THINK you’ve got a rotten commute? Meet Joseph Collorafi. Each morning at 5, while you’re probably still snug in your bed, Collorafi is leaving his home in the upstate town of Guilderland, N.Y. First he’ll drive to the Albany-Renssellaer train station to catch the 6:20. If it’s on time, that will get him into Penn Station at 8:43. From there he’ll grab the 1 train to Houston Street, usually arriving at work around 9 a.m.
The total time door to door: four hours.
A benefi ts administrator for the regional offi ce of the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Collarafi says he puts up with the Odyssey-like slog four days a week because he loves his work, and he and his wife want to live near their children and grandchildren, while avoiding city rents.
“I couldn’t get the same job (upstate), so you do what you gotta do,” he says.
New Yorkers have the longest average commute in the country, at 38 minutes, according to a 2006 study by the Transportation Research Board. And the study found that “extreme commutes,” those lasting longer than 90 minutes each way, are on the rise.
While fi gures are hard to come by, there’s some evidence that the number of local long-haulers has risen in recent years, as booming housing prices have sent New Yorkers farther and farther afield in search of affordable space.
Anne Noonan, a spokeswoman for Adirondack and Pine Hill Trailways bus lines, says they’ve seen a steady increase in demand for service from the Catskills to the city for the past “eight or nine years, but particularly following September 11.” Towns like Kingston (2 ½ hours away) and New Paltz (two hours) have seen a 30 percent increase in service in the last five years.
The story’s the same in Eastern Pennsylvania, according to Ted Patton of the Martz Group, a bus line that carries commuters from the Poconos to Port Authority. Patton says ridership has increased 3 percent each year for the past three years.
The ride stuff
Among those who make the trek from Pennsylvania is Andy Thom, who rides the bus every day from Bethlehem to his job at Curious Pictures, near Astor Place. His day starts early.
“If I get the 5:35 bus, that gets me into the city in under two hours because that’s the express,” explains Thom, a supervising director for the animated series “Little Einsteins.” “So that’s a good day, but it’s a tradeoff because I leave so early. Normally I get up around 6 o’clock and I’m on the 6:55 bus. That gets me in to the city about 9:15.”
From Port Authority, Thom rides the N or R train to Astor Place, adding another 15 minutes.
It’s a daily grind he could do without, but Bethlehem is his hometown, and Thom says he’s there to stay.
“We have a 3,100-square-foot house, and we paid just over $400,000 for it. You can’t find that anywhere in the city.”
He passes the time by watching movies his wife won’t watch at home, mostly “monster movies, B movies.” And he gets to read the newspaper cover to cover, something that can be tough to accomplish at home with two kids.
His commute is decidedly not work time, though – and it’s also not for socializing.
“You can tell the people who don’t commute daily. They’re chatting away and making friends. (For me) it’s not a happy place.”
Collorafi’s trek is quite the opposite. He’s found ways to use his commute as an extension of his job, turning the Amtrak café car into an impromptu outreach event.
“I wear my VA tag around my neck and people ask questions,” he says. “I educate a lot of people on veterans’ entitlements.”
He’s not the only one getting chatty in the café car. Jonathan Sherry, who also rides the Empire line between Albany and Penn Station, says he’s part of a group of long-haul commuters who “share wine and occasionally have parties” there, and even get together off the train on occasion.
Sherry, director of IT for an entertainment licensing company, travels from Rhinecliff to Union Square Monday through Friday, a journey that takes about five hours and 20 minutes round-trip. It also eats up around $700 every month, but he says his lifestyle in West Saugerties justifies the time and money.
“My wife and I are both crowd-phobic, and we put up with New York City from 1981 to 1999. Upstate is so beautiful and peaceful that the commute is worth it, for a time.”
Thomas Carpenter, an Ulster County resident who drives more than two hours each way to The Bronx three times a week, likewise sees his lifestyle as a temporary compromise. He’d like to find work closer to his home in Krumville, but he says he “couldn’t find anything comparable in terms of salary” to his job as a system security coordinator for Affinity Health Plan.
“I don’t want to uproot my family,” he says. “My home is paid for, and my expenses are much less up there. I don’t see this as the rest of my career life, but at least in the short term.”
Cost of living is certainly a consideration for Krista Savard, who rides the train from Fairfield, Conn., into Manhattan every day for her job as an executive assistant at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
“I have friends who live in the city now, and it’s so expensive,” she says. “I’d like to one day be able to buy something instead of just renting and throwing money out the window.”
Savard leaves her house by 6:48 a.m. (yes, she has it down to a science), parks behind her dad’s store near the train station (a money saver) and catches the 7:08 to Grand Central. She arrives around 8:30, in time to walk a few blocks to Madison Avenue, where she gets on a private shuttle to the company’s offices on 26th Street, between 11th and 12th avenues.
The same trip in reverse usually gets Savard home by 8 p.m., which seriously cuts into her social life. Since she aims to be in bed by 10, Savard doesn’t go out much during the week. She tries to squeeze a lot into every weekend, from spending time with family and friends to running the errands she didn’t have time for during the week. Saturdays and Sundays are her chance “to not have a schedule. I live by the clock all during the week,” she says.
Slave to a schedule
Robert Sims remembers what it’s like to live by the train schedule. A former extreme commuter, Sims says he hated knowing departure times by heart and feeling “like I had this clock in my head that I was constantly racing against.”
A post-doctoral fellow doing cancer research, Sims had changed jobs to work with his mentor at the NYU Medical Research Center, which meant traveling more than four hours round-trip each day from his home in Freehold, N.J.
“I thought I could do it for two or three years, but I couldn’t. It was brutal.”
One problem was that he “just wasn’t getting enough work done.” Another factor was the birth of his first child last September. Fed up after three months, he and his wife sold their house and moved to a two-bedroom in the East 20s.
“I have more time now to be with my wife and son,” he says. “That’s how I measure quality of life.”
Wanting to spend more time with his family likewise caused Paul Speaker to put the brakes on his extreme commute. President of the division that develops online video content for Time Inc.’s magazines, he was living in the Poconos and traveling into Manhattan every day.
“It became a five-hour-a-day commute. When I first moved out there, people would say, ‘Boy that seems really far,’ and you say, ‘It’s not that bad – it’s only an hour and a half.’ But the reality is, door to door, it takes at least two hours.”
Speaker and his wife, Olenka, agreed he would come home every night, no matter how late he left work, to avoid creating “an environment where I was living in the city and coming out on weekends to be with my family,” he says. Sometimes that pact found him arriving home at 2:30 a.m. and waking up at 5 to start the trip all over again.
So he moved his family to Short Hills, N.J., and “bought about three hours a day of my life back,” he says. Now he drives his daughters to school, and even makes it home for dinner two or three days a week. “That never used to happen,” he says.
For his part, Joseph Collorafi, who is 60, plans to keep it up for “at least three and not more than six” years. Luckily, he seems to have the right outlook for that kind of longevity.
“We adapt very quickly,” he says of himself and his fellow commuters. “When a train breaks down and you’re sitting there for an hour, and then they tell you that they’re sending an engine to pull you back to Penn Station, it’s very easy to get frustrated and irate. But you know what? These people take it all in stride.”
Krista Savard
Executive assistant at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia
Hometown: Fairfield, Conn.
Length of commute: 2 hours
Wakes up at: between 5:15 and 6:05 a.m.
Arrives home at: 8 p.m.
Route: car, Metro-North train, company shuttle bus
Monthly commuting costs: $301 for train pass
Passes the time by: Eating, sleeping, listening to iPod, reading magazines.
Andy Thom
Supervising director for the kids show “Little Einsteins”
Hometown: Bethlehem, Pa.
Length of commute: 2.5-plus hours each way
Wakes up at: 6 a.m.
Gets home at: 9:30 p.m.
Route: Car, bus, subway
Monthly commuting costs: Around $525
Passes the time by: reading the newspaper, watching DVDs.