Bracing for Commuting Three Hours a Day

In the past six years, I have talked to a lot of teachers about the reasons they like their current schools and why they stay. Some cite that they like the students at the school, the administration, and their experience at the school (having been there a really long time and feeling loyal to it). But I have heard one logistical rationale more than any other for why a particular teacher prefers their current worksite:

“It’s really close to my house.”

It’s the two or three-minute commute to their job that I have found to be the most surprising response that is more practical than idealistic or noble. A lot of people love not having to commute, particularly people who have kids and need to drive the kids to daycare, school, or pick up their kids in some capacity. They also tend to just not to enjoy sitting through a ton of traffic or having to take multiple buses or trains to get to work.

It is no secret that having a short commute leads to a better quality of life. Seth Goldman, one of the co-founders of Honest Tea, says living close to his job is the best thing he did for his family and his quality of life. He recounted having a 90-minute commute to work from Arlington, Virginia to Northeast Baltimore in a lot of stop-and-go traffic the year after he had his first son, leading to three hours of commuting every day.

He was not able to spend as much time with his family as he wanted to, and he also was not able to exercise and relax as much as he wanted to. Eventually, he would move to another city where he would live a short bike ride from his new job, and this experience with having such a short commute led to Honest Tea providing bikes to employees and giving commuting subsidies that matched car parking subsidies to provide to car commuters.

These benefits might be extremely obvious to most people. It comes not only with saving time and having less of a headache, but gas money, parking money, long-term car repair and maintenance money, and money for bus and train tickets.

I have worked at three schools in my time as a teacher. During my first school, I had to commute around 23–27 minutes to work every day. It wasn’t too bad, and I usually was very early to work,. I had no complaints.

Then, COVID happened, and I was able to work from home for a while. Obviously, this led to not having to commute at all, which was nice in terms of saving gas money and saving the headache where people notoriously drive very poorly in my city. I did get used to the work-from-home life, but of course, I knew it wouldn’t last forever.

Once we went back to working in person, I had a new school to work at since my first school site closed. I commuted around 15 minutes to my second school. It was a really easy commute, despite driving through areas of the city where stop signs were commonly seen as optional and where people ran red lights all the time.

Plus, driving 15–30 minutes is the sweet spot for me personally. It allows me to get settled into music or a podcast in a way that a really short drive doesn’t allow for and a really long drive can test my patience and attention span.

I moved to another school that was about 25 minutes away again. I didn’t mind it too much, but I started law school around the same time of night. My evening law school experience was made better by the 10-minute drive back and forth from the law school, which allowed me plenty of sleep and rest, not stressing the commute

The biggest transition was when I didn’t move my workplace, but moved to my current house. The commute to work increased to about 30 minutes a day, but that wasn’t the problem. All of a sudden, my evening commute to law school also took 30 minutes a day. With only a 25–30 minute commute one way, it didn’t sound that bad, but it was compounded by two 30-minute commutes in a single day back and forth. Instead of driving an hour and 10 minutes a day, all of a sudden, I was driving two hours a day.

It wore on me when it first started, and I struggled to adjust. I was late pretty often by a few minutes to work and law school the first week, and had less time in general. I got less sleep. I complained regularly to my wife about it, but there was obviously nothing that could be done.

However, I eventually adapted and have been doing that commute for two years without issue since. I structured my schedule and routine a lot more to that commute, and it wasn’t easy at first, but I knew what time I had to get home, what time I had to leave, ways to make the drive go by faster, or ways to cope if I was tired.

In August, however, I am starting a job in the heart of Washington DC, next to George Washington University. This is about a 1-hour and 20-minute drive every day through the worst traffic in the entire area. It is only about a 45-minute drive on a weekend with no traffic, so it became clear I had to explore my options. First, given the well-publicized return of federal employees to the office, the roads are much more congested than they used to be, and parking lots at train stations are also a lot fuller than they used to be for the last couple years as well.

I explored the option of driving to a Washington Metro train to take into DC — it would be about a 45–60 minute drive to the Metro station depending on traffic, followed by taking 30 minutes of public transportation into DC. I did it one day and it, for lack of better terms, sucked. No matter how bad people in Baltimore drive, there wasn’t the same frustration of stop-and-go traffic and being stuck, barely moving for five minutes on end on an expressway.

There was another option to take public transportation almost the whole way there. I would have to drive about 20 minutes to a train station that goes from Maryland to DC, called the MARC, and then take about an hour and 10 minutes sitting on trains. It would also require transferring to one train.

This is the route I decided to take. At least I can sleep on the train, work, study, read, or do other things that I can’t do while driving. As such, it is a lot less stressful and much less energy-consuming.

We are not necessarily in the financial position to move to DC or the DC area at the moment, so I will have to commute for at least the first year of the job and may continue to do so if it is not too much of an inconvenience and the pros of not relocating outweigh the cons.

As a teacher, I can’t count how many times my colleagues and I grilled our students for being an hour or two late to school. Despite them having to take two or three buses to get to school in a very unreliable bus system, which we understood was a tremendous hardship, the rationale was that the professional world and workplace would not be as understanding at all if they were an hour or two hours late to work. I think we had a point, but having to take buses for two hours is terrible, and I have found that whenever a lot of parents have the choice, they often choose to send their kids to the school that’s as close to home as possible instead of forcing their child to commute a large distance. Of course, a lot of parents who have their kids go to elite or magnet schools are willing to make that sacrifice, but having a school very close to home was always a major factor.

We live in a country without the best public transportation system in a lot of places, which also contributes to other really long commutes, which not does not only affect getting to work. The CDC has found that 5.7% of adults face unreliable transportation to get to health care appointments, the grocery store, and so much more.

I am obviously not in that 5.7%, given I have a car and regularly use it. There seems to be an easy solution to long commutes: move. Either move your job, or move your home. The latter is our eventual goal, but we are not in the position to do it at the moment.

I am lucky that not all of mine will be driving, and I would feel comfortable enough sleeping on one of the trains. The other train, the D.C. Metro, is not one I would sleep on, given that it’s not recommended by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) and just not the smartest or safest thing to do.

But I have obviously never dealt with a daily commute of this scale before. I presume I will be shocked by it at first, just like I was when my commute to law school became 30 minutes, not only because of the time or money involved, but the work of becoming familiar with the route and train schedule. If I am going to be commuting three hours each day, I do not want it to be three hours of doing absolutely nothing in my car.

I am confident that I will survive and get used to it, but I am also confident that it won’t be easy.

I have taken for granted how much working very close to the house can really matter for daily life logistics and work-life balance. I can try to game my new commute as much as possible. But the best solution would, one day, move very close to my new job so I can again live less than 20 minutes from my workplace and be able to sleep more.

A long commute is something a lot of people experience at least once. This is a great job that I was really excited to get after law school, given the trials and tribulations I went through to get a post-law school job, and hundreds of applications, dozens of interviews. While I’ll always think about other ways I can spend three hours of my life other than commuting, if a long commute is the only sacrifice I will have to make, then daily life is still very good. Maybe I’ll sing a different tune once my wife and I have kids, like so many of my colleagues, but for now, I’m looking forward to the next journey.

—

This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.