Marchetti intended the constant to be 1 hour round trip, so a half-hour commute one-way. It’s an important distinction, since here in Atlanta the exurban commuter is clocking in at 1.5 hours or more into the city, well outside of what is considered tolerable. Multiply that by a million and you get some irritated people.
Is housing that expensive in Atlanta?
Its traffic is notoriously bad, so you don’t have to live far away to deal with a long commute.
That’s disgusting, and I now feel bad for Atlanta.
Oh don’t feel bad for us. It’s also hotter than hell with 115% humidity every day for 7-9 months!
Also in the greater Atlanta and can confirm. My job thankfully has me work from home as much as I can (I also travel a lot, which requires getting a vehicle from the office). But it’s still a nightmare every time I do have to go in.
I still don’t think that this could be called a constant when you’ve got folks like myself who live in a major city, 8 miles away from our workplaces, and still see 2 hour total commutes per day.
We should strip the inheritance if anyone who is related to folks who demolished the streetcar system.
Anything beyond 45 minutes is a schlep and there better be something good for me losing an hour and a half or more of day in transit. Especially a car where I can’t even read or relax.
There are people at a place I worked that did a 2 hour trip each way each day.
That’s me.
I work in a very small city entirely surrounded by a much larger one. The one I work for is an enclave for the 0.1%. The average new home build here is over 10 times the price that of the major city that surrounds us, which is also very expensive for the region.
Suffice to say, I can’t live here. I live in a shitty trailer that’s about 2 hours away with traffic, but costs $700 a month as opposed to $3000+ for a tiny 1-room apartment near work.
The commute sucks, but I save $115 every day I commute.
Fortunately, I like audio books.
How is the enclosed city not just considered part of the bigger city? I think I’ve never seen a city like that before.
It’s fairly common, especially if the residents are wealthy, they just incorporate their neighborhood area.
yep, I work in Montreal, an island… crossing a bridge the morning and the evening is 1h in summer up to 3h in winter (one way!!!). At least since COVID I WFH, save 2h+ a day.
Fuck having to use a bridge to get to or from the South Shore for a commute. As soon as there is an accident your are screwed.
I know a guy that’s doing at least once a week, probably more, commute from DC to New York City. To be a product guy at a like 5 person company. As if you really need to be in a shared office to move jira tickets, ask eng again “How’s that feature coming?”, and so on. The CEO is a crazy person.
The CEO is also making the front end developer guy who lives in Connecticut come into the office 2-3 times a week. So he can work on his web page, the one with the code stored on github.
I hate all this “return to office” stuff. I don’t care about management’s feelings or real estate investments, and I don’t care about people who hate their family and can’t focus at home. Making people commute is a pay cut and a blow against labor.
My department just got called in for an RTO with zero warning, with 3 days in person for a ~160 person department.
There are ~20 desks available. Do the math.
This next week is going to be a disaster for their coked up idea of good business practices.
Please update us if you can, that sounds like a delicious level of schadenfreude.
I have diabetic retinopathy and about 10 years ago, I saw enough blind spots that I stopped driving. My company accommodated me by letting me work from home. We already had another employee who was doing that for vision issues, it was simple to do.
Because we were successful, they replaced our desktops with laptops at refresh time and started letting everyone work from home 1 day a week. Then when Covid hit, they just told everyone to bring their laptops home and WFH full time. The CEO talked about return-to-office for a year or two but decided to make it optional.
It’s an amazing benefit. It gave me back about 90 minutes every day, and my dog doesn’t have to be crated during the day. I can sleep later and have access to my own kitchen for lunch. Theres a reason that average tenure in my department is around 20 years.
A 1hr commute represents 16% of your day, how much of my day should be wasted commuting
Math ain’t mathing?
Two hours (round trip) divided by 24 (in a day) works out to .0833, ~8%. I can’t get 16 I’m not sure where that’s coming from.
Time awake?
16 waking hours works out to ~12% which is closer but not quite
I wonder how this looks for people with flexible commuting methods. I can bike to work (45 mins each way) or take the train with some walking (40 mins), or take the metro to the train with very little walking (50 mins). The fact that it’s sometimes exercise helps break it up, and I don’t much mind it
Imagine having a choice for how you get to your destination
(this comment made by the American gang)
laugh-cries in 4 hour commute to a job only 50 miles away
Fuck the Altamonte, man… Where’s our fucking high-speed train?
Marchetti never went to NYC.
Or LA
If my commute isn’t a 30 second walk to my home office I won’t take the job.
I personally hit a wall at 41 minutes of in-car travel time for a daily commute. I’ve timed it. Every second after that feels like a whole level of abnormal waiting, a kind of cold torture or injustice that you must wade through to to your destination. It’s not a healthy headspace at all. I’ve naturally sought out shorter commutes after this revelation, and yeah, the 30 minute estimate seems right.
Living in walkable area - luxury Having a good commute - luxury
As if the entire system is designed around somebody else’s needs
When I interviewed at a company some years ago, the commute would have been ~an hour on a normal day (potentially longer if I did park-n-ride). I was very forward about wanting to only come into the office once or maybe twice a week. The manager I was talking with brushed off my commute time by basically saying that the commute wasn’t that long and he knew others that commuted much longer. That was a huge red flag for me and I did not proceed with them. I don’t care what others will tolerate. If management is going to ignore concerns like that, I don’t want to work there. It was really apparent that he wouldn’t let me work from home more than maybe once a week if I was lucky.
Then his law has failed.
There are plenty of successful housing areas much farther out than 30 minutes one way (the 1 hour is daily). Nearly everyone I know has a longer commute than that.
Maybe it’s the commuters that failed to find a job that’s close enough to be tolerable. I worked one job for a few months where I had a 1-hour each way commute, and it sucked so I job hunted enough to find one with a more tolerable 30-minute commute.
I would rather live in a cardboard box in an alley than commute for more than 15 minutes
Neat. Anecdotally I can confirm that as I work construction so have a variable commute. 30 minutes is fine, 45 an inconvenience, and an hour having me thinking about quitting.
