Maximum Commute Distance

[webny99]

What would be the maximum distance you would consider driving to a job every day?
And how might this vary from place to place - are people in large cities prepared to drive further?
Do congestion woes limit the potential willing-to-travel distance in fast-growing areas?

The longest commute I know of personally is from Fulton, NY to Webster, NY - around 55 miles and a minimum of an hour travel time. Even with the minimal congestion and rural nature of the NY 104 corridor, that's much too long of a commute for my liking. I like diversions and side-trips, so I wouldn't appreciate traveling that far.

[MikeTheActuary]

I have found that the attractiveness of a particular job declines if the regular commute exceeds a half-hour each way.

Here's how my actual commutes have been:

Job 0 (high school): 35 minutes, daily, by bus
Job 1 (college): lived upstairs from job
Job 2: 16 minutes, mostly on rural 2-lane road
Job 3: 35 minutes (mostly light rail) for 6 months; 10 minute walk therafter
Job 4: 20 minutes by bus for 4 years; then 35 minutes by express bus

Job 5a: 30 minutes, mostly ex-urban 2 lane roads
5b: 50 minutes, mostly I-91/I-84 through Hartford (that sucked, so...)
5c: like 5b 3 days/week; telecommute 2 days/week
5c: 80% telecommute; 20% 2-3 hours mostly on MassPike
5d: 75% telecommute; 25% mostly air travel
5e (current): telecommute 3 weeks/month; drive 4¾ hours + border + traffic each way to work in office 1 week/month.

3 and 5a were probably my favorite, although my current situation has some unique appeal.

[Max Rockatansky]

I once had a job that had me on the road about 60,000-80,000 miles and 120-150 nights a year.  The job wasn't all that great but being able to travel all that open country and being to try every road under the sun was an absolute blast.  The longest drive to a job site was 730 something miles away out in Texas.  I generally would spend the start of the week in the office and travel out to the furthest location by Wednesday.  From there I would chain about 4-6 sites on the way back home.  For a home unit/job site/whatever you call it commute I'm cool with anything up 40 minutes so long as it doesn't involve much freeway

[Hurricane Rex]

Probably 60 minute although my longest commute to school was 20 minutes in elementary school so I can't say for certainty yet.

[SectorZ]

I have found that the attractiveness of a particular job declines if the regular commute exceeds a half-hour each way.

Here's how my actual commutes have been:

Job 0 (high school): 35 minutes, daily, by bus
Job 1 (college): lived upstairs from job
Job 2: 16 minutes, mostly on rural 2-lane road
Job 3: 35 minutes (mostly light rail) for 6 months; 10 minute walk therafter
Job 4: 20 minutes by bus for 4 years; then 35 minutes by express bus

Job 5a: 30 minutes, mostly ex-urban 2 lane roads
5b: 50 minutes, mostly I-91/I-84 through Hartford (that sucked, so...)
5c: like 5b 3 days/week; telecommute 2 days/week
5c: 80% telecommute; 20% 2-3 hours mostly on MassPike
5d: 75% telecommute; 25% mostly air travel
5e (current): telecommute 3 weeks/month; drive 4¾ hours + border + traffic each way to work in office 1 week/month.

3 and 5a were probably my favorite, although my current situation has some unique appeal.

Can you elaborate on 5e? 4.75 hrs one way per day (albeit every 4 weeks)?

[dgolub]

My current commute is about an hour each way.  Not that much in terms of mileage, though, since it involves going into the most densely populated urban center in the country where foot traffic is pretty congested.

[1995hoo]

I don't doubt part of it is where you grow up and what you're used to seeing. I grew up here in Fairfax County living outside the Beltway, and 45 minutes to get downtown to work doesn't seem like a long trip to me. My current commute (most days via the subway) takes about an hour once I account for the ten-minute walk from the subway to the office. I know several people in their 20s who think a 20-minute commute from Arlington sounds insanely long, though.

Longest commute I ever had distance-wise was 30 miles each way in the summer of 1996. I lived in my apartment at Duke and commuted to a job north of Raleigh off Millbrook Road, usually via the Durham Freeway to I-40 to Wade Avenue to the Beltline to Wake Forest Road. The distance might sound long to some people, but it typically took me half an hour because traffic there is lighter than it is in the DC area and it therefore didn't feel like a taxing commute to me. (Raleigh is also a little odd in that peak-direction traffic on I-40 is the reverse of many other places, or at least it was back then–outbound heavier than inbound because so many people headed to the Research Triangle Park to work.) That was also a situation where I was not about to move for just three months since I was going to live in that apartment again the following academic year. Wouldn't make sense to move just for a shorter commute (even if I could have afforded to do so, which I couldn't–gas was cheaper than rent).

My commute nowadays, when I drive, would be about 15 miles if I took the most direct route (I don't due to traffic patterns), but it would take longer time-wise than that commute to Raleigh did.

[jeffandnicole]

41 mile commute, with 38 miles being all highway. About an hour each way. 1:15 home on the afternoon isn't totally unusual. Best time...35 minutes to work, accomplished once in 19 years.

[ftballfan]

My longest work commute had to be about a half hour (roughly 25 miles) mostly via rural county roads. I was living with my parents at the time.

Current commute is only five minutes (3 miles) and through one stoplight. However, some of my coworkers have 45-60+ minute commutes (my job is in Ypsilanti, and there are people commuting from Walled Lake, West Bloomfield, Grosse Pointe, Carleton, Riverview, Southgate, Brighton, Pinckney, and Flushing)

[MikeTheActuary]

Can you elaborate on 5e? 4.75 hrs one way per day (albeit every 4 weeks)?

4.75 hours (plus border and bridge traffic) each way, one trip up, one trip back, and a couple of nights in a hotel in between.

[webny99]

Strictly speaking, mine's only about 12 miles.
However, I usually fill a half an hour, so depending on the routes I choose, I could burn up to 30 highway miles, even at rush hour.

My personal maximum would be around 20 miles/30 minutes. It's easy to make it longer if I want to - just leave earlier. But I wouldn't like the additional pressure associated with distances longer than that.

[SectorZ]

Can you elaborate on 5e? 4.75 hrs one way per day (albeit every 4 weeks)?

4.75 hours (plus border and bridge traffic) each way, one trip up, one trip back, and a couple of nights in a hotel in between.

That's what I thought. Good you can work from home 3 out of 4 weeks!

[Roadgeekteen]

No job, but 5-10 minutes if I had one. Used to leaving about 15-20 minutes before school starts.

[Mapmikey]

My current commute is 62 miles each way from Fredericksburg VA to Bethesda MD, 4 days a week.    It encompasses 36 miles of I-95 through N. Virginia and 24 miles of the Beltway (west side).  Going in I can do in a little under an hour and 90 minutes would be a good commute home in the afternoon.

Prior to the toll lanes being available for solo drivers a couple years ago, I would typically have 2 or 3 commutes home that were 2+ hours and a couple times a month there would be a 3+ hour commute.  The record is 6.5 hours.

This is my 20th year of doing this commute.  At most I have 8 more to go.

[webny99]

^I'd be interested in hearing more about the 6.5 hour commute 

Granted, I've got it pretty easy, but if I lost even fifteen minutes I'd go crazy. I can't even imagine reckoning in terms of hours.

[Jim]

My current commute is 36 miles, mostly Thruway and Northway, so it takes under 45 minutes most days, and I do it either 4 or 5 days each week.  It's not bad.  I've had commutes as short as a mile or two and as long as almost 120 miles each way.  The longest were each for one academic year.  One was 55 miles, taking 65 minutes, 4 days a week.  The tough one was the 120 miles, but that took just under 2 hours most trips.  I was able to limit that to 2 trips a week by staying near work 2 nights a week and having one stay home day.  Both of the long ones included crossing the Berkshires on the Mass Pike, so traffic was rarely a problem and scenery was great, but weather was occasionally challenging.

[Eth]

My current commute doesn't involve driving at all. I go into the office twice a week via mass transit, which usually takes around 40 minutes each way. There's less stress involved with that, since I don't have to deal with traffic at all, so anything under an hour would be fine; if I were driving, I think 45 minutes would probably be my limit.

[MisterSG1]

My current commute doesn't involve driving at all. I go into the office twice a week via mass transit, which usually takes around 40 minutes each way. There's less stress involved with that, since I don't have to deal with traffic at all, so anything under an hour would be fine; if I were driving, I think 45 minutes would probably be my limit.

So do you completely use the MARTA, but you're part of a very small minority that uses public transit in a sunbelt city.

[Rick Powell]

I do a 90 mile one-way commute twice a week, and telecommute the remaining 3 days...although I occasionally go a third day on the long commute if the situation calls for it. Approximately half the trip is on rail transit (mileage-wise)but has a 12 minute walk at the job end, and the whole thing takes a little more than 2 hours each way, from walking out my front door to walking in the office. But once on the train, I can either work or take a nap, it beats driving in rush hour.

[Mapmikey]

^I'd be interested in hearing more about the 6.5 hour commute 

Granted, I've got it pretty easy, but if I lost even fifteen minutes I'd go crazy. I can't even imagine reckoning in terms of hours.

Most of my co-workers live 15-20 miles out (civil servants generally can't afford Bethesda) and their commutes are not that much shorter than mine.  My supervisor who lives 12 miles away actually has had a longer commute than my record from icing of streets a few years back rendered travel all but impossible...it took her 8 hours.

The 6.5 hour commute resulted from 1/4" snow which resulted in a 100 car pileup in Stafford County around lunchtime.  The accident field was so large that there were pockets of cars that managed to stop without colliding amongst the wrecked vehicles.  One person was killed.  By the time I got down to Garrisonville on US 1, traffic was no longer moving at all.  So I had to backtrack to Quantico and take a convoluted route through western Stafford County to get home.  Had this detour not been necessary the commute would've been maybe 4 hours.

[Rothman]

An unexpected commute of 8 hours?  Might as well have just turned around since the day was done by the time she got there.

Some messed up decision making there.

[Mapmikey]

An unexpected commute of 8 hours?  Might as well have just turned around since the day was done by the time she got there.

Some messed up decision making there.

You couldn't...that was the problem (icy streets plus hills plus afternoon rush hour = gridlock).  The streets iced over and nobody could treat them because there were cars everywhere preventing it.

The DC area gets hammered like this every few years...the snow/ice/rain lines are difficult to pin down because of Washington's proximity to mountains and open water.  We also occasionally get a winter event that is immediately preceded by rain hard enough to render pre-treatment worthless.

[Rothman]

I lived in the DC area.  I know how it is.  Just sounds like someone was overly determined to get to work, that's all.

[sparker]

Longest commute I've had for full-time employment was from my home in Redlands to my job just east of Ontario Airport; with city streets, it was a little under 24 miles each way (mostly I-10).  WB in the mornings was rarely an issue; since I didn't start until 8:30, most of the "rush" had subsided by then.  But going home at 5:30 p.m. was rarely fun; most of the time I took surface streets parallel to the freeway (there were a lot of "farmers' markets" along that stretch, and surface-street driving conveniently took me past several of them).  Currently, I've got less than 2.5 miles each way to work in San Jose -- although a couple days a week I need to make a "parts run" to several electronic stores in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara -- but that's mid-morning, so the trip isn't particularly noxious. 

The longest commute that I know of by any of my friends is from Tracy to Newark (he works for that city); he uses the ACE train at least three days of the week, but takes his car in if he needs to engage in other activities between work and home (most of his friends, including myself, reside either in the Fremont area or in and around San Jose).  Unfortunately, that means slogging over I-580, one of the more obnoxious (in terms of both traffic and physical condition) facilities in the entire region.  He's not in the best of health, and the trip really drains him; we (his friends on this side of the hill) try to help him out -- sometimes becoming essentially a "personal Uber" -- when he's over here so he won't have to bring his car, but schedules being what they are, that isn't always feasible.  But he's slowly moving his life (shopping, gym, etc.) over to the Valley from his previous Milpitas area of residence, but with some serious blips in his social life (late '50's, and single for over 10 years).  He's calculated his mileage from home to work (he uses CA 84 from Livermore to Fremont when driving) as 59 miles each direction; each auto commute averages about 2 hours and 25 minutes westbound in the morning and about 20-25 minutes more eastbound in the evening.  I've even shown him Old Altamont Pass Road (original US 50), but he has qualms about using it in the dark.  He'll likely eventually shift to an all-rail commute schedule and only come into the Bay Area on weekends -- can't blame him at all for that.  118 miles per day -- even for only 2 days a week -- can be taxing.  Unfortunately, the housing economics in the area virtually dictate much of the rationale for such a commute.   

[DandyDan]

In all the jobs I have had, I believe my current commute of 20 minutes is the longest I have had, assuming I take the most direct route. I don't know if I would want a longer one.