Driven to Extremes

Inside, Julie was waiting for him. Julie Turner has known her husband for 27 years, since she was in seventh grade and he in 10th grade in Columbia City, Ind., where they started dating when she was a high school sophomore. They have been married for 16 years, and, in addition to their sleeping children, they have a black Labrador retriever, Saxon, who was bounding around Marc as he plopped onto their living room couch and wearily leaned his head back.

"It took a while longer tonight," he said sideways to his wife, shrugging. "I said I hadn't been getting home until nine o'clock."

"You've almost never been home before 10," she said, taking a seat alongside him. "You usually haven't gotten home until 11. I've had grown-up parties, and you wouldn't walk in until we were cleaning up at 10."

"But I wanted to be there. It was just --"

"Past 10," she sliced in. She explained her frustrations: "I know we have unusual lives. And we thought, mistakenly, that this, the way we were living, the commute, everything, would work. It hasn't . . . The commute was not the original cancer, but the commute became a big part of it . . . It's been part of a hole in our relationship."

Marc leaned back and chuckled. "How are we still married?"

Julie looked him over. She managed a smile. "I've been asking myself the same thing over the last year."

WHY DO THEY DO IT?

No sure cure exists for commuters' burdens, other than to give up their lengthy drives -- and few of the afflicted feel able to do that, either because they can't afford comparable housing closer to their jobs or because they want to live far from urban sprawl. The result is that average commute times, and the numbers of long-distance commuters, keep growing in America. According to Census statistics, about 10 percent of commuting Americans are traveling 60 minutes or more, averaging 82 minutes a trip. Marc Turner is part of an ever-expanding group dubbed by the Census Bureau as "extreme commuters," American workers whose average one-way commute to their jobs is 90 minutes or more, statistics say, and whose ranks roughly doubled between 1990 and 2000 to more than 3 million, or a little more than 3 percent of all commuters. And Turner had an additional burden on weekday mornings: He was driving toward the Washington metro area, which itself has the second-longest commuting times in the country, behind only New York.

Most extreme commuters live south or west of the Metro area, where many have realized their dreams of more space and affordable housing. That's also where to find the Washington area's most horrendous gridlock, which sometimes stretches clear to West Virginia, an increasingly popular commuter starting point. In no other state have commute times soared as significantly, according to the Census statistics. The average one-way commute that began in West Virginia steadily climbed from 21 to 26 minutes between 1990 and 2000, about a 25 percent increase, which sounds more modest than it is, given the number of locals who still have brief rides.

"From the day people move out beyond the [Washington metro] suburbs to a place like West Virginia, their commute is going to increase a few minutes every year, because that area is one of the highest growth areas in the country," said Alan Pisarski, a transportation consultant and author of Commuting in America III, published by the Transportation Research Board of the Academy of Sciences.

There is a measure of social inevitability to the long treks. "A lot of people like to move away from crowded areas," Pisarski said. "They associate the move with success . . . And cellphones are slightly ameliorating factors; people can at least get some business done and stay in touch with their family . . . They see themselves as net winners, especially financially."