The Cost of That Commute
The trade-off: Endless hours in a car to get anywhere in order to have a bigger house in the middle of nothing.
In exchange for an extra bedroom in a cookie-cutter house that from the sidewalk looks like one big garage, in a development named Pheasant Run that hasn’t seen a pheasant since the trees were clear-cut, we Americans have bought ourselves a life of driving.
On average, Americans commute 25 minutes each way to work, up 18 percent from 20 years ago. While that might not seem outrageous, more than 10 million of us now drive more than an hour to work, up 50 percent from 1990. Then there’s the growing number of us who commute at least an hour and a half to work – each way. According to the Census Bureau, such megacommuters have increased 95 percent since 1990, to 3.4 million workers.
And it’s all about the house.
When people are weighing the pros and cons of buying a larger house 40 miles from work, or buying closer in and making due without an eat-in kitchen, I don’t think they realize exactly what those 800 additional square feet are costing in human terms.
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