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How Many Days Americans Waste Commuting In The Course Of A Lifetime, Mapped By City (digg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Have you ever stopped to think that over the course of your lifetime, you will likely spend hundreds of days commuting back and forth from home and work? If not, we've got a great map that's sure to make you question what you're doing with your life. The good folks over at Educated Driver used Census Bureau data on average daily roundtrip commute times in hundreds of cities nationwide to calculate how much time Americans spend traveling to and from work over the course of their lives. (They assumed a 45-year career working 250 days a year.) The results, mapped by city, are pretty horrifying.
Method of travel also matters -- you can read a book on a train or bus. You can't in a (not self-driving) car stuck in traffic.
I actually rather like my commute. I only have a few spots of traffic, but for the most part it is nice time for me to drive down with only myself and my thoughts.
Being scared that I may have wasted 2 years of my life driving to work, isn't that big of a deal. What is more scary is the 10 years of my life actually working.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
to most Americans. They couldn't afford nice houses in nice neighborhoods with nice schools and clean air if they didn't spend 2 hours a day commuting to work. Public transit isn't an option because nobody wants to pay for it, because people love cars (you get a lot of happy memories associated with them from when you were a teenager and your parents paid for it) and because you feel like a poor person riding the bus.
This might change, but only because wages are plummeting and pretty soon most Americans won't be able to afford their own cars.
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So, 365 days in a year, less 104 weekend days leaves just 261 days.
We then have holidays - most folk get off (either on the day or in lieu) New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
That puts as to 255 days available to work. In other words, the analysis reckons the average person will take five workdays total for vacation and sick time in an entire year.
And they think it's the commute time to be concerned about!
The assumptions are that you have the same commute during your entire career.
I have had anywhere from zero (worked from home for 8 years) to 1.5 hours. For that 1.5 hour commute, I drove or walked to a train station, rode the train into the city (Chicago) and then had a 20 minute *brisk* walk to the office. During that commute I was able to relax, and I read lots of books that year. I also got 40 minutes of exercise every day walking to/from the office. My schedule was also very predictable. So there are trade-offs. I wouldn't want to do it today, but it wasn't bad at all at the time.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Digg still exists?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Try setting up a basic sciences lab with multi-million dollar equipment in your home. Try doing other people's plumbing or electrical work from home.
Meth-heads seem to be able to set up home labs, why can't you?
I have it drummed into my head that this is the greatest country on earth. It was big news when a dumb show about corrupt politicians had a phony TV politician asked about American Exceptionalism and go on a rant about how we're not in the top 5 for anything except prisons. And I've never heard a real politician make that point. Even Bernie has to shy away from it.
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While you're at it, why don't you give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it?
#DeleteChrome
My commute to my job is about 30 minutes each way, and I've been doing it 5 days a week, for almost 20 years now, so that's ~250 hours of commuting time a year, or ~5000 hours of commuting time total.
So that's ~208 24-hour days of my life wasted, right?
Well, the kicker (and I know this is going to sound obnoxious/pretentious, but it's true so I'll post it anyway) is that I've been commuting by bike, and enjoying all of that commuting time as exercise and a recreational activity. I wouldn't count it as wasted at all.
If your situation allows you to commute by bike, I highly recommend it -- it transforms a tedious daily chore into something you can look forward to both before and after work. It also cuts down on the time you need to spend at the gym, since part of your exercise quota you now get "for free" as part of your commute.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Unfortunately, the number of people who can live in such an arrangement is small relative to the overall population. You would likely think a person sounded utterly ridiculous if they used your line of reasoning to pretend that poverty didn't exist because it didn't affect them personally and that anyone could escape it simply by making more careful decisions.
I also wouldn't be surprised to find out that you lived in a rent controlled property, which tends to be pretty common in a lot of cities. It's a great deal for whoever gets to live there because their rates are artificially low, but it also keeps people from developing new properties which contributes to the problem of a lack of housing in the places that people want to live. I also suspect that no one would be able to tear down that town house or those three-flats in order to build an apartment complex that would let more people live closer to their work.
You can't have both historical districts (or rent controls) and short commutes. Cities often seem to push for the former, even though it makes the latter worse and everyone complains about long commutes quite a bit. Maybe it won't be so bad when we get self-driving cars, but looking at it from a value proposition, people spend a lot of their lives stuck in traffic. You're lucky to have escaped that fate, but you should realize that you're the exception to the rule and that it is not possible for most people to have that experience. When the number of jobs in an area greatly outstrips that number of places to live, it's impossible to avoid commutes.
1) New York is a city. Has a high-density downtown core which most people live in.
Nope. NYC metro area has a population of over 20M. Only 8.6M live in the city itself, and only 1.6M of those are in Manhattan.
NYC has a strong NIMBY movement, and it is very difficult to get building permits for new downtown housing.
Chicago is a city. Has a high-density downtown core which most people live in.
Nope. Chicago is even more skewed than NYC toward suburban sprawl into "Chicagoland", extending into Indiana and Wisconsin.
I used to think that, as a kid, in California- the midwest sucked and we were the chosen few. Then I grew up. I realized that the friends I knew who moved there were HAPPIER. Not from McMansions, or from the weather, but from the lack of traffic/annoyance/your attitude prevalent in California. They could afford trips, visiting nature, doing things that made them happy.
In other words: Not having to deal with you.