A growing share of Boston-area workers are slogging dozens of miles to get to their jobs, according to federal data.
For many, long-distance commuting presents far more costs than just wasted time: exhaustion, stress, turned-down get-togethers, restricted social lives.
In 2013, about 18 percent of people working within a four-mile radius of Boston City Hall commuted at least 25 miles to get to their jobs, according to census data.
By 2023, the share of workers commuting at least 25 miles to Boston’s urban core climbed to roughly 20.6 percent — an increase of more than 52,000 people. The share of workers commuting at least 50 miles rose from roughly 6 percent in 2013 to 7.5 percent in 2023, about a 27 percent jump. Those with the longest treks largely arrived from Boston’s west and southwest.
Nationwide, the average commuter last year spent about 27 minutes en route to their job, according to the census. The share of workers traveling an hour or more has risen steadily over the years.
Long commutes are, for many, a kind of compromise: a workable, if far from ideal, way of balancing their professional goals, economic limits, family commitments, and other personal preferences.
Some settle into lengthy, multileg transit journeys. Others stare down Greater Boston’s infamously clogged road network and, with resignation, make the drive.
“It’s clear that a significant portion of the population of greater Boston is constantly considering either moving further out of the urban core to find more affordable housing and stay within the region, or moving out of state altogether,” said Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators, a public policy research group.
A 2017 report about long-distance commuting patterns in the Boston area, written by the city’s regional planning organization, noted that the bulk of Boston workers with lengthy commutes tended to be highly educated professionals earning middle-to-high incomes.
Workers in this echelon, the report surmised, tend to work specialized jobs that offer more flexible schedules, such as remote days, sparing workers from grueling five-day commutes.
For many New England professionals, the conveniences of both working and homeowning in the Boston area are little more than an aspiration, one that, over the years, has been dangled further and further out of reach, said Adam Guren, a housing economist at Boston University.
“It doesn’t surprise me that people are moving farther and farther away,” Guren said.
Some Boston-area workers have pitched their tents in the city’s far-flung outskirts — Rhode Island, southern New Hampshire, southern Maine, distant parts of Massachusetts — in an attempt to reconcile stability, comfort, and opportunity.
Nicole Eaton and her family relocated to Providence in 2021, their condo in East Boston having become too cramped. Three-bedroom spaces in walkable areas, she said, were hard to come by. So they moved southwest.
When classes are in full swing, Eaton, a 46-year-old history professor at Boston College, travels to campus an average of three or four times a week. The typical commute — a bus ride to the commuter rail, a train ride north, a transfer to the Green Line, and a walk to campus — takes about two and a half hours, she said.
“It can be really exhausting,” Eaton said. On some days, between commuting and tending to a 7-year-old daughter, “I end up having no time at home that I’m not sleeping or prepping to go to campus.”
The journey is also sapping Eaton’s social life.
“I did kind of have a vision of academic life when I went to grad school, which is that you would walk or bike to campus, that you would be having dinners with your colleagues and visiting guests, and that rich cross-pollination of talking about ideas with people,” she said. “I think I kind of retreated into the nuclear family because of this longer commute.”
More conveniently located jobs in her field are lacking, Eaton said.
“We may just leave the country,” she said, mentioning her husband is from Serbia. “We think about it often.”
Kathryn Lamontagne, a 46-year-old senior lecturer at Boston University, moved back to her hometown of Westport, just inside the Massachusetts border with Rhode Island, in 2015 to help care for sick parents.
She’s fond of transit but feels like she can’t count on the T’s speed or reliability. So Lamontagne drives, usually departing at 5:15 a.m. and arriving in just under two hours.
“If it was every day, it would be impossible,” Lamontagne said.
Lamontagne sees “no Boston” in her future, in part because of cost, in part because Westport offers all the comforts and conveniences of community — her son’s school is a few towns over; her parents, who often take care of the kid, live nearby.
Ailing loved ones and grueling rents pushed Sam Herec, an engineer working at a speaker manufacturer based in the North End, to return home to Plymouth last year. To get to the office, he usually drives to the Kingston commuter rail stop, rides about an hour north to South Station, and walks the remaining stretch — about two hours altogether.
Herec, 35, has been passively scouting a return to Boston, or somewhere close, but hasn’t found many suitable options.
“If you want to not rent forever, you have to be able to try to get some savings,” he said, adding that the fatiguing commutes have been “sort of a drain” on his social life.
Quick and easy solutions for this kind of dynamic aren’t close at hand, experts said.
Boston-area municipalities can loosen housing regulations to jump-start construction and, in time, ease the shortage, but many efforts to do so are politically fraught and sputtering.
Modernizing the T’s dated commuter rail infrastructure could also bolster transit connections, experts said. The T plans to deploy electric trains along the Fairmount Line, connecting downtown Boston to Hyde Park, by 2028, but a wholesale fleet replacement seems ever further off.
McNeilly, like Herec and Lamontagne, said they’d initially moved home to care for sick loved ones.
McNeilly taught their final class of the semester on a recent cold, rainy night in December. Their blue 2012 Ford Focus waited for them in the parking garage after class.
McNeilly hoped they wouldn’t encounter a crash on their ride home, as they had earlier in the week, but surrendered to the possibility.
“If there’s any sort of delay, then, oh well,” McNeilly said. “What’re you gonna do.”
McNeilly folded into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and drove off.
Jaime Moore-Carrillo can be reached at [email protected].
