I'm assuming that most of you are from the US so probably using cars, but lemme know if you use trains, subways, buses, etc.
Me? Back when I was doing an internship I walked to a nearby station for 10 minutes then transited to another train line, which could be an instant or 20 minutes wait. After that I walked for 10 minutes to my work place. So it was probably about 40 minutes of commute. Of course, I live in tropical country so I'm drenched in sweat as I arrive in the office.
Fortunately every year my city's public transportation seems to get better and as a result I barely needed to use cars.
Pre-pandemic I drove 15 minutes to the BART station, hopefully got parking. Walked 5 minutes to the train platform. Waited for train. 50ish minute train ride to downtown San Francisco. 10 minute walk to office. Pretty typical Bay Area commute.
Now, I take my dogs for a walk, get back home, make coffee, relax. Go upstairs and login to work. WFH is the new normal and it’s great.
Where I got on, not too bad, I usually got a seat, but it quickly got crowded. Nowadays I hear it’s better; ridership hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels yet.
TL:DR - Ride my bike along a precarious but not terrible inner city suburb of Melbourne Australia. It takes about 10-15 minutes to go 4km. I have the option of a 25 minute riverside bike ride if I'm willing to give up my sleep in.
I live in an "inner suburb" of Melbourne Australia, and I work at a community centre just a few tiny city suburbs away, 4km.
I have an e-bike that I use as my primary vehicle, because of the way my migraine disorder manifests and overlaps with another condition, I can't drive a car. So I've learned how to get by completely carless - living in the inner city suburbs helps so I'm privileged in that regard. But the ebike has been a game changer.
Before covid I had a job about 6km away and I was wasting so much money on buses and uber, it was two buses and an awkward connecting power-walk that meant frequent missed connections and also pushed me just over onto the more expensive ticket because of how our public transport fee system works. So I would lazily uber to work several times a week. And since I was working part time, it wasn't even worth it some days when I had a 2 hour shift. ~40% of my pay cheque would go to ubering to work.
Then covid hit and our state went into lock down. The community centre ran a food bank so my 2 or 3 hour part time shifts became 12 hour days as demand increased but staffing couldn't. I'd always miss the last bus, and uber drivers were few and far between. I tried riding my bike but the 12km return trip was just a bit too far on top of the 12 hour day, so I bought an ebike.
I got a new job, closer, and a very nice ride. I have multiple route options, one of which is a gorgeous separated shared pedestrian-cycle path that follows the local river which I often ride home - I finish at the optimum dog walking time so I get to meet so many puppies on my leisurely ride home. But it's very slow (because of all the dogs which aren't supposed to be off leash, but are) so, my preferred route to work is the fast way. It cuts right through the the town centre, it's an old industrial dock town so it's pretty highly developed but never highly invested in, meaning the roads are horrible and full of trucks. But the council are working on it, and in the last few years they've installed some halfway decent bike infrastructure. The danger is worth the 15 minutes it saves me in the morning.
20 min waiting for bus because the one that was supposed to come through didn't
30 min bus ride
10 min walk
Which is why I work a lot less hours when I go to the office, I start my clock the moment I would sit to work around 9:00, then start packing, go through the whole process, get to the office at around 10:30 or sometimes later, plug in my laptop, grab a coffee, chat with colleagues, read some emails and by this time it's already lunch time. Come back from lunch, do some work, then meetings, then I need to start packing for the journey back if I'm to make it back home by 17:00.
In short I give 9-5 to the company, if they want me to waste 3 of those hours in commute, plugging/unplugging peripherals and essentially not being productive the entire day it's their problem. I can do my job from home, as I did for a long time before WFH policy changed, if they think going to the office is worth the commute time then the commute time comes from their slice of the day. To me it's not worth it, so I wouldn't spend my personal time commuting to the office.
In the US and currently fully WFH, but if I need to go into the office for some reason, it's a 10-15 minute walk.
Walkability is pretty important to me, so I moved to a city with decent public transportation and don't currently own a car. I use ride sharing apps or traditional car rentals on the rare occasion that I need a car, and even though they feel expensive, my annual car expenses are still significantly less than what I'd pay for parking alone if I owned a car.
Before switching to full time WFH I had a 20 mile (32km) drive. At rush hour it took a minimum of 60 minutes if there were no “incidents”. Incidents were a regular occurrence and would easily cause the commute to balloon to 90-120 minutes.
I would from time to time check in to see what the public transportation options were. Public transportation looked something like:
15-20min walk to the bus stop.
40 minute bus ride to the light rail terminus.
20 minute train ride
10 minute shuttle ride from the light rail station to the office.
So about 90 minutes of travel on a perfect day with no wait between transportation modes.
I opted to “beat the rush” by leaving at 5:30am. That way it was an under 30 minute drive.
I walk from my bedroom after getting out of the shower to the desk in my living room and switch on my work PC. Then I go back to my bedroom to put some clothes on.
Before WFH, it was a 30 minute walk which was uphill both ways due to there being a large valley between my home and work. A lovely walk in the summer but hell in the winter due to poorly plowed sidewalk infrastructure.
Half of it is small highways that aren't too bad as long as there isn't ice and/or deer. Once I start getting to the metro area traffic gets congested. Nothing like LA though.
Its a 38 minute drive without tolls and a 33 minute drive with tolls. Ill suffer the 5 minutes to avoid $30 in tolls every month.
I actually live in a more expensive area than where I work, but I do so because the entire state is still somewhat affordable (Kansas) and the city I live in is much more progressive than the one I work in.
10-15 minute bike ride. On the way I in traffic can almost be entirely evaded by swapping the section without bike lane for a bit of trail. The return is a bit more janky because the infrastructure designer probably died from aneurysm as they were designing the road layout.
I get up, let out the dogs & chickens. Bring the dogs back in & feed the cats and dogs. I have coffee, then I go to my office. I've been working from home since 2010 and I'll never go back to an office situation.
When I'm not broken, an 8 mile cycle ride that takes around 30 minutes. I'm currently recovering from a broken kneecap and getting the bus in, which is about 20 minutes and 5 minutes walk each end.
Walk 2.5km from home to mini bus taxi rank. Wait for taxi to fill (15 passengers) and we drive 30km. Get off and walk through a mall to office. Takes about an hour total. Afternoons it's just the opposite. Traffic doesn't matter to South African Taxi drivers.
There is zero public transportation where I live so it's been strictly car for the last 1.5 years but I just got a job less than 5 miles away so I'm going to try riding my bicycle this spring.
Live in the northern US and bike 3 miles to work. Icy right now so I have studded tires and bar kits. I wear a ski facemask and skip the glasses cause they fog. Bike light since it's easy to work past sunset this time of year. Even when it was -30F I only wore one hoody (biking is hard work). Takes me around 15 minutes which is the same as driving. There's bike paths 90% of my commute but I still almost get ran over at every other cross walk. Besides the danger, one of the best things I've ever done for my mental health. And I'm not even the road rage type. I just enjoy the ride
Really annoying. The most direct route is this one two lane road that has a single patch where no bicycles are legally allowed. So driving and all it takes is one fender bender and it takes me an extra thirty minutes.
I work from home one day a week the rest have to head in since the factory floor needs me.
Why are you waiting 8 minutes on the bus when it takes you just 2 minutes to get to the bus stop? Leave 5 minutes later and just wait 1 minute instead?
I’m mostly remote now, but on my in-office day it’s a 25mi/40km trip. (We bought the house years before I got this job, I don’t have the energy to keep a house showing-ready while working full time, and the houses near work aren’t in great shape.)
The morning commute takes about 40 minutes by car, the evening commute is more like 50-60 minutes. There’s technically bus service available, if I wanted to take 2+ hours each way, but I prefer having time to eat real food and do some exercise and mabye a hobby.
Used to be grueling, 3h total time commuting in South America's biggest metropolis that left me with no time for life out of work.
Now I got a bike so every day I'm riding the equivalent to a land rocket with no air bags. But hey, I can do stuff at night!
I either take transit, which takes 35-40 minutes - a combination of bus, metro and a walk, or I bike, which takes 40-50 minutes with time for a shower and changing clothes included. I usually lean towards transit during winter and bad weather, while I lean toward the bike as often as possible otherwise.
I have the option to work from home as much as I want, but I voluntarily go 5 days to the office. I'm planning to shorten down the commute by moving closer to the city center, because I find it to be a bit on the longer side, but I still find going to the office to be a better experience than working from home despite the added time for travel.
I walk into my home office, as my company like many went fully remote during COVID and stayed that way. However prior to that I had two options:
I could bike, it was about 5.5 miles with bike lanes the whole way (until downtown, where the roads were shared but marked for bike traffic). I think it took me about 20 or 30 minutes, but honestly I don't remember anymore. Going home took longer as it was uphill compared to the way in.
The other option was I could take public transit; there were both buses and a light rail and I greatly preferred the latter. When I did that, it was a 5 minute walk to the light rail, about a 20 minute ride, and then a 10 minute walk to the office.
At the time I lived in a decent sized US city, but since going remote I've moved somewhere smaller. However I really loved having good public transit, and if I ever had to go into an office again either being able to bike or public transit in is a big requirement for me; I can't stand car commuting: it's stressful and wasteful, and has a very negative impact on cities for those that live there.
Winter (north Scandinavia): 10 minutes by car. Options are walking 1 hour or bus+walking ~40 minutes depending on how close you like to cut it on the bus stop.
Summer: option of bike 15 minutes. Not an option during winter. It's okay above -15 C, flat ground, low traffic and well plowed streets. None of those are true here.
I don't have one place I work at. My job requires I travel so I do a lot of driving (minor perk is I get paid milage and drive time). I normally work at two locations each workday, and it's not uncommon for me to commute over 100 miles round trip. Until recently I was only working two days a week, and now it's between three to four days depending on what I have to do.
Disclaimer: I don't get paid nearly enough and am trying to find work closer to my rural residence. Corporate doesn't want to give raises either.
I work a bit of a weird shift from 3pm-3am, which means I get to skip a lot of traffic. My commute is almost exactly 10 miles and takes about 20 minutes. There's plenty of other cars on the road when I go in, but not so much that traffic gets backed up. On my way home I consider it to be a busy day if I see 3 other cars.
I live towards the rural end of the suburbs, a decent amount of woods and farms and such around, and my work is in a slightly denser part of the suburbs.
My drive is pretty straightforward, I make a total of 10 or 11 turns, 3 are leaving my neighborhood, 4 or 5 (depending on if you count veering slightly right to go through the employee entrance gate instead of stopping at the guard shack) are getting around my work campus. There's 8 traffic light and 3 stop signs along the way.
The first 10 minutes/6 miles or so are mostly on a 2 lane state road, it's mostly flat, a little windy, and runs parallel to a creek. About 1 mile of it is the main street for a small town, where the speed limit is 25mph. The rest of it is 35mph, lightly forested, with some scattered houses, businesses, a high school, etc. along the way.
I come to the end of that road where it connects to another small town, this one a bit larger, I turn left, cross a bridge over the creek I had been driving along, and immediately leave that town, the road opens up to 4 lanes, the speed limit goes up to 40, go through sort of a small commercial district, the speed limit goes up to 45o, then down a fairly large hill that cuts through a small, forested state park, crossing a smaller creek at the bottom of the hill, then back up another hill through a mostly residential area, turn right, then turn right again and im going up the driveway to work.
The roads usually get plowed pretty well when we get snow, I've never had any major issues with that, although I do drive an SUV. Parts of it are prone to flooding though, being along a creek, and with all of the wooded areas we're also a little prone to downed trees and power lines.
Theres a lot of side roads and such that I can make detours onto if needed, although depending on how severe the weather is, some of them are really hilly, narrow, and winding, heavily forested, and don't get plowed as well, so usually that main road is still my best bet. It happened once that due to flooding I was basically unable to get more than about ½ mile from my house in any direction, but that was also a 200 year flood, and it wasn't nearly so bad the year before when we had a 100 year flood (and yes, it was disconcerting that we had major flooding events in consecutive years like that. Climate change is very real, they used to be able to harvest massive blocks of ice from dammed up streams in this area just a little more than a century ago, one of the damn still stands to this day, but I've never seen any of our waterways freeze over more with more than about an inch at most.)
I'm in the UK - live in a rural location and work at several other rural locations. It is a 10 - 45 min drive depending on which one I am at. There is no suitable public transport to any of them - and since I sometimes have to head over to another for some incident or another, cycling - which would be possible to the closest one otherwise - would then prove difficult.
In my first job, I used to cycle 5 miles each way daily, and I was able to walk to one job for a while, but pretty much every other job has required me to commute by car/truck - mostly 20+ mins. One short-term job involved driving 1 hour 30 or more - but it was only ever going to be short-term.
I live in a NYC suburbs and work in another. It is possible to take a bus/train to NYC from each, but no direct way between them. So I drive the 18 miles. I have to cross a bridge. That makes for a traffic bottleneck. Without traffic, it's less than 30 minutes. With traffic it can be 1.5 hours. One snowstorm made for a 5 hour ride home.
It's roughly a 5 minute drive on a well maintained 2 lane country highway. Of course then I spend 4 to 6 hours driving on rough roads filled with farmers after I get to work, but that's another story.
Hop on my bike and ride east into town. Most of the first two miles is along a stretch where the rightmost full lane is reserved for busses and bicycles; I don't even touch the handlebars. Then tsca short stretch on a regular bike lane and over the river into downtown, where I ride in actual traffic for another mile. All told it's 4.2 miles and takes between 25-40 minutes, depending on traffic, weather, and whether I stop to dick around on my phone in the way.
I mostly work from home. My workplace is about 13km away. There's a bus, but the connection is only hourly and doesn't align with my with hours all that well, so I only take it in winter.
If possible, I go by bike. It's a nice route across country and small towns, but it's quite hilly (150m/200m) and there no showers at work, so I opted for an ebike.
25 minute car drive. I almost never have traffic jams during my commute. The longest it has taken me was around 40 minutes when I had to take a detour due to farmers protests.
I have a bus stop near my house. It takes 45 minutes to get to the city of my job and then I have to take another bus to get to my job itself.
It would probably take a bit over 1 hour to get there on a bicycle. I would get extra money if I went to work on a bicycle. The main reason I don't cycle to work is that I don't think it's safe.
Most of the route I would have ride on a little strip 2 meter away from cars and trucks going 90km/h. Or I can take a longer route where I have to ride on a little strip right next to traffic going 70km/h.
These days, I walk about 2 meters right from my living room. It's about 1.5 hours (~30 walking, two trains with one transfer) if I need to go into the actual office (maybe once quarterly)
Public transport is a bit awkwardly scheduled relative to my start times. A train only takes about 30 minutes, including walking to and from the station but it either gets me in super early or just a hair too late. I tend to take a bus instead because it's a better fit, I get to leave a little latter than the early train while still being on time. But it takes about 40 minutes in total, which includes a bunch of extra walking because the route starts another suburb over.
I often get a ride in, depending on whether my schedule lines up, which only takes about 15-20 minutes depending on traffic. I feel a little guilty because this is the shortest commute I've ever had by far yet the first time I've not primarily used public transport, but I do really appreciate the convenience. I unfortunately sweat a ton (I really should talk to my doctor about hyperhidrosis, it's extremely bad) so even the short walk from the bus/train station will leave my hair gross and matted, which then turns in a terrible case of triangle head.
I've thought about getting an ebike. There is a separated bike path that is a little bit indirect but covers like 90% of the route. I think I could get there at least as fast as the bus. Could be quicker, but I'm not taking a direct route as it's just bicycle gutters in an area that sees a ton of industrial traffic. Fuck riding by trucks.
Wish I could say the same about our public transport improving, it's only gotten worse. It all got privatized awhile back.
I walk 6 min to the closest bus stop, get on the direct bus to the city, 20/40 (summer/winter) min later I am at one of the bus terminals, 2-5 min later I am down on the metro platform, getting on the metro, two stops later I get off and walk 6 min to the office.
US here: I am lucky enough to be able to ride my bike most days as long as the weather isn't terrible. If forced to, I'll drive but I love not worrying about parking and the freedom of a bicycle compared to a car.
Depends on the work day. Once all of my offsprings have been delivered to school and daycare and I get back home, I spend 30 seconds rearranging my bed pillows so that I can comfortably sit with my laptop.
Once in a while it involves a 40 minute drive to my local airport, arriving 20 minutes before boarding begins (tiny airport). And from there we're talking everything from 45 minute to 30 hours until I reach my destination.
Drive 15min to Metro station. Ride train for 40min. Switch lines. Ride for another 20min. Walk 5min to office. Then I do that in reverse 8-ish hours later.
I usually read on the train in the morning and game on the way back so it's been somewhat bearable (I'm the crazy kid playing lvl 28 beatmaps on my phone during evening rush hour)
Family gets in car, two minute drive to wife's work, five minute drive to elementary school, two minute drive to daycare, 1 minute drive back home until time for me to go to work in an hour. 2 minute drive to work.
It looks like the carpet between the kitchen and my library. My commute is all of 100 feet or so down a portrait-lined hallway to the computer. And that's it. And I work for myself, (a part time writer) so i don't really have to struggle with the daily grind of cars, buses, trains, etc.
But - we do have a pretty nifty Trax system here in Utah for commuters going cross town or from downtown to the University. I'd probably use that if I was still working.