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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

>If my choices in 2020 are remote work, suburban car commute, or downtown city office commute watching YouTube on a bus or train, one of these options is the clear last-place option.

It depends where you live. If I drive into my company's suburban office (which I have rarely done for the past few years), I'm about a 25-30 minute drive. If I take the commuter rail into the city to go to another office, I'm about 90 minutes door-to-door between drive to train/train/subway/walk. I don't mind doing the latter now and then, but if I had to make the choice most days, that wouldn't be my pick.

I did commute into the city semi-regularly for about a year once. It really wasn't sustainable over a long period even though I didn't need to do it every day most weeks.

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If you didn’t live in the suburbs, it wouldn’t take you 90 minutes to get into the city.

If your suburban office didn’t have a huge parking lot in front of it, adjacent to a grass knoll, adjacent to a four lane highway, which also has a grass strip in between it, with your house set back from your street with a lawn and driveway, with your street hidden in curvy cul-de-sac roads from the main road to alleviate thru traffic, you might have an actual chance at walking, biking, or taking a bus to your suburban office. But it’s all been designed around the car so now you must own your very own car to go anywhere.

I actually live in the country (maybe technically exurbs). No amount of sidewalks or bike paths or reasonable density bus routes is going to get me to either of my offices. This isn't a new thing. My house was built in 1823 well before things were designed for cars.

This is completely fair and is absolutely a very real thing for many people. But only about 19% of the US population lives in rural areas, for some definition [1] of rural.

Unlike rural areas, cities are dense enough that we could certainly choose to build them in a different way, so that we are not all completely dependent on our cars to go anywhere. For a lot of folks, I think it's definitely a discussion worth having.

[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-210...

I'm actually not rural by the US Census definition. And probably not especially close even though I and a couple neighbors are on 100 acres between us. I live in a 7K person town and it's not even remotely rural by US Census definitions.

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