35 minutes each way on the bus in high school. Didn’t mind the commute (I didn’t have to drive!) but the company was less than pleasant.
As an adult, I’d probably punch myself in the face if I was doing a solid 35 minutes each way.
80 miles by train. Along with about a billion trillion other commuters doing the same journey. Took about 90 mins.
For the past six months my one-way door-to-door has been 103 miles (although I only do it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
Before that, for 12 months my one-way commute was 119 miles door-to-door.
I hate hate hate it. It wears me out and kills about 2 hours each direction. I’m sick of the radio, I’m sick of music, I’m sick of the fucking interstate. I’m sick of buying gas, and I’m sick of ingesting bolus doses of coffee every morning. Every day on the way home I stifle the urge to scream. (Not kidding.)
For a while when I had the 119 mile commute, I carpooled. My carpool partner was a nice enough guy but he listened to Fox radio. So I got to start every other day with two hours of hate. Eventually my job hours changed and I couldn’t carpool any more.
Why do I do it? My wife is the primary wage earner in our family and her job is in Columbia, Missouri. I haven’t found a job in my field in Columbia (unless I want to take a position that would erase about 5 years of career progress and pay increases). So I work in St. Louis and obsessively watch for job openings in mid-Missouri. Before we moved, my commute was 4 miles. This commute is fucking insane.
ETA: Oh, and every now and then I pass some mangled wreck, or I see the tire fly off a semi and rocket across the road, or I dodge some jackass texting, and I think “Someday, I am going to die out here.”
It takes a toll on the psyche, is what I’m saying, I guess.
31 miles from San Dimas, CA to downtown Los Angeles. I only did that by car for a couple of weeks, though, before I decided that taking the commuter train was a much better option. I did that for about 7 years. It was just over an hour door-to-door by train, and more like 75 to 90 minutes by car.
Longest commute by distance - now 10kms (about 6.3 miles). Takes about 10 minutes.
Longest commute by time - 35 minutes (walking), probably a shade over 3 kms.
I just don’t understand those who have to deal with hour+ commutes everyday.
Currently doing approx. 120 kms one-way (which is about 75 miles).
I drive about half of it (freeway + country roads), then park and jump on a train. It takes me a little under 2 hours each way.
I imagine I’ll do it for around 2 years. Just bought a lovely rural property and want to get a chunk paid off and can earn at least triple by commuting and working in the city, over working locally. Won’t do it forever though. It is rough on your body, especially in winter when you leave in the dark, get home in the dark and feel like all you do is work, commute and sleep. But if you decide to do it (and can see an end-date so you don’t get all soul-suckingly depressed by having no life) it isn’t that bad.
The commute to the job which I just left was about 70 minutes. including:
- 10 minute drive to / from the train station
- 40 minute train ride (including wait time for the next train)
- 20 minute walk to / from the office
I don’t feel so bad about that one, compared to some of the other posts here. 
My longest commute was 110 miles and took 2 hours. I did that twice a week for a year and then every day for about 6 months.
My current commute is 54 miles and takes any where from 45 to 90 min depending on the weather and how much I feel like speeding, normally it clocks in at an hour been doing it for 3 years 5 days a week.
I like having the time to decompress and not living in a town that is an absolute shithole but if I get a new job I’ll be trying to live closer. I had a temporary transfer about a year and a half ago and the condo I was set up in was 5 min from the office it was nice being able to go home at lunch or get home from work and still have time to do stuff before dinner.
I’m wimping in with my current commute of 20 miles each way which I’ve been doing for the last six years. On a good day, it’s 40 minutes. With PennDOT’s semi-annual “You Can’t Get There From Here” festival and a wreck in the tunnels, it took me over an hour and a half to get home one day last week. Fortunately, parts of Mount Washington are very scenic this time of year.
Bri2k
My longest was just under an hour: about a 40 minute train trip, plus 15 or so minutes walking to and from the stations at either end. I did that for 10 years (all of primary and secondary school).
For 7 years, I commuted 42 miles each way, mostly rural interstates. I arranged to have my work schedule from 9-6, rather than 8-5, and that probably took an average of 20 minutes each way off of the commute. On a very good day, 40 minutes, average about 45 minutes, and on a couple of memorable drives home, it was 2.5hours+, because of snow and ice.
Now, I have a 10 minute drive.
About 90% of the time, this was how I felt, and I still occasionally miss the commute. I used the time to wind down, catch up on the news, and watch the seasons progress. I miss watching each years batch of foals and calves arrive and grow up over the summer. I miss having 30 minutes to watch the seasons progress. I saw some beautiful sights, even though it was the same 42 miles every day.
Longest by distance was about 48 miles, roughly an hour each way.
My current commute (same job, new home) is about 40 miles, roughly fifty minutes. This is only because I work off-peak hours, however – on the occasions I’ve covered shifts during normal human hours it can approach an hour and a half out, two hours home.
On an older shift, I didn’t mind so much because it synced up with some of my favorite NPR programming. My current shift, however, lines up with generic light news in and random junk home. Not so fun. Generally speaking, I don’t mind the drive in as much, but that hourlong drive late at night tears me up.
My work commute, at 50 miles each way, is the longest I’ve ever had to go. It takes, on a normal day, 1 hour and 15 minutes. On the way to work, I take the New Jersey Turnpike at interchange 6 and exit at 11. I have between 10 and 15 minutes before and after the Turnpike. I’ve been doing this for 14 years. It’s torture.
87 miles each way, Florence, SC to USC-Columbia, twice a week for 2 years. Took about an hour and a half each way.
My wife was teaching full time at Francis Marion College in Florence, and I was finishing up my doctorate and teaching 2 days a week at USC-Columbia. We knew it was temporary, and on my off days, I could work on my research at our apartment. Listened to a good local rock station on the way in, and listened to All Things Considered on the way home.
75 km each way for 2 years. It took about 90mins each way and the toll highway charges averaged about $500/month.
My company bought a new building and moved all of our offices to it. After 2 years my husband and I (we both worked for the same company) sold our house and bought one a 5 minute commute from the new office.
My current job is was only about 45km but approximately the same time until July of this year when we started a Remote work program. I now stumble down the stairs to my office 4 days a week. I much prefer that to the 5th day when I use a commuter bus followed by the subway to get to the office.
Thanks for the responses!
I’m starting to think that my possible 80 mile commute may not be so bad. 70 of those miles will be interstate, and I’ve just discovered NPR podcasts, so this may be doable. Of course, I have to get accepted into school first, and that’s a ways away yet anyway.
Currently, about 110 miles. I drive five miles to the freeway, then head down from just about the Canadian border to the Northgate area of Seattle. There, I get on a bus and ride it downtown (about 10 miles). I generally leave the house around 0530, get to the office around 0750, and get home around 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening. I do this three days a week, and telecommute two. It gives me the quietude of my house, and the amenities of a big-ish city. I drive a Prius.
I make some coffee for my travel mug, and a container of oat gruel (1/2 cup quick oats and 2 cups water, plus some sugar-free fake maple syrup – can’t use the 100% Grade B Good Stuff for that!). I generally finish the coffee before the bus exit, and I drink the gruel about 6:15 or so. My companion on the trip is NPR. Often I’ll tune into KEXP the last 20 miles.
So a couple of hours on the trip down, and 2-1/2 on the way home.
Used to have a 85km commute each way, it took between 45mins and 2.5 hrs, depending upon how many people had gotton engaged in fatal traffic accidents on the Pan Americana highway in Buenos Aires. Great place, utterly awful driving.
I now have 51 mile each way drive between Park City and Provo, nice drive through a canyon, gets a bit sketchy in winter and takes about an hour.
I do the same,I load up on the NPR podcasts, On the media, This American Life, RadioLab, Cartalk, Freakonomics, also get the Bill Maher realtime, BBC radio4 comedy podcast, and if you subscribe to the Economist you can get the full magazine on podcast with some one reading it, that takes 8 hrs.
I also found some decent local coffee shops on the route, that are local and serve a good americano. The best is at the half way point, provides a 5 min stretch out of the car, something to think about if you have a lot of driving, adds a short ammount of time overall, but gets a mental break from staring ahead.
I had an 80-mile commute for four years, and I drove it twice a day – once in the morning, return in the evening. It took a minimum of an hour and fifteen minutes, although hour an a half was more typical. In bad weather and/or on holiday weekends it got worse. On one occasion it took over four hours to get home.
I got a lot of audio book reading done. And it aged my car prematurely.
In my final semester of college, I was working two days a week in Little Rock at a job basically training to work there when I graduated and going to school three days a week in Fayetteville. Driving to Little Rock and back on Tuesdays and Thursdays wasn’t the greatest idea, but I got paid for my time and I got 51 cents a mile.
187 miles from my apartment to the office, roughly 3 hours.