Public transportation does take longer. On most routes a lot (x2-x3). But this is wall-clock time, not lost life-time. At least it doesn’t need to be.
The schedule in Hamburg is very good mostly. Often every 10 minutes with good connection. The pricing is good and you get get almost everywhere with at most 5mins to the station (bus or train) by foot. It is publicly funded. Note that in Europe the cities are old thus not built for cars esp. in the inner cities.
For me this means that I take the commute heavily into account when evaluating jobs.
The last years my commute was as follows: 1min. to the bus, avg. 5min. waiting, 35min. bus ride (in almost all cases with a laptop on my lap), 1min to the office. Compare this to a car commute which would likely take 20min. (but might be longer due to traffic, ice scraping, parkinglot,...) of which no part allows for productive or free time (I admit that some people like to drive, so for some this might count as fun/free time).
If you can bill by the hour then this time alone is worth much. If you can’t you could still think/work on job topics and thereby produce better results and earn better paid jobs.
Not many people report enjoying inner city commutes, but if you enjoy driving it might be worth commuting by car in order to order to enjoy leisure driving on the weekend.
I have stuck to public transport usage in the UK , although I have to say that the French, German, Belgian and Dutch systems are exquisitely blissfully in comaprison to what we have.
Public transportation does take longer. On most routes a lot (x2-x3). But this is wall-clock time, not lost life-time. At least it doesn’t need to be.
The schedule in Hamburg is very good mostly. Often every 10 minutes with good connection. The pricing is good and you get get almost everywhere with at most 5mins to the station (bus or train) by foot. It is publicly funded. Note that in Europe the cities are old thus not built for cars esp. in the inner cities.
For me this means that I take the commute heavily into account when evaluating jobs. The last years my commute was as follows: 1min. to the bus, avg. 5min. waiting, 35min. bus ride (in almost all cases with a laptop on my lap), 1min to the office. Compare this to a car commute which would likely take 20min. (but might be longer due to traffic, ice scraping, parkinglot,...) of which no part allows for productive or free time (I admit that some people like to drive, so for some this might count as fun/free time).
If you can bill by the hour then this time alone is worth much. If you can’t you could still think/work on job topics and thereby produce better results and earn better paid jobs.
See the boring advice for more on this.
Not many people report enjoying inner city commutes, but if you enjoy driving it might be worth commuting by car in order to order to enjoy leisure driving on the weekend.
I have stuck to public transport usage in the UK , although I have to say that the French, German, Belgian and Dutch systems are exquisitely blissfully in comaprison to what we have.
I wonder what parts of Belgium you’re talking about . I find it horrible, generally speaking.