have a bunch of friends (who I visit when I can!) who have beautiful rural homes tucked away in the forest. I go there for vacation, and they visit me for theirs. (Or at least, they used to. No one likes CT, I find!)

i live in LA and I work on the westside, traveling to various children's homes and school. All my friends and the majority of things I enjoy are in Silverlake, Echo Park and Los Feliz. I frequently wish that I could live on the east side and be more socially connected.

My mother once gave me the advice that you can commute to play. She pointed out that driving to work (the stress, and money involved in a long commute) ISNT optional, but driving to see friends and do fun things is optional.

Overall, I find that living a little bit farther away actually helps me make better decisions about those late-night bar meet-ups and concerts. And I always get to use distance as an excuse.

We rent in a neighborhood we cannot afford to buy in because it is so close to downtown. My husband can walk 20 min to work or take the train to get there in 5, It takes me 20 min to get to the university by train. Someday we hope to buy in such a nice neighborhood, until then at least we can live here!

I'm moving to be closer to work, but I'm not a stone's throw. Instead of 5 min from my previous job, I'm now about 15-20 min because I can't afford to rent where my workplace is, nor do I really want to. My new place is equidistant from friends and work. Before I had to drive an hour to hang out with friends, just as stressful as driving an hour to work. It's all about middle ground.

Living in Omaha, we don't run into a lot of traffic problems so my 10 to 15 minute commute is perfect. It's out of the neighborhood that I live in and I use the time in my car on the way home from work to turn up the iPod and disconnect from work. While we aren't exactly a walkable city, I can walk to our favorite bar and a great restaurant from my apartment. I love love love Midtown Omaha.
Living any closer to work would keep me in that Work Mode for much too long after leaving the building. I don't think I could handle a 30 or 45 minute commute, but I also really don't want to go back to living in a large, high traffic city.

If you live in an urban area and can afford it, living close to work is the way to go. I like to read, but not on a crowded train or bus. I have a co-worker who commutes over 3 hours a day. He says commuting is the best time of his day, because he gets to relax before he gets home. Me, I want to get home as soon as possible to relax with my family.

I live in Charlotte (NC) and commute 45 minutes each way. Public transit is not an option for where I work, so it's car commuting and that is the worst! I don't think I would mind it if I could use the time for reading or zoning out. But as it is now, I end up raging at other drivers and stressing out. Where I work is not a good part of town, so I wouldn't want to live any closer. However, the commute and time I could otherwise spend at home is making me consider another job - preferably one that is home based.

I'm with Marri - I drive about 25 -30 min each way to work. Our offices are moving further west and it will now take me 45-50 minutes from work. Am I going to move? Nope. I live right on the beach so when I do get stressed from the 48 red lights then I get to come home to pure relaxation.

I work in Century City LA and had been commuting 1 hour from Downtown until recently when I moved to the Wilshire/Miracle-Mile area. I decreased my commute by about 10 milies, and 30 minutes; a HUGE improvement. But alas, I'm already dreaming of an even shorter commute (hopefully) when i next move.

I think unless you can bike or walk to work, a commute by car is just not fun.

I've been using public transit for almost all of my working life. The only years I drove to work--when I was living with my parents in my late teens--we lived on an acreage outside our small town, so all I did was country road and highway driving. I've never had to drive to work on a regular basis, and except for the fact that one job was an hour and three bus rides away, I'm fine with it. I happily accepted waiting at a cold bus stop in trade for not having to drive the morning after freezing rain or a big snow fall. Yikes!

Hi,

Bit of a weird one here, but the image in this articles header is of a t-shirt I designed.

I originally designed it after ending a job in London, where my daily commute was around 4 hours in total. I had enough and after working on some new t-shirt designs, I thought I would do one in honour of my new time gain.

The shirt can be found at : http://www.playdontplay.com/clothing

cheers

Sam

I used to commute in from the GTA via GOTrain and it took an hour. I slept or read.

Now I live in Toronto and my commute is 25 minutes door to door on the TTC. It's such a small part of my day that I don't mind it at all. I do do a lot of reading or listening to books on iPod.

When I was looking for a place to buy in San Francisco, being central was a big factor (not just for a short commute). Now that I have my place in the Lower Haight/Duboce Triangle area, I can have a job almost anywhere in the city and get there within half an hour on any number of the public transportation options. And even if I do need to work somewhere else in the Bay Area, BART is just 10 minutes away by streetcar or bus. It's wonderful!

I know people who have to commute to Silicon Valley every day, and it seems horrific.