America’s Commute to Work Is Getting Longer and Longer

this still smells of propaganda, like it's woven through the whole thing. "The American worker is making peace with a longer ride".
and yet the very first example they provide is someone who works from home twice a week.

I'll tell you this: the commute is even better when you work from home. WFH means less carbon emissions, less time wasted in traffic, and less time literally putting your life at risk from vehicle collisions.

As someone that loves going into an office, I wish they let people who didn’t stay at home.
I miss the aspect of the pandemic where people were freer to stay home if they chose, and the roads were so much emptier. It’s better for people to work how they’d like to, it’s better for me trying not to spend an hour commuting, and it’s better for the Earth to have fewer people burning carbon twice a day.
I almost got into a pileup on the way to work this morning. I hate commuting
- Same! Dickhead cut off a truck hauling gravel, forcing truck to evade, nearly running me off the road onto a sidewalk with several people on it.
- Got cut off by a BMW today. I know this might be shocking but the driver didn't have their turn signal on.
WFH means less carbon emissions, less time wasted in traffic, and less time literally putting your life at risk from vehicle collisions.
It speaks volumes that all of these problems are car-related. The whole push for WFH is a massive condemnation of how badly people actually feel about the effects of the car-oriented development that the U.S has been spending so much time championing.
- a) what you say is true b) these car-related issues affect other countries just as much : I'm Canadian. c) there are other things that WFH improves as well, but they are far enough behind the car-related problems that they can seem petty by comparison. They aren't petty at all, but they do make a convenient foil for those who argue against WFH.
- Even if I lived across the street from my office, I would still prefer to work from my home.
Hey! That sounds like pure communism! You go to work where the overseer can keep an eye on you and your productivity!
- my overseer can see my work just fine. also I fucking rock.

Trains, bitches - and WFH for people who have no business being in an office.

Lol I have no reason to be in the office for my job. My company started forcing people back in January. I take the train in. It takes me 2.5 one way, 5 hours total. Doesn't make any fucking sense that I have to make the journey, and it makes no fucking sense that the train ride takes an hour and 45 minutes
If there only were trains, or trams, or busses. In many areas, public transport consists of "the morning bus" and "the afternoon bus".
And not everyone can WFH. Actually, most people with lower pay grades can't, so they still have to be present whereever they work.
And while we're at it, everyone gets a pony.
I'd love more trains and I'd love more WFH jobs, but that's not the reality in 2024 and just declaring "trains, bitches" is not helpful or particularly cordial to all of the people who have no choice but to make long commutes to their jobs.
- I would wager most people don't actually have no choice but to make a massive commute. Often it just comes down to policy choices. As a country, we've made deliberate decisions to ignore developing mass transit, just as we've decided homes should be treated as investment vehicles. If we built out and maintained more trains, buses and light rail, congestion could be cut down and more people could travel much more rapidly and efficiently. If we didn't obsess over the idea that property values must go up without fail and encouraged building affordable housing, people could actually afford to live closer to where they work, rather than being pushed ever farther into the suburbs and countryside in search of a place they could afford to live in. Some people make insane commutes chasing higher pay in a neighboring region. I knew of people at one company who commuted from Philadelphia to Brooklyn every day, because NYC pay was higher and Philly rents lower. That said, that's absolutely a conscious choice those people make.
  Likewise, not every job is capable of being done from home, but many are, yet workers are still forced to come into the office anyway. This is a choice by company execs, not an inevitable fact of life.
  I'm sure there are some jobs that are relatively remote, yet need to be done in person despite the long commutes. Let the people doing them be compensated accordingly, but this is absolutely not something that should be normalized for the population at large.
wfh for people who have no business being in an office
I don't belong in an office but it's kinda hard to mop the floors where I work from home. 😭
- but it's kinda hard to mop the floors where I work from home.
  Yeah, the "everyone should work from home" factions seems to forget those of us whose work requires us being able to touch the things we're working on.
- Sounds like an engineering problem to me

Same in Canada, and I have not moved, I live _{12 miles (}20km) of my working place, 90% highway. Early 2000s it took 30 minutes or less, early 10s ~40 minutes, 2019 before pandemic it was already a good 45+ minutes. 2023+ it is more than one hour (forth, and 1h back).

So you're passively looking for work every day, right? You're not gonna keep doing an additional 10hr shift a week unpaid, right?
- I WFH since COVID, best thing ever and only 8h work per day 🙂
Mine has been creeping up as well. More construction and more traffic.

I worked in Manhattan and had coworkers who lived in Pennsylvania. Two hours each way. A story I heard was that a bus company recruited drivers who would get up at 4am, pick up passengers, drive to the city, and then go to another job. 6 pm they get in the bush and drive home.

That doesn't make much sense. What happened to the bus in the middle of the day?
Parking in Downtown Manhattan can be rented out for $30 - $50 per hour, maybe $80 all day. And that's a car-sized space. Since a bus is two or three of those, it would make no sense to just waste $240+ on an unused bus.
- Before Hudson Yards went up that space was mostly empty. I've also seen lines of buses parked under the FDR downtown.

I have a horrendous 2 min drive to work each day. #fuckcities

If it's two minutes do you need to be driving? That seems like a walk or bike
- Well I wasn't counting dropping kids off at school or daycare, which is the opposite direction. I often walk.

All the illegals coming in aren't helping things either

I hope immigrants sneak in and move your house a few inches further from your work every day
- That explains the noises at night! If they could just shore up our one sagging foundation corner in the back while they're at it, that'd be great. After they do some serious manual labor in the summer sun for me, then they can go back to their country until I need more work done. Oh! Actually, no, we need them to do the harvest. And there's this thing with some construction.... shit. It turns out that hard workers are actually really needed everywhere and we shouldn't be such xenophobic/racist assholes all the time.
  I do actually need the foundation looked at, though but I can't afford it despite having a pretty decent and high experience required job. All the money is going to billionaires instead. Strange that those same billionaires are funding lots of media telling me to be afraid of people all the time... no relation to the whole immigration thing, I'm sure.
Are these illegals with us now? Do they ever tell you to do things, things that might hurt people?
- What are you talking about?