Well, you must make these choices in the context of your city, but 12 miles would not be a big deal with, for example, a subway or lightrail.

Living right by work is optimal, but not always practical, so the runner-up of solid transit is a good alternative.

> 12 miles would not be a big deal with, for example, a subway or lightrail

That's not true at all.

I'm from London, which has a pretty extensive subway system (we call it the tube). The only way you'll do a 12 mile* tube journey in 40 minutes in London is if you (i) live and work on the same subway line, and (ii) have <2 minutes' walk at each end. This is not true for 99% of people.

Sure, you could build more tube stations at great expense, to reduce the walking time, but more stops means more time stopped, which means more time spent in the tube.

I've lived in Beijing and Shanghai, and what I've written above, in reference to London, applies almost equally in those two cities.

*When I say '12 mile' above, I'm talking about the equivalent journey by road, not the 'as the crow flies' distance between two points, nor the distance the tube train travels.

The worst part of this as well is that my city, Nottingham, and also the whole of England, changed to a "spokes on a wheel" method of organising public transport. This is where they have all public transport go to a central hub, rather than organising around transport demands and having direct buses from residential to industrial areas or cross country trains.

So you always have to go into a hub (city center in Nottingham, London in England), and then walk & wait around for a new bus/train (or tube from station to station in London).

This significantly increases journey times to anywhere that's not the hub. Also the assholes charge £20 more for having the gall to go through London, even though that's precisely how they set the system up. So now to get to my home town I either have to get 4 trains outside of London, or 2 and a tube through London.

It's more economical and profitable for the bus/train companies, but costs everyone not going to the central hub a lot of time.

To give a concrete example, my commute in London is 5 miles and 50 minutes - 10 minutes' walk to the station, 25 mins on the train, and 15 minutes walking to work. (Cycling is a little quicker, but still in the 40 minute region).

My commute in Berlin would have been 4.7 miles if done by car & takes me ~30-35 minutes by subway (including ~10 minutes walk), so a little bit better but not much.

I would have liked going down to ~20 minutes but beyond that it's entering into diminishing returns territory & I'd much rather work fewer hours and/or from home instead.

That sucks-I regularly make a 45 mile trip into a contracting job and I can be there in ~40 minutes (its +10 minutes at rush hour time). This is into a major metropolitan area in the US. And I do it in my own car-comfortable, quiet, and I listen to my podcasts. Its probably my favorite part of the day.

Darn, I must have an overly rosy memory of my short time in the NY subways & on light rails. It has been many years.

To be fair, NYC's subway system is not a hub-and-spoke system, it is a true network of rail lines. Practically a matrix. One of the finest in the world.

I live and work on line 10 in Beijing, and I still save a lot of ti e by taking the taxi, even with traffic.

And line 10 is one of the newer/nicer lines.

It's hard to get from Bromley to Victoria in 45 minutes.

If more people were allowed (and enabled) to work from home, that would help mitigate that issue heavily.

More like he was priced out of living any closer to work.