It would take me 21/2 hours if I took the bus vs. 35 minutes by car. Fack that.
http://www.thesudburystar.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1195459
My wife hates her commute, even though she changed schools a couple years ago and now she's a nice 15-20min away. She looked into taking public transit. 2 hours over three buses, vs. 15 minutes (20 in heavy traffic).
In the Edmonton area, each municipality has it's own transit system, which means you have a terrible time coordinating schedules if you're coming from an outlying community. Vancouver has one system for the entire urban area. Smart.
For teachers, traveling into residential areas means going against rush traffic, which is nice, but it also means limited transit opportunities as they tend to be heavy leaving park-and-ride stations into the downtown, but little in the way of going into the actual residential area.
Of course, this is our fault for living in the suburbs and not close to where we work. But, the school board is city wide, and if we moved every time one of us changed locations, we'd be moving constantly. The cost of selling/buying houses would have bankrupted us by now!
Early in my own career I worked downtown, and we tried living downtown. However, we did own a car (just one!) since we liked to vacation by car and other stuff. But, the continuous theft attempts and vandalism to our car drove us out. At least once a month (often more) I would find our car with a smashed window and broken dash. Thanks to a starter-interrupt anti-theft system, they never stole it, but the constant damage killed us financially.
The plan now is to simply leave the city for a small community. Jobs have been applied for...
