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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PiKA2001
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.
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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
