With the increase in speed limit on the turnpike, DC has become just under 4 hours for me. From my house in the city to the Silver Spring metro stop is 3h 55m on the GPS. Toronto is a 6 hour drive, Charlotte or Chicago are also only a 7 hour drive. I know many people prefer to fly, but between getting to the airport, getting there in enough time (1.5 hours or so), probable delays, actually flying, getting out of the other airport, and getting to your preferred destination, you are looking at a time frame that is either less than, equal to, or within a 2 hour time frame of what it takes to fly. Criticism of international flights is completely valid, but between MegaBus and driving, I feel like a lot of cities are relatively easy to get to. As for international flights, I know a lot of friends who will take a MegaBus to NYC, Toronto, DC, or Philly and just fly round trip out of there. There are a lot of overnight or close to overnight MegaBus routes to those places.

Agree if you are just concerned about travel time but there's also the opportunity to get work done, sleep, or watch a movie on a plane. I generally avoid driving these days just because I find myself increasingly dreading the level of concentration and focus required to drive safely for more than two or three hours at a stretch.

That is completely fair. The equation also drastically changes when you are looking at traveling alone and traveling with more than one person. Even with just my husband and I, the cost in both time and money to fly to Philly, NYC, DC, and Ohio is simply not worth it. Instead, we plunk down the money for a new audiobook and split the driving.

Unless you have a private jet, or perhaps you only fly first-class, I'm not sure how you actually sleep or get any work done on one. As someone who's over 6 feet, I'm so cramped in a modern plane that that alone makes it pretty hard to get a computer out and do anything useful with it; add to that people reclining their seats (now I can't use my laptop at all), kids kicking the back of my seat, people crawling over me to go to the bathroom if I'm not in the window seat, and worse, on a short flight, the fact that you're not even allowed to have your laptop out for a large portion of the flight--by the time you're finally allowed to get it out because the plane has reached altitude and you get started with something, now the plane is coming in for a landing and you have to put it away again.

Substitute "on a plane" for "on a train" and you'd be correct. Trains are great for bringing a laptop and getting work done while you travel: the seats have reasonably generous space, there's power outlets (many planes still don't have these in economy), and you're allowed to get your laptop out as soon as you sit down, well before the train even leaves the station, and you don't have to put it away until you're ready to get up and walk off the train.

I'm only 5'6" so I can sleep like a baby and work comfortably as well.

The PA turnpike was built with a design speed of 100 mph and when I went to CMU, my record between Westchester County north of NYC and campus was 6 hours, 50 minutes (driving at times close to that design speed.) Three of the four speeding tickets I've gotten in life have also been on that road...

Even with a faster turnpike, Pittsburgh is well outside the Northeast Corridor megalopolis which does have an isolating effect on capital, and even with a tech makeover, it's still going to be an isolating city without similar makeovers in eastern Ohio and upstate NY.

I'm of that era of CMU grad the article talks about that spent four years there and left. It's a great town and I enjoy going back, but the prime reason I didn't stick around was isolation.

I realize this is off-topic, but I'm somewhat surprised by the consistent use of the Austin metro as an example of a "tech hub" in comments here, when a metro area in its own state (Dallas) had raised more in venture capital as recently as 2016. [1] Austin is certainly shifting their economy to be tech-dominant, but it's still a small economy relative to other US cities.

What makes Austin a more important tech hub than, say: Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh-Durham, or Chicago?

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/globa...

Just speculating, but maybe it's because Google, Facebook, and Amazon have a tech presence in Austin and not in the other 3 metros you mentioned?

Google has sales and engineering in Chicago, engineering in Chapel Hill, and sales in Dallas. I think there may be some engineering in Dallas too. There are enough good people out there unwilling to relocate that you can find a Google presence in most tech corridors.

Google doesn't have an office in Dallas anymore

Austin is overhyped. There are cities in East Bay that nobody knows of (e.g., Emeryville) that have raised more money than Austin.

Wasn't Dell based in nearby Round Rock?

I totally agree. I wrote to the mayor about this, and we could definitely use more help raising awareness to the city about this very pressing issue (@billpeduto on Twitter if you're also affected)... I've never had an SFO<->PIT flight without layovers.

Also, we ask everyone here to please continue to refrain from using the pejorative "rust-belt" to describe our beloved hometown and emerging tech center. It is a very unwelcoming word. Thank you!

> we ask everyone here to please continue to refrain from using the pejorative "rust-belt"

Who is "we"? I spent the first few decades of my life in a great lakes rust belt city and this is the first time I've heard of anyone considering it a pejorative.

People actually from Pittsburgh do (I'm a fourth generation native, my great grandfather farmed tomatoes for H.J. Heinz -- look on a ketchup bottle):

"Shame. It’s pretty thick in these parts, and it’s linked to the region’s nickname, 'The Rust Belt.' After all, rust connotes disuse, or of being left behind." [1]

Hope that helps you see our point of view a bit more.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richey-piiparinen/rust-belt-de...

Interesting. I've always viewed it as a slightly clever term connoting the region's heavy reliance on the steel industry in the past and the undeniable economic/demographic decline that followed.

I obviously don't know about Pittsburgh, but it is absolutely not viewed as a perjorative in some other cities typically considered part of the rust belt.

An addendum to my sibling comment here:

A cusory web search turns up indie bookstores, restaurants, literary publishers, community groups of various sorts, etc in Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit that embrace the term "rust belt". I didn't easily find similar results for Pittsburgh, so maybe yinz do have a different take on it. But please don't assume others intend "rust belt" as a pejorative, and please consider recognizing that as it's not widely used pejoratively, you may have limited success convincing others to stop using it.

I've only ever heard Californians and New Yorkers use the word pejoratively, like in OP's context.

> I've never had an SFO<->PIT flight without layovers.

About 10 years ago, I did a round trip a month, each under $300 and all flights non-stop. Then USAirways hub status left, and the pain set in.

I'm from Pittsburgh, too.

Not only do I find the term "rust belt" perfectly acceptable, I find your scolding strangers on the internet about its use to be pompously absurd.

You are not "our" spokesman invested with some kind of moral authority to publicly sermonize about "our" identity. Please refrain from doing so on "our" behalf, and speak only for yourself.

I'm doing that this week and I had to choose a 6:30am flight to get a layover less than 6 hours and a price less than $1000.

You must not look very hard. I fly annually SFO <-> PIT direct, including another one in a week.