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Commuting Kills

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Re: Commuting Kills

#11

Post by sandworm101 »

dupe576 wrote: post #4

That's why I think everyone should bike to work if possible. It has little to no environmental impact and a positive health impact. And because you are killing two birds with one stone by exercising during your commute, you really aren't wasting any time.

Biking is fine if you are a prof at a college campus, or the boss of some hip startup, but I cannot arrive at work sweating through a horribly wrinkled suit. We don't have showers.

I have yet to meet anyone who has communized by bike in my city (Vancouver BC) for more than a few years without a major altercation with a motorvehicle. It might be healthy, but it is also physically dangerous.

Re: Commuting Kills

#12

Post by pekk »

ggchappell wrote: post #2

Long commutes are of course a problem. However, I am not sure the analysis method used in this article is really the way to look at this issue. The fact that lots of people spend 15 minutes sitting on their rear is not a serious problem, despite the fact that you can multiply that 15 minutes by millions of people to get a large number. The problem is that some people have very long commutes. 30 minutes or more is a p…

Multiplying minutes by millions of people does give a first approximation to how much energy use, pollution, and congestion you are causing. Commute times matter even if you don't care that people are sitting for 15 minutes (or 45, or 90).

Re: Commuting Kills

#13

Post by pekk »

dupe576 wrote: post #4

That's why I think everyone should bike to work if possible. It has little to no environmental impact and a positive health impact. And because you are killing two birds with one stone by exercising during your commute, you really aren't wasting any time.

The root cause of long commutes isn't a lack of biking, it is a lack of proximity. Riding a bike for two hours each way isn't an option for many people.

Re: Commuting Kills

#14

Post by protomyth »

ryandrake wrote: post #7

My commute is a solid 2+ hours each way. I thought it would make me crazy, but acceptance has sort of seeped in after a couple of years. On one hand, it would be nice to have free time and/or see my family, but on the other hand, my family simply won't fit into a 900 square foot box in South Bay or a hammock in SF, which is what I could afford in those locales.

Mine is a little over 30 minutes in good weather[1] (28 miles of mostly highway), Sirius XM and Audible have been great investments. Its about the right length to get the days work sorted out in my mind, but I would live closer if I could.

The reservation suffers from a serious housing shortage never mind not being a member of the local tribe, and eastern ND has a lot of families of folks working in western ND, so housing is a bit hard to find.

1) 2 hours in crappy, why the heck didn't I go home sooner weather

Re: Commuting Kills

#15

Post by frequent »

I started to walk to work more than a year ago (5km one way, about 45mins). Makes a world of a difference, as it gives me more or less two hours of exercise per day, time to get my mind on/off of work, call family/friends and other stuff. Bottom line for me - it's less the time spent commuting, than whether you can spend it in a useful way.

Re: Commuting Kills

#16

Post by ygrechuk »

dupe576 wrote: post #4

That's why I think everyone should bike to work if possible. It has little to no environmental impact and a positive health impact. And because you are killing two birds with one stone by exercising during your commute, you really aren't wasting any time.

Yeah, that's great, but here in NYC it's either freezing or hazy-humid for 2/3 of the year. Oh yeah, and my commute would be about 2.5 hrs each way, according to Google Maps.

Re: Commuting Kills

#17

Post by mmaunder »

frequent wrote: post #15

I started to walk to work more than a year ago (5km one way, about 45mins). Makes a world of a difference, as it gives me more or less two hours of exercise per day, time to get my mind on/off of work, call family/friends and other stuff. Bottom line for me - it's less the time spent commuting, than whether you can spend it in a useful way.

Good point. I have a standing desk, so always looking for ways to turn work into some health benefits. Also reminds me of my commute in London via tube from Putney to Canary Wharf which was over an hour each way. I learned two new programming languages while doing that commute.

Re: Commuting Kills

#18

Post by rayiner »

The article argues for telecommuting to reduce commutes. I think a far less radical approach would be to open multiple offices and put teams in more affordable secondary cities. Modern technology has made it pretty easy to spread your organization across multiple offices. I work at an organization of less than 35 people that has offices in three cities. Outsourcing IT/HR/building administration makes it pretty low-cost to have additional offices, to the point where it might actually be cheaper when you weigh the fixed overhead of each location against the cheaper office space outside NYC/SF.

I live in Baltimore now, and before that in Wilmington, and I'm astonished that more companies don't have offices in those cities. Both cities have a lot less traffic than D.C. and Philadelphia, respectively, and are well-served by rail. I'd imagine there would be a lot of talented people who would sign up at offices in those cities so long as they weren't backoffice locations and they could still do frontline work.

Re: Commuting Kills

#19

Post by munificent »

> The way I see it, remote-workers are like work-place superconductivity: Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero transmission cost.

I think that's a weak analogy. I think a better one is that you have a core that's off the motherboard but starts up fast. Sure, there's no wake up time, but your communication with the chip is limited by the bus.

We work together to communicate. Being physically remote, even with email, chat, phone, VC, etc. is still lower bandwidth that physical presence. You can certainly make remote work successful, but I think you're lying to yourself if you don't acknowledge that being together in space matters.

This article really isn't an argument for remote work any more than it is an argument for living closer to work.

Re: Commuting Kills

#20

Post by melling »

cm2012 wrote: post #10
melling wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"30 minutes or more is a problem" I live 4 miles from midtown Manhattan. That's about a 30 minute bus ride during rush hour. An hour commute is probably the average commute from the suburbs to NYC.

Cool fact: The average NYC commute is 79 minutes a day, 40 minutes each way.

Are you sure about that? I'm seeing 48 minutes.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-havelongest-...

This includes people commuting from Brooklyn and Queens, which is most likely less than 10 miles to work.

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