The Cost of Commuting -- Balancing Time Versus Money

Here's a piece from Business Week that says in 15 top U.S. cities, the more you make, the more time you probably spend commuting to work. In other words, the high earners generally don't live in an urban area, they live in the suburbs and need to take a car, train or some other form of transportation to get into work each day. Here's a summary of the situation:

The study also suggests that there is a link between salaries and the time people spend in a car, bus, or train each morning. The poorest people in these urban metro areas have the shortest commutes. In the Boston metro area, for example, people earning less than $20,000 a year commute typically commute 17.3 minutes each way compared with people earning $50,000 to $60,000, who commute 30.8 minutes. Commute times in the city of Boston don't rise much for people earning more than $60,000. Similarly, in New York City commute times climb steadily as annual salaries rise before peaking for employees earning $110,000 a year. The commute time peak in Los Angeles is $60,000; it's $70,000 in Detroit; and it's $30,000 in the vast Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area, where the typical commute time for wealthy workers is just 26.4 minutes.

This obviously brings up an interesting time-for-money sort of discussion (not to mention the "quality of life by living outside the city" discussion, but we'll table that one for now. For illustration purposes, here are a couple personal stories -- one from a friend and one from me:

* A friend of mine used to live in New Jersey and had a job in New York City. He would commute two hours each way into work and then back home for five days a week. Yep, you read that right -- four hours a day commuting (or 20 hours a week.) He got up at 4 am so he could leave home at 5 am (to "minimize" traffic), getting to work at 7 am. He then left at 6:30 pm (again trying to limit the traffic he had to fight) and got home each night at 8:30 pm. In other words, he was gone each day from 5 am through 8:30 pm. His family life was almost non-existent. He slept much of the weekends because he was exhausted. His health was a mess. Sure, his family had a nice home and he made $150,000 a year, but he didn't really have a life. He moved to a smaller city a few years ago and had a 15-minute commute, a bigger house in the suburbs, still made close to the same amount, and his quality of life went way up (BTW, his finances probably improved dramatically because his living costs likely dropped big-time.)

* You all have seen the cities I've lived in, so you know that I've never had a huge commute. My worst was actually in Pittsburgh where I had a 30-minute one-way commute -- much worse when the weather was bad. Even in DC I took the metro and made it to work in under 20 minutes (of course I was a student then, and probably would not have lived where I did if I'd had a family.) My commute now is under 15 minutes in good weather but can be as much as 30 minutes if we get hammered with snow and ice the night before. In other words, it's a GREAT commute for the most part -- not much time at all.

We've talked about the fact that some people want to be paid more if they have a long commute, and I can see where they're coming from. If I had to switch to a longer commute (let's say 30 minutes each way), there would certainly need to be a compelling reason (like much more money, better job satisfaction, etc.) before I would move. My time is just too valuable to give up for a few thousand dollars more a year.

How about you? How do you balance the time/money issue?