Another Chicago move thread: Bobos in gridlock?

[ole69]

18 minutes, and on a schedule! That sounds nice...

[jsk1983]

Have you considered Evanston? It's a suburb but has a pretty large downtown and is probably the most vibrant suburban downtown by far. Its on a different train line so you'd probably have to drive though. Not even sure how much time this would save.

[tomcho]

Originally Posted by ole69

18 minutes, and on a schedule! That sounds nice...

19 minutes, bad math on my part averaging inbound/outbound times.

[chet everett]

I think many folks who have done commutes where "one phase" exceeds the magic 45 minutes will agree it sucks, when there are "multiple steps" and the total time for each morning and evening consumes more than two hours it goes beyond suckage into mental anguish.

At that point many people start to consider moving to another home or finding a new job.

I know DOZENS of people that went through that kind of thing -- maybe they tried a ten minute walk to a twenty minute El ride to another ten minute walk to a forty minute Metra ride to a fifteen minute bus ride. Maybe they switched out the first 30 minutes on the front end for a 20 minute bicycle ride and then a bicycle ride that washed with the shuttle on the other end. Works until you get soaked in a couple of rain storms... Maybe they carpool for amlittle, until their carmates get frazzled / find new jobs. Then they go to driving and the whole trip, including hunting for parking park in Wicker Park, is still just over an hour and ten moat morning, until winter hits and they get stuck in a few snow stomas and the trip from Deerfield to Bucktown stretches from 5:30 until nearly 9:00PM and then they whole reason for having cool places to catch a band or something seems impossible...

If we had better linkages with the various commuter lines, less harsh weather, more densely packed employers the options for city-to-bur might not be so hard to assemble a tolerable commute, but putting 12 hours into what is supposed to be a "job" leaves no time for "city living" in too many cases. Through in the fact that MOST suburbanites do have school age kids and little time for the kinds of "non kid friendly" pursuits and it is NOT EASY for somebody w/o kids to enjoy a suburban job...

[tkassum]

Originally Posted by jsk1983

Have you considered Evanston? It's a suburb but has a pretty large downtown and is probably the most vibrant suburban downtown by far. Its on a different train line so you'd probably have to drive though. Not even sure how much time this would save.

Hi JSK. I did consider that but I don't really believe there's that much incremental time savings. It's about 30-45 minutes from my office and apparently in traffic the drive to it is fairly rough. Thanks for the suggestion though!

[nikitakolata]

Originally Posted by tkassum

Hi JSK. I did consider that but I don't really believe there's that much incremental time savings. It's about 30-45 minutes from my office and apparently in traffic the drive to it is fairly rough. Thanks for the suggestion though!

You are totally right about that. I lived in Evanston for 3 years and while I loved it for a lot of reasons, it simply has no expressway access. Getting to the expressway always felt like it took forever. I didn't have to drive to work, so it wasn't an everyday issue for me, but for example, visiting my parents in St. Charles (another suburb with no expressway access) was just a total pain in the a**.

Plus, if that area of Glenview isn't doing it for you, I don't think downtown Evanston would either... The benefit to Evanston though is the purple line, which makes going downtown (even during non-rush hours since you connect to the red line) for fun pretty easy. Given that I work in the loop and the housing prices in Evanston have finally come down, if I could sell my house in Humboldt Park, I would move back to Evanston in a heartbeat, but that's cause many of my friends are still there. Oh, and my favorite restaurant, Tapas Barcelona... I could eat about 5000 of their bacon wrapped dates, yum.

[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by nikitakolata

Oh, and my favorite restaurant, Tapas Barcelona... I could eat about 5000 of their bacon wrapped dates, yum.

How do those compare to the chorizo stuffed dates at Avec?