Comment by mcgrath_sh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcgrath_sh | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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