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Life in the Commuting Lane

August 06, 2008 3:30 PM

'Nightline' producer Ely Brown recently spent some time in Maryland to report on life as an ex-urbian, a person who works in the city but lives in the suburbs.  But while these people may save money on that pricey urban real-estate,  they encounter a whole new list of problems: longer commutes, high gas prices, and traffic -- lots of traffic.  Below, Ely Brown shares her feelings on life in the exurbs.  You can watch the story tonight on 'Nightline,' 11:35 p.m. ET.

I don't like commuting.  Crowded buses, subway platforms, sluggish rush hour traffic all make me shudder.  I make lots of decisions in order to keep it to a bare minimum.  In graduate school I lived close enough to campus to walk.  When I started my professional career with ABC in New York City, I opted for a dark, tenement apartment within a 25 minute walk to the office rather than a sunnier, bigger place that would have involved a subway ride.  When I moved to Washington,DC, I searched high and low for a house I could buy that was close to work.  I managed to find one in an "up and coming" neighborhood that is an 18 minute (downhill) bike ride to work, 25 minutes (uphill!) home.

In many ways I am lucky. I don't have kids so I don't have to worry about good public schools.  I live in a city with a wide spectrum of real estate options.  But for many people, the real estate boom of previous years priced them out of being able to live in the urban areas where they work. 

The answer was tremendous growth of new housing and interest in the exurbs -- areas far away from city centers with lower house prices, cheaper property taxes and to some a  better quality of life.  But the trade off for those benefits was a long commute.  Fifty, sixty, seventy miles or more.  One way. 

And now with gas prices averaging near $4 a gallon, families who thought they were getting a deal are instead getting slammed by the high cost of gas.

So I traveled from DC out to Cumberland Maryland to follow two families as they embarked on their daily commutes.  As I drove out to
Cumberland -- 2 hours and 10 minutes away in moderate traffic -- I couldn't help but imagine what the drive would be like to do everyday.  And I also couldn't help but watch the needle on my gas gauge plummet as I drove mile after mile.  Refilling it cost $60.  Ouch.  I figured if I actually lived out here, I’d have to fill it at least three times a week doing that commute at a cost of about $180.

A summer fellow working in Nightline's NY office joined me on the shoot.  Eliot Caroom intelligently was driving a Honda Hybrid.  Over the course of two days of driving across Maryland and West Virginia he averaged 50 miles per gallon, thus proving that there are options out there to save a buck on gas if you are going to have to do long haul commutes. 

In researching the story we talked to many families who tried to find creative solutions to the problem of gas prices and killer commutes.  One person drove an hour to pick up a carpool van for the final hour of his commute.  Another carpooled everyday, leaving home before dark to beat traffic and save time by not sitting for hours in a rush hour crawl.  And others still would drive in Monday morning and then stay part of the week with friends or family closer to work.  Even the cameraman on our shoot, who lives 50 miles from ABC's downtown bureau in Washington has gone out and purchased a motorcycle to cut costs.

August 6, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (1)

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Posted by: Dennis Day | Aug 10, 2008 8:18:35 AM

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