ITT we talk/brag/complain about our commute.
 

I have a 30 minute commute right now but TXDOT is starting a HUGE 2 year project on the freeway soon and I'm NOT looking forward to the mess/hassle of construction. :(

Try driving in DFW during rush hour lol

I live somewhat close to one major office/entertainment area in DFW, drive on 3 tollways, and work in another major business district (where a large chunk of HQs are located). Bleh.

I work and live in the same city.... and love it!!
All I have to do is drive streets to and from work which can be up to 30 min, but an easy drive. I even ride my bike to work sometimes.

I get on the highway at the 42nd worst bottleneck inthe country, according to the people who keep up with this stuff.

I used to live and commute in the DC area so take that! UGH, El Paso has 800,000 people driving on a road system designed for maybe 300,000.....

My best commute ever was when we lived in Nashville. My husband and I both worked at the Vanderbilt Medical Center and we lived only 1/2 mile away. Walked to work for three straight years. Good times. It was a nice change from commuting in Dallas, including one of the toll roads referenced by K_S above.

Now my commute is just down the hall to the kids' rooms.

Yeah, DFW's highway system is very good, but is not designed to hold the ~6.5 million residents + visitors. It's not as bad as Austin, but it's still a hassle driving through all of it.

I used to work across from Northpark, but even then, I rarely got caught in "bad" traffic. It usually took me ~20-25 minutes to get from Irving/Las Colinas to that area.

Now I have to take 161 to 190 to the Tollway (:rolleyes:). I know the tollroads have less congestion than the freeways, so I can't imagine making that drive on the freeways (Someone suggested that I take Loop 12 to 35 to 635 to Preston or 75. I almost spit on that person).

:mad:

2.9 miles. under 10 minutes.

That person was smokin' some serious crack.

My commute was Beltline/Tollway initially to Methodist and later to Parkland. Not too much traffic compared to other freeways, however, if there was ever a serious accident on the Tollway there wasn't really another option to get to work. I was too far from Central or 35 so I just chose to pay to sit in traffic.

Halloween night was always the worst. All those Plano/Allen peeps going home early (I got off work at 4:30) to Trick or Treat. Could take up to 2 hours some years.

/hijack- you following the World Series? I literally had tears after game 6 and again last night as the line-ups were read. Can take this to "What do you feel like saying right now" thread so as not to derail this one...

Two minutes!

But I used to live in Northern Virginia, so I sympathize.

I turn left twice and arrive in under 5 minutes. Love it.

Yea, as soon as my lease is up, I'll be moving to Addison or Far North Dallas. I can't deal with all the "extra" on 190 and the Tollway.

I chuckled when you said "if" there's an accident lol

/hijack - It's funny that you bring that up. A couple of close frat brothers and friends live in Mansfield and suggested that we meet at BWW for the game.

I left work (Tollway and Legacy) early to "beat traffic" -- ha! It literally took me 2 hours to get to Mansfield. I couldn't believe how backed up Irving and Grand Prairie were going south. I knew it would be crazy going toward the Ballpark, but it was madness all around West Dallas/East Tarrant Counties.

BWW in Mansfield was PACKED and the energy was incredible.

ETA: This thread also reminded me of something a friend told me. Before living in DFW, when you see and accident, you think "Oh, my goodness. I hope everyone's OK!" After living here for a while, that changes to "Dammit, this person is screwing up traffic!" Lol

Does anyone have a commute that is over an hour? How does it work for you and do you get used to it? If I get the transfer I'm hoping for I will end up with a 50 minute drive (w/ no traffic) to/from work.

I used to work with a guy who had a 2 1/2 hour commute ( He lives in Grand Rapids but works in metro Detroit). He ended up renting a room in town and would just go home on the weekends.

Used to have a 5 minute commute. Lived downtown, worked about 10 blocks away. Now, since I've moved to the 'burbs, its' only about 20 minutes.

My commute is 5 minutes or less.

Anybody trying to commute from GR to Detroit is just crazy.


I hope you're keeping in mind that 50 minutes with no traffic means an hour and 15 minutes with traffic and 2-3 hours with snow. You could deal with that for a little bit at first, but you're going to want to live closer than that. I have a co-worker doing Waterford to Detroit every day and she goes nuts.

5ish miles; 7-12 minutes.

That doesn't seem too bad of a commute.. I was doing Royal Oak to Mt. Clemens and it was 20-25 mins in the morning and 45 mins in the afternoon.

My first job out of college involved a commute of ~45 with no traffic, which quickly turned into 1:15-1:30 with. I'm a morning person, and they let me adjust my hours to come in a little earlier and miss most of it.

I would absolutely suggest getting audiobooks or Pandora for iPhone though, because hearing the same drive-time news on a 15-minute loop gets really old, really fast. I got used to it pretty quickly though.

If I'm lucky, my drive is 45 minutes in the morning. Some days it can take up to an hour.

My commute home however, is anywhere from 1 - 1.5 hours depending on the time I leave. Somehow I end up home at 7:15pm whether I leave work at 5:30 or 6:30. So it pays for me to stay late!

I have a 60 mile round trip per day.

On nice sunny days, I don't mind the ride. I get to play my music and clear my head. But when it rains, snows, or I get stuck behind an accident it makes me completely insane.

I work from home. :D

I've had some pretty hellacious commutes, though. For a month, my commute consisted of a 2-hour Metro-North ride and a roughly 1/2 hour subway ride each way. I moved closer to NYC and later took a job in Midtown, which left me with "just" a one-hour Metro-North ride. I listened to a lot of podcasts and got a lot of knitting and needlepoint done.

My drive is 90 minutes one way, but that's just the time in the car. I live east of Cincinnati, and drive to the middle of no where southern Ohio for my job. Around 200 miles a day. A tank of gas gets me 2 days. By the time I get the kids dropped off at Preschool and the babysitters, I roll into work at about 7, and I left my house around 5 or 5:15.

It sucks. Yes, we are planning on relocating. Selling our house is proving to be difficult.

Complain: A TomTom report awarded the Seattle metro area with the worst congestion last year. What makes it so great? From my perspective two things- geography and sprawl.

For geography, we are confined by the Puget Sound and mountains into a small space- and then we threw in a 34 square mile lake in the middle of it just for fun. That means everyone lives west (Seattle), north, east, or south of the lake. One freeway goes up each side, and two bridges connect in the middle. That means very few options to get where you want to go.

Thanks to urban sprawl and Microsoft, we also have two separate commercial areas. After Microsoft decided to set up shop in a tiny little town nobody had heard of, others decided to come join the party and now there's a booming tech scene. Redmond for sure isn't made for Microsoft traffic volumes. The kicker is that a lot of people live in Seattle but commute to Bellevue/Redmond, and vice versa. So although one way is less busy, it's not drastically so.


I used to- I had a 45 minute commute with no traffic, which could be as much as 2 hours with bad traffic (normally an hour to 1h 15min). I only lasted a few months before I moved closer to work. Then I went to a 30-45 minute commute going 8 miles. I got used to talk radio and actually looked forward to my time to catch up on the world. I think if I were to do that longer term I'd check into audio books.

Now my commute ranges from 10-30 minutes, 3-6 miles depending on the building. With any luck, I may be able to change it to a very stable 10-15 minutes soon... we shall see :cool:

I'm another one who's got 10 minutes at most to get to work. And that's if the college students walk across the street really slowly on my way.

I walk out of my house, cross the street, and walk into my office. 50 yards at most.

Unfortunately, my office is moving closer to the Hill soon...so come April, I'll have about 30 minutes door to door (via Metro, I don't drive).

Ohhh this thread was like made for me.

Door to door my trip is roughly an hour and 10 minutes. Not terrible...I'm always engrossed in iPod touch games or a book, so the el ride goes quickly to me. What bothers me though is that when I work late, I take a cab home (paid by the company at least!!) and it takes 20-25 minutes. Unfortunately, that's only because it's usually 9-10ish around that time so there's no traffic...

I hate how mine is dependent on what time I leave.

7am: Takes 45mins to an hour.
7:25: Takes about 25 mins.
7:35:Takes about 40 mins.

If I don't leave at EXACTLY the right time, I could be getting very acquainted with the car in the next lane because we'll be looking at each other for quite some time.

HOUSTON
 

Pick your poison - it's all bad. I'm coming in from Katy, so:

6:30 - leave and go to youngest son's school.
6:40 - drop off youngest son; head to eldest son's school. THIS is where it gets interesting. Do I 1.) go west (the wrong way) so I can hit the HOV lane before it gets really hairy 2.) go down Fry and hit the freeway, hoping against hope someone will let me over to get into the HOV or 3.) just go down the feeder roads? Depends on how backed up the freeway appears to be. Today it was the feeders all the way.
7:20 - 7:30 - drop off eldest son at his school.
7:45 - 7:50 - arrive at my school.

Augh! I'm from Houston originally...I know what a nightmare I-10 can be!! I grew up in the Memorial area.

I have a 40-45 minute el ride to work. It's not bad, but hard to get used to when I used to have a 20-25 minute el ride to work.

Katy to Houston? I frequently go to Houston and it's a nightmare. I couldn't survive if I had to drive in that daily :eek:

It's a 28 minute ride on the el to class and work for me. It takes me 50 minutes to get to internship though, which really sucks. Also, it's an 8 minute walk to the el from my apartment.

I'd love to complain, but I really can't:

Since my fraternity does not have an official house, I live in an apartment off campus. I'm six blocks away from my classes (it's a huge campus).

It takes me 8min by bike to get to classes, and each time, I have to "fight" traffic going at 25mph and the 300ft elevation climb has really given me a lot of leg muscles. I can choose to walk, but then it takes 15min to get to classes.

Going downhill, I always wonder if that time will be my last as I imagine myself getting fragged into pieces if I ever fall off at 30mph.

(BTW, nobody drives, parking permits are so expensive that they start to rival rent for a room in some areas.)

From my old apartment, it was a 15 minute drive to work. We just moved in August, so now my commute is about 5-7 minutes. I love living close to work, makes it easy to go home on break.

I'm 6.1 miles from my job. It takes me THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES, minimum to get there. Something is wrong.

I'm six miles from my job - including walking from my place to the Metro (15 minutes) and walking from Metro to the office (10 minutes), it takes an hour. If I drive (very, very rare since I don't own a car), it takes 45 minutes during rush hour, or 15 minutes if I come in after about 9:30 or so.

I'm starting a new job on Monday and I think my shorter commute ranks pretty high on the list of perks (eliminating a transfer AND going four fewer stops, it should be about 35 minutes door to door.)

Houston traffic=THE WORST. I hated it.

I read this as commune instead of commute and though you were all dirty hippies.

I live oh less than a ten minute walk from campus and can be anywhere from that corner of campus in about five minutes. We also have a shuttle but I only take that if I have a load of library books, my lungs are not cooperative, a friend with access concerns is riding and they need a hand on the hills because their chair is not motorized, or it is raining.

I am still using the same tank of gas I purchased the 11th of September about 100 miles away from my house. Even though a parking permit would be super helpful this winter the cost was about a month of rent and it more than covered my kitties special food for a year. Considering I don't plan to be in town May-August if I am in the field it would be a waste of money.

I filled up Monday or Tuesday, and it's time for me to fill up again. You make me sick :mad:

k_s, Sorry dude, but I have you beat. I fill up every other day. :P