Earning More, Commuting Farther

In the 15 largest U.S. cities, the more money you make, the more time you spend commuting to work

By Prashant Gopal

• View Slide Show

David Campaña's 90-minute commute from his Springfield (N.J.) apartment to his job in lower Manhattan—first by car, then by subway, and finally by foot—might sound like an ordeal. But the 37-year-old chief technology officer for the New York City Finance Dept. loves his commute.

He reads on the train and looks forward to "walking amongst a million strangers" on Manhattan's streets each day. Campaña, whose previous job was close to his Springfield home, is reluctant to move closer to work because his two young children would have to switch school districts and move from a spacious 2,600-square-foot rental apartment in New Jersey to a cramped Manhattan unit. (He also has a large weekend house with a yard in Pennsylvania that he probably would have sold already if the real estate market were in better shape.)

"If you want your money to go further," Campaña said, "you have to live farther away."

Bigger Cities Mean Longer Commutes

New York's professionals spend more time traveling to and from work than those in any other large metro area, according to Seattle's PayScale.com, which provides real-time salary information to individuals and employers. BusinessWeek.com worked with PayScale to rank the 15 largest metros based on the typical commute time for a worker earning more than $100,000 a year. The typical one-way commute in New York for a worker in that salary range was 39.3 minutes compared with 23.7 minutes in Minneapolis, which had the shortest commute time. (Of course, a New Yorker listening to an iPod or reading a book on a train might have a longer but more pleasant commute than a Minnesotan driver battling daily traffic).

The metro areas with the largest populations generally have the most time-consuming commutes. New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia—where commutes for high-paid professionals are the longest—are densely populated and pricey places with large urban cores and suburbs located relatively far away. The Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area has a relatively small population. It also has historic mansions within the city (some of them with lake views) that appeal to well-to-do parents. And many large employers in Minneapolis and Phoenix—which had the second-best commute times—are spread out beyond the core. General Mills (GIS) and 3M (MMM), for example, are located in the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul, so workers might choose to live in the suburbs and still have a short commute. Phoenix has the benefit of fast, wide highways to get commuters around quickly.

But it's not necessarily ideal to have jobs spread across suburbs like butter. Traffic is horrendous around the Washington (D.C.) area because people are not just traveling to and from the city, they're commuting from suburb to suburb. Most Americans have suburb-to-suburb commutes these days, which explains the heavy traffic outside of cities that many suburbanites are familiar with.

The Compensation Connection

The study also suggests that there is a link between salaries and the time people spend in a car, bus, or train each morning. The poorest people in these urban metro areas have the shortest commutes. In the Boston metro area, for example, people earning less than $20,000 a year commute typically commute 17.3 minutes each way compared with people earning $50,000 to $60,000, who commute 30.8 minutes. Commute times in the city of Boston don't rise much for people earning more than $60,000. Similarly, in New York City commute times climb steadily as annual salaries rise before peaking for employees earning $110,000 a year. The commute time peak in Los Angeles is $60,000; it's $70,000 in Detroit; and it's $30,000 in the vast Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area, where the typical commute time for wealthy workers is just 26.4 minutes.