Strong chance I'll end up in Auburn (Seattle, Kirkland: crime, buying a home)

[revelated]

Buying a home. The question is the commute. I work in Seattle, since downtown Seattle unfortunately is the place you go if you want to make good wages (and don't intend to work at Microsoft).

Currently, the daily commute from Bothell (which is nice, reasonably crime free and quiet, but NOT designed for snow conditions, has TOO MANY churches in the wrong areas and has an annoying tendency to chase good businesses out) to Seattle is consistently 40-60 minutes, assuming no accidents. Even if the estimate says less than 40 taking the 520, by the time I get near Stewart/Denny, nearly an hour has passed. Never fails. I'm done with all that. If it's going to be an hour commute, I want to be able to predict AND verify that hour and not have it be way off like it is now.

I also am done paying for the 520 when it doesn't really benefit, and I'm tired of the 405 and its severe lack of offramps north of Kirkland.

The Sounder train out of Auburn to Seattle has a nice 30-minute quote. Unfortunately, it's a 45-minute walk from the train station to my work and/or a 23-minute bike or bus ride. So I end up at the SAME hour, despite me taking a train which has few stops and is going at least twice as fast as driving from Bothell! That's not even counting the extra 10 minutes it'd take to get to the Auburn train station.

So...in terms of TIME SPENT ONLY...is it fair to say that, assuming I were to buy in Auburn, me leaving my house at 7am would get me to Seattle and to my job the same time it would be for me to take the train and walk or otherwise connect to get to work? Because by my calculations there simply is no fast way to getting anywhere in downtown Seattle if you're not already living close to it (a co-worker who lives in Ballard took 1 HOUR by bus to get to work one day!)

[Hemlock140]

I have an employee that takes the train, after driving to Auburn from Lake Tapps. At this end there is the bus from the train station to the office, which runs only every half hour, so with good timing the total trip is an hour and 15 minutes. When driving it's just under an hour, but that's starting work at 7am, add a lot of time to that leaving at 7am when traffic peaks. Also, we have free parking, if you don't and drive, it can be over $10/day to park. Probably 35 minutes is possible late at night, but if you are going home 3-6pm I would think it will take longer than the train to drive.