Having a long commute of 90+ miles each-way each-day, is 180+ miles or 3 hours out of each day dancing in stressful traffic (longer with traffic congestion). There are many reasons why some people decide to commute these long distance/hours each day. I know of them all too well, as in the SF Bay area where housing is expensive, and it used to be there was less expensive housing far away with more family oriented bedroom communities, people did just that> spend their lives commuting.
As a hp CE (Customer Engineer) for decades driving the company ice beau-coup miles everyday on-call 24/7/365, I know long distance driving. I also knew I would not want a long commute (I was already driving too much in my life). In almost the same example as Chris mentioned, one manager had a big home way out in the Central Valley, see http://goo.gl/maps/Z0o1p (with rush hour traffic, his commute was double the amount of time listed). He had an interesting way to reduce the amount of commuting he did: during the week, he had an arrangement to stay near by the office, but took off on Friday at 5pm for his long drive to his Central Valley home, spending the weekend with his family. A long daily commute time also became a relationship decision for me. I was going with a great gal who on her own, bought a small cabin up in the Santa Cruz mountain redwoods. While the distance was not far, the twisty-turny, slower-speed mountain road driving commute took the same three hours each day. She wanted me to move out my close to the office digs, and live up there with her, which meant I would also have a 3 hour daily commute. Personally, if I had a 3+ hour daily commute, I would not try to drive it each day (EV or not). I would look to use public transportation, or some other way to not have to. In my mind, there comes a point of: why are you killing yourself losing those hours of your life each day and taking on all the stress and risk. Even if my job had changed to staying at the office and I were driving a 1000 mile range EV, I would still not want that daily commute grind. {brucedp.150m.com} ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns - On Sat, Mar 29, 2014, at 01:59 PM, Chris Tromley wrote: > Not long ago I would have thought that 100 mile range is plenty. But > I've > been doing contract work for the last few years and keeping up an ongoing > job search all the while. I'm just outside Philadelphia, and I've > noticed > that the engineering jobs I'm suited for are moving farther away. At my > last job I had a 90 mile 2-way commute, and I was amazed that LOTS of > other > people there did the same thing. > > So if I want to commute to work where I live, I might very well need a > 150 > mile range to have a reasonable cushion. (Out here on the east coast > most > people don't even know what a "charging station" is, so charging at work > cannot be assumed.) > > I used to think 100 mile range would be plenty to permit widespread use > of > EVs. I'm not so sure any more. I think 150 is the new 100. - -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Email service worth paying for. Try it for free _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
