My commute is roughly an hour each way, and involves driving to the train station and catching the train to work, then reversing that to get home. As I'm a voracious reader and as the he bulk of my commute is actually spent on the trains (or waiting to board the trains), I spend that time reading and I'm perfectly satisfied with my arrangement.

Were I to trade in my train ride for a one hour drive into downtown, replete with stop and go traffic, additional costs in gas and parking, I don't think you could build me a bigger, better house that would even come close to offsetting my increase in level of misery getting to work. And that includes factoring in audiobooks as part of the drive.

Not to mention the value of nonpositional goods like time.

And isn't this knowledge mostly irrelevant to the people who have to commute long distances because they can't afford to live near their workplaces? The janitors, waitpersons and other low-paid workers in Silicon Valley often commute from the Central Valley, not because they want to, but because there isn't even a closet they can afford near work.

It has nothing to do with positional goods; it's the lack of affordable housing.

If only we all had the ability to just pick up and move closer to our jobs. If only it didn't matter that our kids are well entrenched in a school system. If only the cost of housing were equal everywhere. Ah, the beauty of utopia.

My commute into Manhattan consists of a 40 minute train ride and a 15 minute walk. Like The Critic, I get a tremendous amount of reading done and enjoy the train. Good public transportation makes commuting much more bearable.

For what I am paying for an old house on Long Island which I purchased 24 years ago, I might be lucky to afford a studio in Manhattan. If I had to drive into the city, however, that studio might seem tempting.

Here's Stutzer's personal site, with papers.

I'm looking for published research on commuting, because I'd be interested to get more granularity, particularly comparing car commutes to other forms of transportation.

There's also the consideration that if hour-from-work commuters to switch from car to train, the trains would become less comfortable places for reading, crossword puzzles etc.

I have a 10 minute walk to work, and you'd have to pay me a lot more, a LOT more, to make me trade it for a drive. Even a 10 minute drive.

I can also walk to all my favorite pubs and coffee shops, extra bonus. I basically get ito my car to shop for groceries and leave town.

Such pleasures are indeed underated in our scheme of things.

Strange. I used to have 45 minute commutes and now I work from home. Often, I miss the commute. I loved putting on a CD, listening to an album before I had to really think about anything.

Sure, working from home is cool and it isn't like I'd actually trade back. But I never found the commute to be stressful.

Isn't the main reason a lot of people commute long distances so that they can send their kids to public schools that don't suck?

People may hate commuting, but I'd be willing to bet that they'd take that over their kids going to a terrible school system.

Also, they probably don't value the absence of a long commute more than the outrageous cost of a private school education (over 13 years at ~20-30k a year).

Can't say I agree with your analysis since hip urban dwellings are much much more "positional" (ie status over value) than your average suburban dwelling.

People who move out into the sticks aren't doing it for status, they're doing it because they want more space, a quiet neighborhood, better schools, etc.

The problem is not one of positional goods, but of not fully grasping how much time of your life will be spent in a crappy commute.

Ezra, just out of curiosity, what has your personal experience with commuting consisted of?

For some reason, the hour light rail ride (or hour bike ride) feels much better than the 20-30 minute drive. I'd much rather live in my current location (older inner-city suburb near downtown and transit) than closer to my job out in an office park.

Long driving commutes (or train commutes with very few options and huge time costs for missing a train) really do suck, though.

You seem to assume people are choosing to live in cheaper, spacious houses in distant suburbs rather than cramped, expensive apartments in cities.

Except that for those on low incomes, the word *expensive* is a deal-breaker. That plus the fact of low-quality public schools in cities.

The article points out also that in two-income families, it's rare for *both* parents to work near their home. It gets even worse in divorced families.

I'd caution against assuming that people commute only in order to achieve "positional goods." Life is often more complicated, as some of the commenters above have already pointed out. In my case, for many years I lived two blocks away from where I worked. I was a teacher and was constantly bumping into parents of my students at all sorts of inconvenient moments. I felt I had no privacy and my neighborhood started to feel claustrophobic. Then I moved and had a 40 minute door to door commute -- I loved it. I loved the feeling of a space between my work world and my home world. I also happened to get a much larger apartment out of it. But I'd say that above all my commute contributed to lowering my stress level.

People may hate commuting, but I'd be willing to bet that they'd take that over their kids going to a terrible school system.

But isn't that self-perpetuating to some degree? A school district is sustained, at least in part, by property tax revenues generated by people who work in the city but live in the 'burbs.

Which means that you're not necessarily commuting in order to live in a good school district, but rather that your school district is good -- or at least, well-funded -- because people choose to commute.

(Would those commuter communities have anything like the same funding if people worked and lived within the dynamics of the local economy?)

That exporting of wealth contributes to the underfunding of urban schools.

"A school district is sustained, at least in part, by property tax revenues generated by people who work in the city but live in the 'burbs."

Don't assume most people are commuting to jobs in the "city". In many areas, the high-paying jobs are in other suburban or even exurban locations. People are driving from suburb to suburb because public transit is very inefficient.

A commuter who travels one hour, one way, would have to make 40% more than his current salary to be as fully satisfied with his life as a noncommuter, say economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer of the University of Zurich's Institute for Empirical Research in Economics

How does that make sense? Are they assuming all commuters are unhappy?
What they say here is that commuters need to make 40% more than they are currently making to be as happy as a non-commuter. Is it just a poorly constructed sentence?

In many areas, the high-paying jobs are in other suburban or even exurban locations.

Point taken.

And it can't be discounted that for some people, perhaps the catalysts for this, the prospect of living well away from Those People translates to a happiness that money can't buy.

> My commute is roughly an hour
> each way, and involves driving
> to the train station and
> catching the train to work,
> then reversing that to get
> home. As I'm a voracious
> reader and as the he bulk of
> my commute is actually spent
> on the trains

I think "commuting" in the sense that Ezra is using it excludes rides on high-end heavy rail (e.g. Chicago's Chicago & Northwestern). In my experience that is pleasant and useful time compared to driving or slugging it out on the bus.

Cranky

Of course, part of the issue is one of what causes what: is it the commute that makes commuters unhappy such that if they traded the commute for a potentially less otherwise desirable job and/or domicile, they'd be happier?

Or is it that they are stuck having to make the choice in the first place? Is it simply easier to be happier if you can have your cake and eat it too: you are in a situation where you don't have a long commute and live where you want, whereas if those people who commuted did eliminate the commute (by changing jobs and/or moving) they'd actually be even less happy?

Perhaps the study addresses this (I don't have time to read it), but it's not obvious to me that if commuters would just stop commuting but make other choices, they'd be happier. Perhaps people are actually maximizing utility and are just in situations where the maximum utility just ain't so maximum.

> And isn't this knowledge
> mostly irrelevant to the
> people who have to commute
> long distances because they
> can't afford to live near
> their workplaces? The
> janitors, waitpersons and
> other low-paid workers in
> Silicon Valley often commute
> from the Central Valley,
> not because they want to,
> but because there isn't even
> a closet they can afford
> near work.

I believe it was a study by William Whyte that showed that essentially every headquarters moved out of Manhattan between 1970 and 1990 ended up at a location that was an even 10 minutes drive between the CEO's million dollar house (they thought small in those days) and the stable where the CEO's daughter boarded her horse. It may take some work for a janitor to find an affordable place to live in the City of Chicago that is within reasonable distance of work, but it is essentially impossible to find such a place near a Barrington high-end officeplex.

If you are arguing that the California/Connecticut development model lacks diversity and is unsustainable I won't argue, but Jane Jacobs pointed that out many times between 1990 and 2006.

Cranky

Chicago has a more diverse housing base than California cities. Low-wage workers are moving to the Central Valley to rent apartments, as that's where the only affordable housing is located. (I'm not talking about people who move to buy houses here.) And because we have little public transportation, they then have to drive hundreds of miles a day to their jobs.

And for low-wage workers that may actually make more sense. If you lose your job, you at least have the cheaper apartment. If you can live close-in, you're paying 60% of the income you used to have for housing.

If I could find a job closer to home I would take it in a minute. I've been looking for months and haven't gotten an offer yet. So I continue spending 90 minutes a day in the car getting to my current job.

You think I like it? You're wrong. But I can't change things until I actually get a job offer.

Here's a further paradox on the economics of commuting. Many people believe that they need to buy in the outer 'burbs to be able to buy a house. They "drive to qualify." But data demonstrates that the lower purchase price on the home is false economy because increased transportation costs eat up the savings on the home. There is little variation in most regions between the combined costs of both housing and transportation. So people end up spending more on a depreciable asset -- their cars -- while investing less in an appreciable asset -- their home. On top of that are all of the social costs that you mention.

Sprezzatura, why not move closer to your current job?

What this all comes down to is kids. If you have them, unless you are phenomenally wealthy, you generally move out of the city as soon as you can. Generally, it is the young and hedonistic and kidless (that means you, Ezra) who love to tell the rest of us how wonderful it would be if I lived in an 800 sq ft apartment in Georgetown or wherever. The fact is, I like having room in my big house, I like having a good sized yard (1/3 an acre) and would not in a million years want to live as a family in a large city. When I was young and single and didn't mind a little noise hear and there, city life was fine. You get older, have children and responsibilities, the location of whatever pub is nearby is pretty immaterial. But if you want to live in the city with your family, by all means do; this is America and the choice is what makes this country great. But lots of us would rather live like John Edwards with a giant house and lottsa land, especially if you have children.

how wonderful it would be if I lived in an 800 sq ft apartment in Georgetown

Poor f'ing baby. Good thing daddy made sure you never had to live in less than 800 sq.ft after you left home. The rest of us are all suffering lives of quiet desperation. Cripes.

Also, Scott, lots of walkable city spaces have single family homes and are relatively quiet. However, there is a bit of satisfaction in knowing that your children will hate you for banishing them out to the middle of nowhere when they don't have a car. But, hey, that's "freedom"-- freedom to choose stupid things that makes your life and the lives of your neighbors terrible, and the freedom to say how wonderful it is. Don't piss on our legs and tell us it's raining. Your cul-de-sac in the middle of nowhere you paid for the privilege of giving your a 90 minute round-trip commute isn't paradise. But I guess you can keep telling yourself it is. You also are stuck in a false dichotomy, that your life is either defined by being in an isolated place with a lot of land (and 1/3rd of an acre is actually not a lot) in the middle of nowhere or a "big city." There are lots of options in between, it's just that they're not a set of options you ever thought enough to consider, in part because your government and
developers never presented the options to you. But hey, you think you "choose" it, and if that's what makes you happy, go for it.

Scott is sort of right. Having kids doesn't mean immediately moving out of the city (if it did, every daycare center I've called today wouldn't have a 2-year waitlist)--but having kids does change things. Before my son was born, a third-floor walkup was a fine place to live, and if I'd needed to quit my job, I could have.

But now that he exists, my housing is his housing, and I can't cut back expenses that much--I could live an ascetic lifestyle, myself, but there's no way to stop buying diapers (or paying for the detergent, vinegar and water to wash cloth ones). Yes, I'm giving up some short-term happiness by accepting a crappy commute, but I'm not making housing decisions to obtain "more money, more material goods, more prestige." Instead, I'm gambling that my son will give me long-term happiness.

Is it better to live near your work and commute to your hobbies, or to live with your hobbies and commute to work?

The assumption here seems to be that the only reason you'd choose to live out "there" is some combination of real estate snobbery, fear of city schools, and need for storage space.

But there are also plenty of leisure pursuits that are much easier when you're outside the city: gardening, biking, horseback riding or setting up a studio to paint come to mind.

Surely, there is some value to living near hobbies you find important and definitional.

Of course, if I had the choice, I'd probably take the 800 ft studio in NYC ... but for the sake of argument it's also worth considering that there are non-positional reasons to live in the boonies.

> What this all comes down to
> is kids. If you have them,
> unless you are phenomenally
> wealthy, you generally move
> out of the city as soon as
> you can. Generally, it is
> the young and hedonistic and
> kidless (that means you,
> Ezra) who love to tell the
> rest of us how wonderful it
> would be if I lived in an
> 800 sq ft apartment in
> Georgetown or wherever.

Sheesh. Even today with the population down there must be between 500,000 and 1,000,000 kids living and growing up in the City of Chicago. I grew up in a big city. My first house was in an affordable neighborhood of a big city; it was within walking distance of two train lines, a park, a playground, a school, and a bodega. It was "only" an 800 sq.ft. row house but it had a yard, a parking space, and plenty of room for my spouse, two babies, and 5 bookcases. The immigrant family behind me had 20 people in the same size space.

OK, so a lot of my friends who grew up with me in the city bought suburban homes. I understood. Those were 1200 sq ft suburban homes with 30x50 lawns which seemed to be just fine for raising 3-5 kids (lots of ex-Catholics amoung that set). This idea that a small family needs a **3000 sq ft** house and a **3/4 acre lawn** is pernicious.

Cranky
Cranky

[I] would not in a million years want to live as a family in a large city.

And yet you never quite spell out why, Scott.

Why pseudo? Because I prefer more room. Because with a wife who works from home and a 20 month-old and trying for another, I'd rather live in my house with a yard and 4 rooms and a bonus room than an apartment. Because I like to garden and work in my yard. Because all things considered it what I want to do. So Cranky, Pseudo, Tyro, how many kids do you have? What kind of house/apartment do you live in? How big is it? Where the hell do you get off telling me where to live? Give me your lifestyle history, I'm sure I can come up with a number of ways you could live in a way that makes society better as you could with me. The point is it's my choice and your choice.

How many years of working at a job that requires a commute did it take for the person to have the chance to work at the non-commuting job?

> The point is it's my choice
> and your choice.

Except that "your choice" requires stupendous amounts of oil to maintain.

Cranky

My inner-city row house had very nice gardens in the front and back by the way.

The best thing about good public schools is that they are a great excuse for not living near blacks and immigrants, and not paying taxes to help the poor. Especially with good zoning regulations.

"If only it didn't matter that our kids are well entrenched in a school system. "

If only the same sort of research didn't show that having kids won't make you nearly as happy as you might think, and will (what a surprise) force you into precisely these sorts of situations where large parts of your life suck.

You make your choices and you live with them.

Having actually quit commuting for telecommuting, I can report that *not* spending two hours a day on commuter trains is worth a ton of money. Further, I'm up almost £2,000 a year on reduced transport spending.

It's just a pity I still live in the suburbs because I can't afford to move to the city!

Doesn't surprise me in the least. I telecommute "out of" the city (I live in Brooklyn but work for a company in Jersey, so I make less than I would probably make working in the city), and I've sat down and figured out the dollar value of no commute. Even not factoring in the fact that I think I value free time more and material wealth less than the average person, I figured that it would take a WAY higher paying job to get me to change my situation.

The idea that you can adjust your life so that you can walk to work is bogus. If you are laid off, your employer goes out of business, etc, no one restricts their job hunt to where they can walk. They look for any job that they can reasonably reach.

In a place like DC, walking to work and having a family compete against each other. If you have kids, walking to work means private school at $20K a year if you can get your kid in.

Leave it to a 20-something single guy to tell the rest of us how to live. Sorry, when you are middle aged with kids, leaving above the Chinese food restaurant and across the street from the liquor store is a non-starter.

@Spike3905. You raise a great point. We recently moved from the philly burbs (where I dr0ve about 45 min each way to Wilmington, De) to Cambridge, Ma. I now drive maybe once a week, at best. We've sold one car, and are thinking about getting rid of the other. We're saving roughly $400-500 a month in gas between the two of us. Which just about offsets the increase in housing costs.

And re: the original post, my own experience would agree. I would never trade my 15 minute subway (20 minute bike) commute for the hell I went through in the philly area. Plus living in a city just gives us so much more to do, while having to exert so much less effort to do it.

Figuring that it costs $.45 a mile to drive a car (including all expenses), a 15-mile commute 250 days a year costs $3375.

And that's a cost in addition to lost time and quality of life. Plainly it's worth a number of trade-offs to avoid a commute.

Mainly, though, I wanted to introduce this metric.

Sorry, when you are middle aged with kids, leaving above the Chinese food restaurant and across the street from the liquor store is a non-starter.

And again, it gets described in those condescending, either-or terms.

Scott? I just wanted a bit of clarity; you could have spared us the passive aggressive schtick.

My point in this thread is simply that there some of our 'choices' are really rationalised collective behaviour, and are influenced culturally and politically.

And we see those assumptions at work with the 'live somewhere with a certain amount of urban density, and you're a hipster in an apartment opposite a bar or a liquor store'.

That's neither representative of what urban living is, nor of what urban living can be if there were the same incentives in place for urban building that there are for the 'big house, lawn and yard' model.

In short: urban living doesn't have to be the Upper East Side, Twentysomething Hipsterville, or the fracking ghetto.

Addressing the affordability of living close to your workplace, the AAA puts the average total cost of car ownership for for 2007 at $9500. With almost $800 extra in their pockets each month a family with one less vehicle can afford a lot more for housing.

I would have thought that the comments on a political site such as this would focus on the policy implications of such findings: that Federal and local government is forcing many Americans to make these choices that lead to a long commute because of the issues aforementioned: price, schools, jobs.

It's all very interesting what our personal choices have been in the current context but the government has the opportunity to end the policies that have created this situation though everyone here seems to ignore this power.

Scott, for instance, assumes- apparently- that the only choices are a high-rise apartment and a 1/3 acre plot. Many Americans would be happy for affordable housing with a bit of yard closer to their jobs but current land use policy subsidizes McMansions at the expense of these types of housing.

My bf and I moved to the city, and the bf works in the suburbs. He traded a 20 minute drive commute for a 1 hour bus commute and he is much, much, much happier. He can read on the bus. Also, we can walk to movies, restaurants, and music shows.

I live in the city. I have a sweetie, two children, three cats, and a stupidly large house that sits half-empty, but I live in the city.

It takes me 7-12 minutes to get to work by bus. My children live within walking distance of their school, three parks, a wildlife refuge, an amusement park, a railroad yard, an (ex-)interurban railroad, the library, and most of their schoolmates. And we're 350 feet away from two bus lines that run on 15 minute headways during the week.

If I moved to the suburbs, I'd lose all of this. I don't think that a 100x150 lot (which, um, would have to be mowed. That's a lot of grass to mow with a push mower) is a good exchange for me or my children.

the subtext I hear when I hear "i would never live in a city with my family" is "i would never live near all those people who are not like me", be it their skin color, national origin, sexual orientation, mode of dress, etc.

I lived in a major Southern city for 14 years and the code words/dog-whistle phrase was "transit==crime," as if burglars were habitual users of the bus system with a stolen TV on one shoulder and a pillowcase of silver over the other.

Of course, crime was defined the very presence of the underclass outside their zip codes.

I live in what was once a suburb, and is now a close-in neighborhood (6 miles from downtown) just I did where I lived before. We actually moved closer in when we were buying than when we were renting, as it suited what we wanted: older, well-made homes in established neighborhoods. Sure, they aren't McMansions, but I'd rather commit to a neighborhood or mode of life than to a house that represents a huge waste of resources. And yes, I have ridden public transit to work in both cities, even for a second shift job.

I'm not saying the decision to commute is based on racism or other issues, but I'm not hearing anything that leads me to believe otherwise.

Paul,

You would have a much stronger case claiming that it is the middle class whites who are racist if not for the fact that virtually every upper middle class white liberal sends their children to private schools that are overwhelmingly white.

When Justice Ginberg was writing in a dissenting view that the state has a compelling to assign children to schools based upon their race, her granddaughter was graduating from an elite private high school in NYC that was over 90% white or Asian.

Maybe if liberal whites would lead their way in sending their children to schools that are majority black or Hispanics, then the rest of us would believe their arguments about calling middle class whites racist.

as if burglars were habitual users of the bus system with a stolen TV on one shoulder and a pillowcase of silver over the other.

The MARTA expansion? I've heard the 'black guy with a TV' line in reference to why Atlanta's burbs didn't want the MARTA going there.

virtually every upper middle class white liberal sends their children to private schools that are overwhelmingly white.

And that's some high-class trollshit. Show your data, or shut the fuck up. Right now, you have a sample size of one.

pseudonymous in nc,

The public schools in the District of Columbia are 5% white. In SF, it is 10% white. In Chicago it is less than 10% white. In NYC the public schools are 14% white. In Los Angeles it is 9% white. In Boston 1/3 of all children attend private schools. In Seattle, it is about the same number.

When you look at the bluest counties in the U.S. two trends become apparent: the public schools have very few whites and a large portion of the school aged children attend private schools.

Even Senator Obama would not put his children in the Chicago Public Schools.

The Clintons, The Gores, and the Kerrys would not pub their children into public schools.

The elite white progressives want middle class whites to live in diverse urban areas, send their children to diverse public schools, ride the bus, and live in high rise apartments, then they should either lead in way in going it or shut up.

People smart enough not to have kids are quickly excluded from the gene pool.

"You would have a much stronger case claiming that it is the middle class whites who are racist if not for the fact that virtually every upper middle class white liberal sends their children to private schools that are overwhelmingly white."

I'd be interested to see what the numbers are broken out by elementary, middle, and high school. And weighted by population.

And those numbers need to be compared with the Charter and private schools.

Until recently DC was roughly 85-90% non-white, so yeah, the fact that white *public* school enrollment for grades k-12 is around 5% sounds about right.

Having said that, there are many, many good elementary schools in DC--folks generally pull their kids out around middle-school age.

Nice caricature of the pro-urban position, though "superdestroyer". You might want to lose some of the over-the-top defensiveness and Limbaughisms lest someone mistake you for a troll...

The longer I live the more I realize that money is not as important as living a good life. Money comes and goes like a tide but your life is always there. I think you have a very good perspective on this topic. So good, in fact, that I linked to you in my blog post today!

Very interesting post, glad to see attention brought to this issue. Just to chip in -- from the perspective of a commuter who uses public transportation instead of a Single Occupancy Vehicle, it is not always faster or easier. In fact my commute (within the district of columbia) is only 15 minutes in the car, but it takes me 45-60 minutes on the mish-mash of walk-bus-train that I use to get to work. And I don't live off the grid, either -- I'm right in it. Just so happens the transit system does not provide an easy point A to point B for me. I will continue with public transportation, because it provides exercise, reading time, and a sense of belonging in the city. But as so many others have noted here, the minute I have kids the whole scheme kind of goes out the window. I don't have any yet, but feel like i couldn't manage it stringing together an hour-long commute for a distance i could cover in 15 minutes. Over the course of the day, that means 100-120 minutes commuting vs. just 30. What do you think i would pick if I had a kid?

I live in the suburbs and work in the city and my partner works in another city which is 1 hour drive on the highway from our home. So i travel every morning by bus (takes 1 hour) to reach work and my bf drives every day for 1 hour to get to work. But at the end of the day, we still get to live with each other and do the jobs we love, (the other option was stay in different cities and avoid commute but at the expense of the relation) So point is sometimes, long commutes can be a tradeoff for other better things ! :) Enjoy ur drive/ride if it allows you to do other things!

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