Slashdot Mirror
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.
Imagine if you had young children you were trying to get to school. I live in north Texas, where it's not nearly as bad (although it's creeping that way), and I have to drop my kids off at school no earlier than 8 AM - which means I hit the freeways at the worst possible time, which means I'm lucky if I'm in by 9 AM.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Lots of people have long commutes to work....Who cares?
The one time I took a city bus, it made a half hour drive into a 3 hour adventure, never even considered public transportation ever again.
The solution to the problems is really simple: build more housing. How do you get more housing built? Well, for starts not having some of the most restrictive zoning laws in the country, and having people fight back at any housing that is less than ideal would be a major aspect. Unfortunately, there are people who are advocates for the poor who don't get this and have gone out of their way to block housing that doesn't have affordable housing built into it, which just results in total fewer housing.
A friend returned from recent vacation in S. Korea and Japan was amazed by the rail systems and speaking of bay area Caltrains, "It is so 3rd world country."
I saved this from one of you posters here on slashdot, worth a mention as I was talking with someone who said high speed rail and other such things are guvmint boondoggles. For me I use a car but then I've moved here in the 20th century so I don't have to commute hundreds of miles.
“give out surveys where people rate the relative importance of things.”
That’s likely not going to get you anything useful. What it gets you is a survey of what people think is best for them. And they’re not right a lot of the time, because few people are investors and visionaries. Most people are short-term practical people.
As an example, traffic is getting worse and worse in my little city. Everyone is talking about how we can improve the roads and highways, we’re widening some, improving intersections at others, but nobody is really talking about public transportation. What we need are a couple of light rail lines from the growing suburbs to downtown and the job hubs. That would likely fix a lot of the traffic problems. But that requires people to think longer-term, and rethink how they go about their daily life.
Instead of spending 25 minutes, now 30, now 35 minutes in the car commuting, they need to think about catching a 5 min bus ride, then sitting and checking email for 20 min before getting off near work. But that’s far harder to wrap your head around than “I wish I could shave 10 minutes off my drive to work.” Survey people, and they want less traffic congestion and a better drive to work. That frankly can’t happen without public transportation, but nobody wants that.
Hmmm, our featured person already spends a lot of time on the train. Oh wait, this has been debated before but it was about cars! https://www.c-span.org/video/?...
mfwright@batnet.com
What is it with 3rd-person pronouns in clickbait headlines these days?
- "She totally did a thing, now you totally want to click, right?"
- "What he did next will make you click!"
- "Five cocktails and seven martinis get her through brunch!"
At the risk of sounding ancient; who's "she", the cat's mother?
I mean, good manners don't cost nuffin' now, do they?
...but the comments here are an absolute shit-show of whiny, self-centered assholes who can't resist telling the world how much they don't care about other people.
There are a few solutions to this problem, pick one or more:
1. Reduce the need for people to show up for work at a physical office
2. Make transportation, both public and private, hyper-efficient
3. Pop the housing bubble around Northern California (and other large metros) by popping the Second Dotcom Bubble
4. Add more housing in the area so people aren't desperately waving sacks of money around saying, "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me pay $4000 a month for a 1-bedroom apartment!"
I live near New York City and back before I had kids I used to commute on the train for work; did it for a couple of multi-year stints before I had had enough. I'm about 60 miles away, and it was easily a 1.5 hour train and subway ride each direction when everything was going perfectly. There are plenty of stories like the one in the article, and I remember hearing tales of multi-hour commutes from places like Stockton and Sacramento as the First Dotcom Bubble was about to hit its peak in 1999. I did my crazy commute for financial gain; I was getting paid a New York salary and living a comfortable distance away. Sheila James, being 62 and a government employee, was most likely priced out of the San Francisco market and is trying to hang on a few more years, as federal pensions are calculated based on final average salary and years of service. These days, you'd really have to offer me a crazy amount of money to go back to doing it...even with cutting my day short and working part of it on the train, it's a life-eater. I work at a place that's closer to home, pays less, but lets me be home more which is more important to me lately.
Housing bubbles suck. Permanently overpriced real estate markets suck more. Metro NY is a perfect example...not nearly as bad as California once you leave the city, but prices are permanently high just because so much wealth is concentrated here. You have everything from "old money" to celebrities to CEOs to hedge-fund Masters of the Universe, and if they're not living in Midtown Manhattan, they want to live right outside of it. It makes it difficult to find good housing a reasonable distance from work.
It worked too well, actually. It made it far easier to outsource work to Timbuktu for $2/hr. The remaining jobs require "face time" in order to be competitive with $2/hr Timbuktuians. It's one of the few advantages a physical office worker has over them.
Table-ized A.I.
Having children is a choice, in most circumstances, and rearranging your life accordingly is one of the costs that should be accepted.
Being an inconsiderate jerk is a choice, in most circumstances too.
People have kids and that's a good thing. Refusing to acknowledge that reality is just you being a selfish inconsiderate jerk. Your parents made sacrifices for you just like everyone else's parents. Cut them some slack. Someday it might be your turn. But with an attitude like that hopefully not soon...
I have a friend who lives in Livermore (living close in was not affordable) and commutes into the city [1]. Driving the bay area freeways during rush hour is out of the question, so he only drives as far as the nearest train station, takes the train most of the way there, and then gets into his second car and drives the rest of the way to work. Part of the reason for the two car solution was that there wasn't a train/bus solution that didn't involve him leaving the house at 0-dark-thirty and hoofing it for much of the distance.
It works for him, I guess. Myself, I moved to an area with less traffic and more affordable housing.
[1] To old time bay area residents, San Francisco is "The City". Never its full name unless you're talking to out-of-towners, and never ever "frisco".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> Why should all places of work be placed in high price areas?
I think you might have cause and effect reversed. Areas become high price because that's where the work is.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Her "company" is the federal government, which operates offices like hers because that's where the people it serves are concentrated. Do you really think that having a couple of large employers uproot from SV and move to, say, Omaha, would make the need for a federal bureaucratic presence in SV go away?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I got a job at a local ISP. It took me two buses and a sky train to get to work. Left home at 6:45 and got to the place 34Km away at 9:20. This was in the Greater Vancouver area from Maple Ridge to Burnaby BC.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
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.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Hey, we're currently trying that in Europe!
Tell me: What do you think will happen when you take in a couple million people with zero marketable skill (because goat herding isn't that big an industry in your country) who don't even start to speak the language or write it (or any language for that matter) who make the Southern Baptists look secular, and throw them into a highly industrialized, practically irreligious and open minded society?
If you wanna know, take a look at Sweden or Germany. Especially around New Year's Eve.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
She chose to move 65 miles further away from San Francisco so she could live in a larger place and save $600 a month in rent (on an income of $81,000, keep in mind). FTFA:
Ms. James used to live closer, in Alameda, Calif., about 15 miles across San Francisco Bay from her work. But three years ago, after a developer bought her building and evicted Ms. James and her neighbors, she moved to Stockton.
Stockton has more for the money: Ms. James pays $1,000 a month in rent for her three-bedroom house, compared with $1,600 for the one-bedroom apartment she had in Alameda.
There are plenty of options a lot closer to San Francisco, for less than what she was paying before, and with more space than she had before. And looking at her old rate of $1600/month (which is still less less than 24% of her income) opens up the possibilities even more.
So call it what it is: she made a deliberate lifestyle/money/time tradeoff. We all do that sort of thing all the time, and don't get dramatic write-ups in the Times for it.
Someone will have to clean up after you when you become unable to care for yourself.
I'm just about certain that self-removing yourself from the planet will become a new normal for older people. In my great grandparent's generation, a person once the bell tolled would last a few weeks at most. My grandparents took a month or so. My Parents - born in the 1920's, took a long time to die once they got to that point. To the point that the final pecuniary extraction of your wealth can take years. 10 years in my Mother in law's case. A shell who spent those years racking up an amazing amount of bills for a person who didn't even know who she was any more.
The only exception was my mother, who suffered a massive heart attack while reading on the couch, and was gone in a minute.
Given the choice, I wonder how many people would decide which death was worse, and which was better. I've made mine.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Live cheap, retire early. Those with a decent salary could prioritize savings over shiny stuff and be able to retire well before age 65.
Most US workers don't even save 10%, and instead rack up debt well into their 40's. Living within your means and saving 30-50% of you after tax income lets you retire at that same lifestyle in a 20-25 years.