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The average time it takes to travel to your work in the U.S. is 25 minutes. One in six (19 million persons) need more than 45 minutes to get to work and nearly 3.5 million Americans are extreme commuters (3% of the workforce). Most of those live near a handful of mega-cities (if you can use the term "near" when you daily travel for hours to get to and from your workplace). Paradoxically, the states in the U.S. where people spend the least time commuting to work are also some of the most sparsely populated states (South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Montana). In New York, people spend twice as much time to get to their jobs as in South Dakota - a state in which 800 000 persons live in an area that is almost as big as half of Sweden. (Sweden is by European standards a relatively large and sparsely populated country, but there are still more than 9 million people living here.) Similarly, it is possible that people on average spend less time getting to their jobs far up in sparsly populated northern Sweden than around Stockholm.
From 1990 an on, extreme commuters have been the fastest growing segment of commuters in the U.S., and the number of extreme commuters doubled between 1990 and 2005. What were the driving forces behind this development? Do remember that extreme commuters travel no less than three hours per day, but some can spend four, five or six hours traveling to and from their jobs.
A 2006 competition for "America’s longest commute" was won by a man who had driven 600 km to and from his job as an engineer at Cisco in San Jose (California) daily since 1989. He left home at 4.30 every morning and the trip took at best three hours. The return trip could take four or five hours (more traffic) and he was usually home between 20.00 and 20.30 in the evenings. His commute was bearable thanks to ad-free satellite radio and audio books. And thanks to coffee we may assume, as he drank "about nine" cups on each trip, and squeezed in a total of 30 cups of coffee each day. Winning the competition was an eye-opener, but he was on the whole satisfied with living on a horse ranch next to the beautiful Yosemite National Park. A woman who had taken the same decision and made the same trade-offs was portrayed in a longer (highly recommended) story in The New Yorker. She lives in a nice house, but the quality of her everyday life is by most standards poor:
“She gave up cooking some years ago. Now she gets home, feeds her dogs, then heats up soup or pizza she buys at a pizzeria on weekends. She takes a shower and goes to bed, maybe watching a taped episode of "CSI". ”
Then there is also this story of 42 commuters who sit down together on the 5 a.m. bus and arrive to New York City two hours later. There is of course always someone who is more extreme, such as Greg Wixted who commutes between London and Dubai each week (if you can call it communing?).
There are several more or less good reasons to commute long distances. Perhaps your spouse works closer to home, but your job is far away? Maybe you've always yearned for a rural lifestyle? But the strongest driving force behind extreme commuting in the United States has been a desire for better quality of life (!) and the wish to have your own little piece of the American dream; to buy a nice house with a big lawn in a nice area with good schools, low crime, clean and decent neighbors and soccer practice for the kids on Saturday mornings. The payoff is alluring to many, but the costs are high:
" ‘Drive until you qualify’ is a phrase that real-estate agents use to describe a central tenet of the commuting life: you travel away from the workplace until you reach an exit where you can afford to buy a house that meets your standards. The size of the wallet determines that of the mortgage, and therefore the length of the commute. <..> in this equation you're trading time for space, miles for square feet. "
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http://www.energybulletin.net/51265
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