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Comment by mmjaa | Hacker News Reader

You simply cannot compare the scale of the Netherlands' use of bicycles with Australia. The nations are so far apart - literally - on the scales of distances involved, that its just not sensible. The Dutch are used to living within 20 minutes of everything - Australians have vastly greater distances to scale. A Dutch city was made for humans, a few hundred years ago - most Australian cities were made for automobiles, within the last 100 years.

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Luckily there's an Australian band with a song about that sort of problem: https://3pod.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-of-happiness

Personally I don't understand why you'd want to drive more than 10 minutes by car to work, it's such a waste of your lifetime.

I love it, I love even driving 5 minutes with a car! I am such a "in a car animal". Car is amazing!

I have a friend, two actually, considering to move into a van.

But then, I have a sailboat that I'd very much prefer as a home (the wife sadly has a different opinion)

To be fair, I want to do it (~30 min commute) because it allows me to live in a halfway decent place with stuff to do and still work in a laid back environment in BFE

You just proved GP's point, you don't want the commute, you want to live in the suburbs.

>Personally I don't understand why you'd want to drive more than 10 minutes by car to work, it's such a waste of your lifetime.

By choosing to drive 40 minutes to work, you can live 10 minutes from a national park or a beach or the rest of your family or a golf course or whatever works for you in your off hours.

Why orient your life around your work?

Because, simplisticly, you probably only get to do the 10 minute journey twice a fortnight but you have to do the 40 minute journey 10 times in that same period. So it's 140mins vs 410mins; you in theory save 3h30m per fortnight by living closer to work.

It's actually choosing not to orient your life around work that causes the decision to live closer, thus saving commuting time and overall spending less time on work related activity.

Do you have time and energy to spend time in those places after work on weekdays? I, for the most part, don't. It makes more sense to drive to them once or twice a week on weekends vs living close to them, but having a long commute on weekdays.

>Do you have time and energy to spend time in those places after work on weekdays? I, for the most part, don't.

If you don't live somewhere where it's easy you definitely won't. Make the things you /want/ to do easy. You'll do the things you /must/ do whether it's easy or hard, but if the things you want to do are hard as well you won't do them ever.

The price of real estate in Australia more than 10 minutes drive from many people's work is often hundreds of thousands of dollars less than close to their work.

we have this real estate problem even in the Australia without roos (talking Austria here) and I wonder: why won't "work" move. How important is it for you to be physically at a certain place when you (and your team and manager) might just as well be 30 minutes closer to "home"?

Probably big cities need to be punished for attracting to many companies with a lot of staff. Believe it or not, Linz, the city I live in, has more workplaces that inhabitants. Something's clearly wrong here and I don't mean the work-daily rush hour.

Where I live, the home price difference between 10 minutes to work and 2 hours from work is over $1M USD.

It's not the distance, cycling in major Australian cities is utterly oppressive compared to most of Europe.

>. A Dutch city was made for humans, a few hundred years ago - most Australian cities were made for automobiles, within the last 100 years.

Did you not read the next sentence?

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