[jalfresi]

"you’re creating an incentive for many workers to increase the distance between where they work and where they live"

Having commuted for many many years, I literally cannot fathom how this line of thinking is even considered a reasonable counter. Do some poeple get to commute through a utopic wonderland? Have I been living/working in the wrong places all these years?

[abyssin]

The people I know who choose to live outside the city underestimate the impact of commuting on their quality of life, and overestimate the benefits associated to living in the “countryside”. They want a backyard and a dog. Once they’re stuck in their lifestyle, they develop a blindness to alternatives. Their experience of the city is the one of a commuter – a terrible one. They end up really believing that city life has to be terrible too. They have no idea how to manage the amount of stuff sitting in their relatively cheaper house. They forget about parks and alternative means of transportation to cars.

People should realize that comfortable car-centric lifestyles are too expensive for them to afford. I’m talking from the perspective of a Western European country.

[decafninja]

Speaking from the perspective of a US commuter, the typical commuter here is probably not living in an urban city core, but rather the outskirts or suburbs due to affordability issues. So they’re not experiencing urban city life anyways to begin with.

I live outside Manhattan, NYC, into which I and countless others commute into for work. An astounding amount of collective hours is absolutely wasted on commuting into and out of Manhattan. The public transit system here is arguably the best in the US, but still utterly horrible compared to the systems in place in many Asian cities and probably European ones too.

[bretthoerner]

The average commute in the US is apparently 27 minutes one-way. That's what people have settled on when they're spending their _own_ time. If you get paid for commute time it incentivizes people to commute even longer so they can get even more square footage per dollar, or whatever they're optimizing for.