A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her To Work by 7 AM (nytimes.com)

From a report on The New York Times: Sheila James starts her Monday, and the workweek, at 2:15 a.m. This might be normal for a baker or a morning radio host, but Ms. James is a standard American office worker. She is 62 and makes $81,000 a year as a public health adviser for the United States Department of Health and Human Services in San Francisco. Her early start comes because San Francisco is one of the country's most expensive metropolitan areas. Ms. James lives about 80 miles away in Stockton, which has cheaper homes but requires her to commute on two trains and a bus, leaving at 4 a.m. Plenty of office workers get up at 5 a.m. or a bit before, but 2:15 is highly unusual. "Two-fifteen is early enough that some people are still having their evening," she said on a (very) early morning. But she likes to take her time and have coffee. She keeps the lights low and the house quiet and Zen-like. "I just can't rush like that," she said. When the second alarm goes off at 3:45 -- a reminder to leave for the train in 15 minutes -- her morning shifts from leisure to precision. It is a seven-minute drive to the station, where she catches the Altamont Corridor Express train.

Comments

Re: I took the bus once

[Anonymous Coward]

You add to the fact that it takes her an hour and 45 minutes to get ready in the morning and you've got about the least efficient person in the world serving as a political prop about high rent.

Re:Build more housing

[DontBeAMoran]

The solution is to stop centralizing things. It can work great for information but not for physical things.

Make more smaller cities and flee the megapolis mentality.

Re: I took the bus once

[ShanghaiBill]

You add to the fact that it takes her an hour and 45 minutes to get ready in the morning and you've got about the least efficient person in the world serving as a political prop about high rent.

Indeed. Her behavior makes no sense. If she is going to be on the train for two hours, why doesn't she use that time to do her prep? Or sleep?

Also, you don't have to go to Stockton to get away from SF rents. Oakland (20 minutes by BART) is far enough.

Better headline: Crazy Woman Lives in Stockton.

Causes:

[fiannaFailMan]

1 - Proposition 13. An anti-tax measure that may have been necessary at the time, but went way too far to the point where Bay Area cities are incentivized to approve more business developments but less housing because of the amount of revenue they bring in. The result is a massive jobs-housing imbalance as cities gain more jobs but not enough housing to keep up, resulting in long commutes from out of town.

2 - A strong NIMBY lobby. Established residents are vocal in their opposition to more housing in "their" town. Councils feel pressured to resist new developments.

3 - Induced demand. Caltrans has an unbelievably wasteful policy of widening highways in the hope that it'll alleviate traffic congestion despite a mountain of evidence that this does not work and that more highway lanes just causes more traffic as people move out to cheaper suburbs to get a bigger house for the same price and a (temporarily) reasonable commute time. By the time everyone has the same idea, highways are jammed again.

4 - Anti-transit sentiment. Roads are less efficient than rails, but it's a lot easier to get funding for them.

5 - Single-use-zoning. Putting daily needs out of walking distance of each other forces nearly everyone to drive throughout the day. The result is massive car ownership and demands for more facilities to accommodate private cars.

6 - Fragmented local government. It's very hard to get region-wide transit developments done when each city is only focused on its own interests.