College/Work distance?

38 comments

1. Anything more than an hour, to me at least, tends to be considered a long commute.

2. For a daily commute, I prefer to keep it under 30 minutes, the shorter the better. I’ve got 24 hours in a day and commute time is time I’m neither earning money nor doing things for myself.

   For a weekend road trip? I’d rather not drive more than 3 or 4 hours because more eats too far into the actual time to do stuff.

3. It is kind of funny that you say Scotland is smaller than Texas when the entire UK is much smaller than Texas.

   I commute 1 hr each way and I’ve been doing it for six years almost.

   Growing up in Southern California my dad commuted about 1.5-2 hours each way daily.

   Tracking those distances would be more common for work than for school. It is more typical to move to the city your college is in or go to a so called local “commuter school” that is within short driving distance.

4. 1 hour commute is not that strange, I had a 1 hour commute once and it was a bit annoying. 2 hours and most people would live somewhere closer to work/school at least on the weekdays- maybe go home over the weekend.

5. I would not drive 100 miles or two hours on a regular basis, or in other words if a job was located that far from me I would not apply for it or accept it if offered. An hour is also too long. Some people do commute that far but it’s not something I would want to do.

6. The whole UK is much smaller than Texas. Texas is one of our biggest states.

7. Other than community college, most undergraduate college students aren’t commuting to school. Even if they’re living off campus, it’s still typically within walking or bicycling distance.

8. For a daily commute, my longest was 50 miles – it was awful and I hated it. Took an hour on the best of days. On the worst, it would take me 2+ hours to get home, mostly due to city traffic around Philadelphia. I worked there for 2 years. Now I work from home.

   My furthest day trip was 360 miles – from my area in New Jersey to West Virginia for a work meeting at 10AM. I drove my boss’s truck while he worked on his laptop, and it took us 5-6 hours each way. I left my house at 4:30 in the morning, but I was home by dinnertime.

   I had taken day trips to Washington DC before, which is about a 3 hour drive from me. That would be my limit if I wasn’t staying overnight. Now that I have kids, though, anything more than 60-90 minutes is a hassle.

9. Are you talking round trip or each way with the times and distances?

   2hrs each way would be a bit rough. If you only have to be in one or two days a week it’s not so bad, but 5 days a week wouldn’t be easy. 1hr each way isn’t terrible, it’s pretty standard in many areas.

10. That’s a long commute, but some people do it. A family member’s commute amounted to two hours each way from upstate New York to Manhattan, but that wasn’t pure distance, it was that the commute involved a drive in the car, a subway ride, etc. My commutes have ranged from ten to thirty minutes, which is much more average.

11. My worst commute was about 1:15 to work and an hour home. 5 days a week. Current commute, when I don’t work from home is about 25-30 minutes. My wife’s commute is 45-60 minutes. I consider about 90 minutes to be the start of a long trip. Last year we went on vacation from Kentucky to North Carolina and it was 14 hours (long, esp with 2 kids.). My record for longest car trip was 23 hours from St. Louis to Brownsville TX (on the border with Mexico at the southern tip of Texas).

12. Yeah, I’d call two hours (each way) a long commute. I know people who have done it, if it’s a lucrative job, but not many and not for long. It would be nothing for a simple trip on a day off work or a weekend to go some place but would be unpleasantly long for a daily commute.

    A one-hour drive (each way) is much more typical of a morning commute. My current morning commute is more about 30 minutes and I consider that blissfully short. I once had a job where it was about a 15 minute commute and that was mind-bogglingly fast.

    Oh, and Scotland is more about the size of South Carolina, when comparing it to the size of a US state. The entire UK is slightly smaller than Michigan or Wyoming in land area.

13. the state where I live is about 2x the size of Scotland. I regularly commute within a 50 mile radius throughout the week for various things. it takes me about 45 minutes – 1.5 hours depending on where I’m going.

    for a longer weekend trip, I might go 3-4 hours (that gets me to Chicago or Minneapolis, or 100-300 miles away), but that’s less of a regular thing for me.

    *everything I just said is one-way times/distances

14. Keep in mind that most people move to go to college. Some people do commute, but most live on or near their campuses.

    I would say for a daily commute, 1 hour would be a long commute but common enough not to be exceptional. 2 hours would be considered an extremely long one.

    Personally, I wouldn’t want anything over about 30 minutes or max 40; my ideal is if I can bike.

15. Uh, Indiana (a very small state) has 36,000 square miles to Scotland’s 30,000. You could fit 9 Scotlands inside of Texas.

    About an hour is the longest I’d drive in one direction for work

16. For a daily commute, most people would consider over 60 minutes each way to be long. Note that the distance that can be covered in 60 minutes is very variable between urban and rural areas.

    Personally, I’ve previously commuted over 60 minutes each way, but long commutes can be problems for people with children or other home responsibilities. My current commute is approximately 20 minutes each way.

17. I did it all the time. Had to commute to a second school in addition to my main college, 3-4 times a week. An hour there and back. With traffic it was 1.5 hours, at the right time it was 45 mins.

18. For work specifically, if I’m the one that has to do the diving I’d prefer to keep it under 30 mins. I had a 45 minute commute (all highway, thankfully) and that was too long for me. It’s not just the drive, it’s the conditions too: the longer my commute, the more coldness and darkness I’ll have to deal with in winter time.

    For leisure, I’d happily do 2-3 hours each way on a day trip because I enjoy driving. More than 4 and I’m thinking about an overnight stay.

19. I live in Texas, where things are spread out. I won’t do a daily commute of longer than 30 minutes, but know plenty of people who think an hour is fine. Two hours is not ok with anyone I know.

    Two hours for a family get together once every few weeks would be ok, and five hours is about the limit of my spontaneous weekend trip distance.

20. My work commute is about an hour both ways. Usually closer to an hour and fifteen minutes on the trip home. I’ve had longer and shorter commutes, but that’s fairly average for me.

    3-4 hours to a destination is what I consider a day trip.

    A drive doesn’t feel like a long trip to me unless you’re looking at like 6 or more hours one way, because at that point you’re not driving home on the same day.

21. 100 miles is an extremely long distance for a commute, very few people are traveling that far every day to get to work. My commute to and from work takes close to an hour but that’s because of traffic, it’s only about 25 miles. My second job is a 7 minute train ride and about 10 minutes of walking.

    Its extremely common to move away for college here.

22. Where I live in the US we state distance by the amount of time it takes to drive there. I live an hour from work, 30 minutes from the boys, 15 minutes from the grand baby, 5 minutes from the post office.

23. When I was in college I lived on campus, but my school was about 4 hours away from my parents’ house. I chose that school in particular because I didn’t want to be TOO far away where if I needed to get home for whatever reason I could. So there were a few times I went home for the weekend or something. It’s not a distance I could have done as a daily thing though.

    The farthest I lived from work was nearly 2 hours by train. I did that for 3 years.

24. My round trip commute is about an hour and a half. It is a long commute for sure, but the job is fun enough to make up for it.

25. It’s not just Texas that’s bigger than Scotland. If it were in the US, it’d be the 10th smallest state by area and right around the middle by population. If you want to check a map, the closest state in both area and population to compare to is South Carolina.

26. I lived 1.5 hours from school (+/- time with traffic) and I stayed on campus. Then I graduated and worked 1-1.5 hours from home (again, depending on traffic). I eventually changed jobs, but even then my commute was 45 min-1 hr.

27. You mean daily? 100miles each way is too long for me to do daily, but there are people who do that and more. I drive 40 miles each way for work and that’s about my limit.

28. I live in Texas and I prefer not to live in big cities. I’d hate to have long commutes. I live 20 miles from my job and it takes me 20 minutes to get there. The drive is all rural countryside.

29. I commute to work 55-113 miles each direction. It takes roughly 60-80 minutes. I also regularly drive 121 mi/2 hours on weekends. I don’t consider any of these to be long drives. The majority of people in my life agree, and those who do think it’s a long drive still agree my pay makes it worth it.

30. Lets put it this way. About once per month I leave my house around 7am and drive 5 hours one way to have lunch with my mother and catch up with her. Then I drive 5 hours back and I’m home by 8 or 9pm.

    So nah, a 1-2 hour drive isn’t anything. My grandfather used to drive 2 hours each way to work for about 40 years before he retired.

31. 2 hours is the length of a day trip for me. Indianapolis to Louisville is a straight shot down I-65 and can easily be done in 2 hours. But if I wanted to go to a southern Indiana resort town which isn’t directly connected by an Interstate, it can easily take 2.5 or maybe 3 hours each way and for me that’s a bit too much for a day trip unless I got a really early start to the day.

    Commute time? Indianapolis typical commute time is 22 minutes or so. We have a system of Interstates to get around and we’re one of the few metros pre-COVID where traffic was actually not getting worse.

    It would be very unusual for someone to commute 1 hour each way in Indianapolis. I know a few people who have done that, usually people who work for Purdue or IU. But most faculty and staff live closer to the campus.

    It is very unusual to have a long commute for college/university. If you are going to a commuter school, its just a commute like anyone else. If you’re living on campus most students stay close to the university where not only the school but all the bars and restaurants are too.

32. People usually live where they go to college/university. Like I went to college in North Carolina (from New Jersey). I didn’t drive 9 hours each way. I stayed in North Carolina. My residence was a solid 100 feet from a couple of my classes lol. As for work I work remote half the country away. But I traveled about 10-15 miles each way in office

33. I used to drive 100 miles round trip to work and that was terrible. I now live less than 3 miles from work.

34. A long distance cut off to me is requiring a overnight stay. I’ll be traveling over 700 miles this week to visit 1 project site and I won’t be leaving the state.

35. Here in New Mexico which roughly the size of Poland,1.5 to 2 hours or so is a long drive I commuted about an hour each way for a number of years. My Brother in law used to drive 2 hours each way to work.

36. I spent 2 years commuting 50 miles each way. It wasn’t fun, but it was manageable. The worst part was that most of the commute was through a touristy area so in the summer time it regularly took 2+ hours to cover the 50 miles. Ultimately, that’s what killed it for me.

37. I have coworkers who commute 1-2 hours one way, and I can’t fathom how they do it. That’s 2-4 uncompensated hours a day just getting to/from work. But … they do it, and it works for them. I personally usually shoot for a commute that’s 25 minutes or less. It all depends on your tolerance.

38. Love seeing Scottish people in this sub, miss it everyday