When I lived and worked in the DC area from 1989 to 1998, it was automatically assumed by everyone I knew that if you were going to commute anywhere by car and you had to intersect with major infrastructure like the beltway, then you'd be spending at least an hour on the road, just to go one way. So, that's a one-hour commute right there for many people in the Northern Virginia/DC/Suburban Maryland area.

And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way.

When I lived in Brussels, Belgium from 1999 to 2006 and worked for a Dutch consulting company, there was a period of time where my commute was 1.5-2.0 hours one-way to go up to the company offices in Veldhoven, or to a customer site at Eindhoven.

Living here in Austin since 2006, during rush hour, any commute involving any of the major infrastructure (360, MoPac, I-35, etc...) is likely to take at least 30 minutes, if not an hour or more. When there isn't any traffic, that same commute might take just fifteen minutes.

When my brother-in-law lived and worked in the LA area many years ago, until he made a point of moving to an apartment that was ridiculously close to the office, he was frequently spending two or more hours on the road, one-way. And that's when traffic was reasonably good and there weren't major jams that turned into eighteen-plus hours on the road, one-way.

Just because you don't have a given type or amount of experience, doesn't mean that your experience is universal in this regard.

I certainly realize that my experience is not universal, but I do have multiple instances in my life where I saw those kinds of numbers on a regular basis. And I knew plenty of people at the time who had similar experiences to mine.

>When I lived and worked in the DC area from 1989 to 1998, it was automatically assumed by everyone I knew that if you were going to commute anywhere by car and you had to intersect with major infrastructure like the beltway, then you'd be spending at least an hour on the road, just to go one way. So, that's a one-hour commute right there for many people in the Northern Virginia/DC/Suburban Maryland area.

It hasn't changed, and if anything it's worse. The traffic on I-66 into town every morning looks like a parking lot, all so a bunch of people can live in McMansions in Manassas and Haymarket and Gainesville.

>And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way.

Yep, I've met people who live in DC and commute to Baltimore (because they don't want to live in Baltimore...), and people who live in NoVA and commute to Annapolis.

This stuff is common here. You can see it in the massive traffic jams on I-66 and on the beltway every workday: those people aren't getting to work in 15-30 minutes in that traffic.