It really is surprising how much time people spend traveling on a day-to-day basis. My hour-long commute isn't annoying because I more or less made a conscious choice to trade time for money and convenience (that is, using public transportation takes longer than a car would, but it's cheaper and I don't have to worry about parking or insurance or maintenance), but still, every workday I walk 10 minutes to a bus stop and take the bus to a metro stop and when I get off the metro I take a shuttle-bus to my office, and that takes between 40 minutes and an hour.

My mother commuted at least 20 minutes one way to her last job. My father... I'm not sure what his commute is right now, but I know that he has spent more than five years working at jobs with commutes of more than an hour, and those jobs also happened to be more than eight-hour days on most workdays. And both of those are worse than mine because driving pretty much demands full attention; at least I can read or talk on the phone while on a bus. And so on; 10 minutes is a short amount of time to spend on going to work and half an hour or maybe even more is probably average among everyone I know. Half an hour twice a day five times a week for a person's whole working life, while I struggle to squeeze in another hour or two a week for games with friends or whatever. And for me at the moment, it's the same amount of time to see any friends or go to most restaurants and so on. Wow.

Hoping to cut that commute down has always been a minor reason to want to move into the city, but really, maybe it should be more major. (The irony being, where I work might change, but anyways...)