I worked on a session in the nearest big metro to my small Texas town of 200,000 - daily commute of 2 hours and 25 minutes to get there in the morning, then 2 hours 25 minutes home (closer to 4 hours to get home on traffic heavy days). Not really unheard of.
Then, a few months ago - took a vacation on the beach island of South Padre, Texas then had to rush to a client in north Texas that next day. 12 hours of driving, all without leaving the state.
UK drivers know nothing of the true road trip life.
I’d say the 2 1/2 hour commute is pretty unheard of. I’ve never heard of it before. That sounds like hell. My boss’s is 90 mins and he’s always complaining.
I used to have a 40 mile/65km commute one way. I hated it. Inevitably someone would wad their car up on the highway, closing three lanes down to one lane during rush hour, and it would rapidly become a 90-minute commute.
Boss should find a good podcast and learn to meditate. Driving is my zen, especially on long highway stretches. I guess it also depends largely on if there’s a love of driving and what vehicle you’re in.
Thankfully it was just for 1 artist and we were done in about 3 weeks.
As a temporary thing it’s not that bad but it’s also an extra 5 hours on your day. I’ve done 3.5 hrs for a client meeting but at that point that hour long meeting is all I’m getting done that day
Yeah, I do. Right after I got done doing it for work the singer in our band booked us at Trees. So I spent all that time driving back and forth, then drove out on Saturday with a car full of equipment.
It’s not like it was a big deal and that’s such a fun venue. I had a great time. I just can’t think of it without remembering that drive haha.
I hope you had a place to store your equipment there so you didn’t have to load and unload everyday at least. Doing that every day would have been my nightmare.
Losing nearly 5 hours of your life just driving is pretty crazy. I’ve done East Yorkshire to Cardiff and back in a day to collect something and that took the best part of 9 hours with good traffic. In bad traffic that could have easily been 13 and it’s not that far.
And they say we should all just switch to electric bikes like in the Netherlands. I tried showing them a comparison of the states using a map but turns out “I am just being difficult”
Size of a country has zero impact on your daily commute.
Lol Ok. Guess everyone has to crowd together in comparatively tiny little cities. All this usable land outside the cities is now uninhabitable. Genius.
Let me guess, we will own nothing and be happy, right? Oh and don’t forget about eating bugs!! Yum yum!
That’s not how cities work. That’s just how America decided to approach that problem.
To spell it out for you: your commute is always in your local area. The size of your country is not relevant to your local area. What is relevant, is density. Density though, has nothing to do with the size of your country. Unfortunately, you are about twice as dense as Hong Kong.
Your local area is trees now. Two and a half hours of trees. And a hideous tower thing painted to look like a marlboro cigarette, that people use as a landmark.
Not that I disagree the other commenter kind of…went off the deep end at the end, there. But if your suggestion is not that we take everyone in most of the middle states and shove 'em all together into what would probably come to 3-4 mid-sized American cities — so I guess a medium European one, an event that will absolutely never happen anyway — then your remaining solution to the city density/commute thing must be…to…increase the density?
Is that what you guys are asking? The only problem with America is that there aren’t enough Americans? Especially in Wisconsin?
I think you still completely misunderstand almost everything.
Long commutes are the result of bad city planning. Most of the long commutes are not in rural areas, but essentially from the outskirts of a city to the city center.
America decided to build huge suburbs devoid of any meaningful jobs. Suburbs are low density, so you need to build a lot of them to house the people, but that also means a lot of space is taken up by hardly any people. So the distance between your house and your job is simply longer.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the size of the country. You don’t plan a city on a national scale. That happens locally.
This entire thread is another example of the “murica never bad, murica special” trope. North America isn’t magically a completely different place from everywhere else.
The suggestion is that you permit the building of higher density housing. Note that currently, the law actually forbids doing this in most of America. Something anyone opposed to “big government” (like any American conservative claims to be) should be horrified by. (While left-leaning people should be horrified by it because it’s terrible for the environment, makes cost of living worse, and has negative social effects.)
Some people would still choose to live further out, and that’s totally fine. But a lot of people would choose to live closer to their place of work, which they can now afford to do because you’ve suddenly got 3 terraced homes and some parkland in the space that used to only hold 1 sprawling house and a mostly-unused yard. And even better, as you increase density, the relative efficiency of public transport goes up, and if it’s frequent and reliable, many people will choose to use public transit rather than drive everywhere because it’s just less stressful and easier. Or they might cycle instead.
Either way, they’re getting a car off the road and decreasing congestion, making it faster and easier for everyone else who still does drive.
Anyway the question is: why is there so much space between you and your job? If you can’t realistically move closer to your job, you’re either just too attached to your home (that’s a personal choice) or there’s just no housing available. In this case, you’d likely drive through large suburbs. Which take up land, but house hardly any people. This is a city planning issue.
You don’t have to crowd together at all. Most urbanists would like to cap building heights to four stories. Plenty of places wouldn’t even need that much if we made better use of land than endless parking lots and more lanes of traffic.
Driving an hour to work each way is a bug, not a feature. It’s fixable.
I mean, this sounds just like a big city thing, not an American thing. I live in Paris and hour long commutes are common here too.
As European cities are close together though, this can lead to situations where travelling between cities is not what takes the most time. I once (about a year ago) travelled a Paris-London which took me about 5 hours from start to finish - the Eurostar takes only just over 2 hours. The rest was travelling from my home to Gare du Nord, from St. Pancras to my destination, and border checks before boarding at Gare du Nord (thank Brexit for that one).
I’ve heard similar things. Like, I’ve had work commutes that are an hour long before. (Not that that’s healthy or ideal, but it’s far from rare)
I worked on a session in the nearest big metro to my small Texas town of 200,000 - daily commute of 2 hours and 25 minutes to get there in the morning, then 2 hours 25 minutes home (closer to 4 hours to get home on traffic heavy days). Not really unheard of.
Then, a few months ago - took a vacation on the beach island of South Padre, Texas then had to rush to a client in north Texas that next day. 12 hours of driving, all without leaving the state.
UK drivers know nothing of the true road trip life.
I’d say the 2 1/2 hour commute is pretty unheard of. I’ve never heard of it before. That sounds like hell. My boss’s is 90 mins and he’s always complaining.
I used to have a 40 mile/65km commute one way. I hated it. Inevitably someone would wad their car up on the highway, closing three lanes down to one lane during rush hour, and it would rapidly become a 90-minute commute.
Boss should find a good podcast and learn to meditate. Driving is my zen, especially on long highway stretches. I guess it also depends largely on if there’s a love of driving and what vehicle you’re in.
Thankfully it was just for 1 artist and we were done in about 3 weeks.
As a temporary thing it’s not that bad but it’s also an extra 5 hours on your day. I’ve done 3.5 hrs for a client meeting but at that point that hour long meeting is all I’m getting done that day
Sounds like when I lived in Tyler and had to work in the DFW Metro for a job. I spent months driving back and forth. Luckily my travel was paid.
That’s what this was, actually. TyTX - > DFW - > TyTX. Daily. You feel me.
Yeah, I do. Right after I got done doing it for work the singer in our band booked us at Trees. So I spent all that time driving back and forth, then drove out on Saturday with a car full of equipment.
It’s not like it was a big deal and that’s such a fun venue. I had a great time. I just can’t think of it without remembering that drive haha.
I hope you had a place to store your equipment there so you didn’t have to load and unload everyday at least. Doing that every day would have been my nightmare.
That sounds horrible
Why do Americans always do this weird almost-brag about this stuff?
Losing nearly 5 hours of your life just driving is pretty crazy. I’ve done East Yorkshire to Cardiff and back in a day to collect something and that took the best part of 9 hours with good traffic. In bad traffic that could have easily been 13 and it’s not that far.
that’s uh, that’s not healthy. 1 hour each way is just about the maximum daily commute that is sane.
And they say we should all just switch to electric bikes like in the Netherlands. I tried showing them a comparison of the states using a map but turns out “I am just being difficult”
The “map” is not the problem, you just completely fucked up your city planning. Size of a country has zero impact on your daily commute.
Lol Ok. Guess everyone has to crowd together in comparatively tiny little cities. All this usable land outside the cities is now uninhabitable. Genius.
Let me guess, we will own nothing and be happy, right? Oh and don’t forget about eating bugs!! Yum yum!
Go slink back to hexbear.
Are you completely insane?
Your response has nothing to do with my comment.
Here I’ll speak slowly
We have a big country. Big spaces mean longer commute. City design can't change physics of space-time.That’s not how cities work. That’s just how America decided to approach that problem.
To spell it out for you: your commute is always in your local area. The size of your country is not relevant to your local area. What is relevant, is density. Density though, has nothing to do with the size of your country. Unfortunately, you are about twice as dense as Hong Kong.
Not very passive of you but dayum!
Your local area is trees now. Two and a half hours of trees. And a hideous tower thing painted to look like a marlboro cigarette, that people use as a landmark.
Not that I disagree the other commenter kind of…went off the deep end at the end, there. But if your suggestion is not that we take everyone in most of the middle states and shove 'em all together into what would probably come to 3-4 mid-sized American cities — so I guess a medium European one, an event that will absolutely never happen anyway — then your remaining solution to the city density/commute thing must be…to…increase the density?
Is that what you guys are asking? The only problem with America is that there aren’t enough Americans? Especially in Wisconsin?
I think you still completely misunderstand almost everything.
Long commutes are the result of bad city planning. Most of the long commutes are not in rural areas, but essentially from the outskirts of a city to the city center.
America decided to build huge suburbs devoid of any meaningful jobs. Suburbs are low density, so you need to build a lot of them to house the people, but that also means a lot of space is taken up by hardly any people. So the distance between your house and your job is simply longer.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the size of the country. You don’t plan a city on a national scale. That happens locally.
This entire thread is another example of the “murica never bad, murica special” trope. North America isn’t magically a completely different place from everywhere else.
The suggestion is that you permit the building of higher density housing. Note that currently, the law actually forbids doing this in most of America. Something anyone opposed to “big government” (like any American conservative claims to be) should be horrified by. (While left-leaning people should be horrified by it because it’s terrible for the environment, makes cost of living worse, and has negative social effects.)
Some people would still choose to live further out, and that’s totally fine. But a lot of people would choose to live closer to their place of work, which they can now afford to do because you’ve suddenly got 3 terraced homes and some parkland in the space that used to only hold 1 sprawling house and a mostly-unused yard. And even better, as you increase density, the relative efficiency of public transport goes up, and if it’s frequent and reliable, many people will choose to use public transit rather than drive everywhere because it’s just less stressful and easier. Or they might cycle instead.
Either way, they’re getting a car off the road and decreasing congestion, making it faster and easier for everyone else who still does drive.
What haopenes when commute is is 200km
This is what people call “rather uncommon”.
Anyway the question is: why is there so much space between you and your job? If you can’t realistically move closer to your job, you’re either just too attached to your home (that’s a personal choice) or there’s just no housing available. In this case, you’d likely drive through large suburbs. Which take up land, but house hardly any people. This is a city planning issue.
that’s when you get a new job or move, a 200km commute is patently insane
We don’t all live in cities genius. Cities are shit. Outside of cities, public transportation and bikes are shit.
You don’t have to crowd together at all. Most urbanists would like to cap building heights to four stories. Plenty of places wouldn’t even need that much if we made better use of land than endless parking lots and more lanes of traffic.
Driving an hour to work each way is a bug, not a feature. It’s fixable.
I mean, this sounds just like a big city thing, not an American thing. I live in Paris and hour long commutes are common here too.
As European cities are close together though, this can lead to situations where travelling between cities is not what takes the most time. I once (about a year ago) travelled a Paris-London which took me about 5 hours from start to finish - the Eurostar takes only just over 2 hours. The rest was travelling from my home to Gare du Nord, from St. Pancras to my destination, and border checks before boarding at Gare du Nord (thank Brexit for that one).