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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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.