The biggest problem in many of these metro areas is that it’s almost impossible to serve a suburb-to-suburb commuter market with mass transit. You’re witnessing a harsh reality check for modern American suburbs.
Maybe if they’d gone step by step in the 1970s, with more routes (Metro) and more design into communities...it’d work.
I look at the method used in the Netherlands and Germany....with various ‘shadow’ communities that were connected via rapid rail, and they were always ahead of the game.
In the case of DC...they would be doing everyone a favor by moving 50-percent of the government agencies out sixty to a hundred miles from DC.
True. The automobile commute works well in smaller cities, but above a certain threshold, cities reach the point of diminishing returns. The D.C. area is far past that point.
A lot of the commuting is, as you suggest, suburb to suburb. So live in the suburb in which you work, or next door, or in the city if you work in the city. My standard advice to young people is to draw a circle a mile in circumference around their job. That's a walking commute. Then draw a five mile circumference circle. That's an easy bike commute, or a very short car commute provided you don't cross a river. Be sure that you know every neighborhood within those circles. Live in one of them.
There are great neighborhoods tucked away all over the area, and the city itself is gentrifying so fast it makes my head spin. There is no reason to live in Urbana and fight 270 twice a day except lack of local knowledge. The public schools are probably the biggest irresolvable problem, but tuition at the local Catholic school is probably less than what folks are spending on their commutes. If we moved to full school choice, game over.
I meant circles with a radius, not a circumference, of one and five miles, but you already figured that out. The point remains: there are almost certainly some pretty nice neighborhoods near your job. A lot of people don’t realize that because they’ve not looked around, and sometimes because an area just looks different from what they are used to. DC’s affordable housing is now on the east side, including the close-in PG County suburbs. They’re going to go through the same gentrification process that so much of DC has already experienced. It’s already begun. PG County has been a laughingstock for a long time. That’s going to change. Live in College Park or Hyattsville and take Metro, or live in Urbana and spend six hours a day in your car? The smart choice isn’t Urbana.