Kay Phillips has been dreading this moment for a very long time.
The 59-year-old from Elon, North Carolina, has often wondered how much her commute cost her over the years. She decided to sit down and tabulate it once and for all for Reuters.
Specifically, the four years when Phillips was driving 2.5 hours each way to her job and back, every single workday. From little Granite Falls, up in the mountains of North Carolina’s Caldwell County, to Chapel Hill for her job with the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Coalition of North Carolina.
The total tab, she figures: $43,000. And that is just in gasoline – not oil changes or repairs, not the value of her time.
“I always thought it would make me sick to find out,” she says. “And it did.”
And there’s the rub. Even in less extreme circumstances, your commute is likely costing you much more than you realize – in driving-related expenses, in sheer number of hours on the road and in negative health outcomes.
In fact, 10.8 million Americans travel more than an hour each way to work. And 600,000 endure “megacommutes” of at least 90 minutes and 50 miles each way, according to the Census Bureau.
This was not what was supposed to happen. Indeed, in some utopian tech visions, it was expected that our commutes would eventually go away and we would all be working comfortably at home, tapping on our laptops and iPads while sipping chamomile tea.
“In terms of travel time, our national commute has been ridiculously stable,” says Alan Pisarski, the Falls Church, Virginia-based author of the “Commuting in America,” report series.
“In 2000, the average commute was 25.5 minutes. In 2011, it was 25.5 minutes. Literally, the variation was a tiny fraction of a single minute.”
We often tend to dismiss commuting costs, as the necessary price of having a job. After all, especially in a difficult economic era, not everyone has the luxury of finding gainful employment within a short walk or bike ride from their home.
In fact the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which surveyed Americans about daily commutes and their effects, discovered a virtual horror show. They found the longer the commute, the higher the levels of one’s obesity, cholesterol, pain, fatigue and anxiety.
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