That's only for those that life far from the office.
Which, if I'm to believe "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel¹ is common in the US due to broken city planning.
But really not in most of Europe. My cycle to an office is 20 minutes. And in the Netherlands that is considered a long cycling journey.
Europe has it's car infested traffic jams too, don't get me wrong. But many of those stuck in those jams could choose to work close to home, or live close to offices. Houses and offices most often are intermixed in European (and often asian) cities.
Come on now. Many people in the Netherlands live in one city and work in another. Cost of living prohibits most people from living right next to where they work.
I do that 10 minute bike ride.. to the train station.. then I take the train 1h in each direction three times a week and consider myself lucky for not having to do it every day. The trains are packed.
Only that you can choose to work and live in Amsterdam, ~15 minutes cycling from work. Or Eindhoven, Nijmegen, even Enschede or Groningen. Yet many people choose to live 30 minutes car-commute (or train) from their work. E.g. because it's easier to find a place there (which suits their wishes). Reverse: I'm certain that if you live in, say, Nijmegen, you can find a job there, but many people choose to work in Arnhem, Eindhoven or Amsterdam instead travelling up and down every day.
I know. I've been there done that. In all directions.
I had to work in Arnhem once, but I chose to live in Nijmegen. If I timed it right I could do 10 minutes on the bike, 12 minutes by train and another 10 minutes by bike again. Most commutes were 40 minutes all up, which I found pretty workable. I didn't want the hassle of owning a car.
It still sounds like you're sacrificing your personal life for the sake of a commute. Good commute? Crap living situation. Good living situation? Crappy commute. Or I could just work from home and have a good living situation and no commute.
In the US, in most places, it is illegal to have work and home close to each other. You are forced to choose between commuting and WFH. In Europe no such laws exist. If anything, the opposite is cemented in laws. Meaning it's often possible to work close from where you live and vice versa.
I often work from home. But can choose to get on my bike and be in an office with colleagues, beer, pingpong and noise when I need it.
My point was that this choice is important. And that good city planning allows for such choices
Well, IANAL, but zoning and such, disallow commercial buildings (shops, offices, factories) in housing zones. I understand this differs per state or per locality even. And I think 'illegal' is probably not the right legal term either.
Zoning is usually block by block. Sure maybe your job is in a massive shopping mall that takes up 3 square blocks of space, but there will still be residences near it. The bigger issue is being priced out of living near your job.
I've lived in several cities in the US and always had the legal ability to live within a 10 minute walk of my office, but not the financial ability. It's about double the price of living roughly an hour away in morning traffic.
Ever since going remote I'm able to choose where I want to live based on the other quality-of-life factors in my neighborhood, and not have to worry about trading commute time for rent.
Don't get me wrong, I think the situation with public transport is vastly better in (western) Europe compared to North America, for a variety of reasons, a major one being that especially in NL almost every street has a double-laned bike path next to it. It really does make a difference to have that infrastructure in place, because people use it and this has major lifestyle and health benefits.
But a claim that some majority of people can just bike 10 or 20 minutes to the office was just a bit wild considering my experience living here in NL and taking the train so often. Having said that, it is true that I can bike anywhere in the city I live in within half an hour, and I don't own a car because I can get anywhere by bike or train. The fact that I can do these things allows me to work in another city, instead of being bound to live in a certain restricted location, without even owning a car.
But many people do drive, don't be confused. There are times when it would be really convenient to use a car, and I would be using a car sharing service if it weren't for the fact that my license is not valid here and I need to pass tests which is a long process.
Yeah, but it's still a universal problem in high paying tech because their offices are in big cities (and sometimes expensive small cities).
Editing to clarify - by tech being centred around expensive cities I don’t mean that tech offices are in urban areas rather than suburban. I mean that the large tech companies generally are in cities and towns that are more expensive than many other cities and towns.
For example, there are cheap and pleasant places big tech workers have moved to during WFH times instead of staying in the Silicon Valley-SF region of CA. But some of these towns don’t have a big office building in sight.
It's not "universal". Suburban city-planning is a US thing, almost exclusively (I'm told Canada follows suit). Most cities allow mixed commerce-living. Meaning there's offices, shops, factories in-between and below housing.
Yet US suburban planning -by law- disallows offices (and shops and factories) to be mixed with housing. You are often literally not allowed to live close to work (or work close to your home). that isn't universal at all.
It's by no means universal. A lot of tech is out in suburban office parks, some of which admittedly has its own traffic problems, e.g. Silicon Valley and suburban Washington DC.
Yeah but people are weird: I’m also contracting in the Amsterdam area and I once got a fella quite stubbornly insisting I should commute daily to their office in Leeuwarden to work on their AWS stack. He even suggested I rent a room for the week if I didn’t like sitting on the train that much. Crazy
Ah, of course. But I dis find it a bit regretful, the project sounded cool and there was some Kafka involved at a time that it wasn’t as hyped/established as it is today. But no, it wasn’t worth such a crazy commute, just to have bad coffee together
Not all European cities have bike lanes as good as im the Netherlands.
Zagreb, for example, has narrow bits of sidewalks painted to be "bike lanes" with street lamps and signs usually planted in the middle, lanes just stopping, etc.
Making a city more bike friendly for real (and not just checking off items on a politician todo list) is a long and painful process.
It'll happen, but right now it's easier to get stuck in traffic in a car than have to wade through the same traffic on a bike.
But Zagreb quite certainly does not have laws that prohibit living where offices and shops are. Or disallow offices and shops where people live.
Yet this is what happens in the US.
You can probably grab a tram, metro or bus to work. OFC leftovers from "city planning" under Tito/socialism means there's more distinction between "living" and "commercial" areas than most of Western Europe. But its quite certainly nowhere near as bad as the suburbanism in the US. Which was my point.
I was in a back-and-forth, a couple of months ago, right here on HN.
I was shocked at how people here, pretty much outright accused me of lying, because I mentioned that the typical commute time, from the area I live (and there are many, many more areas, even farther out) to the city, is measured in hours.
They keep whipping out that census site, and telling me that my eyes and experience are wrong, because Teh Internets Tubes says it's only 27 minutes (to travel 35 miles).
I have to assume that the vast majority of folks here, have never had to deal with a typical (and it is typical) US suburban commute.
If folks want to get a real (as opposed to complete fiction) idea of what a US commute is like, most cites have traffic cams on their arteries.
I once worked with a guy who commuted to Chicago from Michigan daily by train. I think the train ride alone was 1.5 hours. Now of course that isn’t really typical (though maybe not that different from some commutes people make to New York City). Even when I lived in the city I’d have to commute about 40 miles to the suburbs a few times a week and that was normally a 1-1.5 hour drive depending on traffic, or about 2 hours if I took transit which meant two buses with a train ride in between.
I did 38 years of NYC mass transit commuting. From northern Bronx to lower Manhattan took 1.5 hours each way (1 bus, 1 train). From Flushing Queens to lower Manhattan, also 1.5 hours each way (1 bus, 2 trains).
In the NE US, if I have to commute into the major city 45 miles or so away, whether by car or by the commuter rail that's about a 7 minute drive away, I'm almost 2 hours door to door. It's "only" about 75 minutes if I drive in after work.
Not that I ever go into my closer office any longer but that's about a 30 minute drive to an industrial park which is a very typical sort of commute. (I had about the same with another job years ago.)
At my job, the commute was about 30 minutes, as I commuted to a suburban office park (10 miles, North-South). I was in the office, five days (at least) a week, so that was 100 miles per week.
However, almost everyone that lives around me, works in the city. Many of them take the train. I know several that drive, though. They usually have highly skewed hours (they will drive in at 5AM, and come back at 3, but even then, there's a lot of traffic).
When I lived in the DC suburbs, even the suburban local commutes were crazy. I had a six-mile commute, one town South, and it often took 45 minutes. It would have been faster to bike.
I think this shows is really the balance between potential salary increases from switching jobs / cost reduction or improved quality of life vs. tolerable commuting distance. Improving transit will not make a huge dent in this; instead it offers people more flexibility in where to live and work. First if/when you have relative parity in job opportunities and cost of living across a large region can you really hope to make much of a dent in average commuting times.
A very common US commuting pattern is to drive from one suburb to an industrial park in another suburb. In general, there's not much you can do with transit to help in that scenario.
I live in Europe. Have lived in many places in Europe. I don't have a distorted view.
Main point was that European cities, in general (Dublin being somewhat of an exception by my experience) don't have suburban city planning. You typically live and work in the same city. Like e.g. Downtown New York - which, I'm told is somewhat of an exception, being an "old" US city. Travel by bus, metro, bike or tram.
I hate Netherlands for that. They force sick and disabled people to cycle in winter and rain. And it is so expensive you have to live like 1 hour from work!
As opposed to left to their own devices with almost no public transit infrastructure and unwalkable curbs if their condition does not allow them to drive a car?
There would still be the long commute to deal with. Not worth it