Some employees scrap the car in favor of other methods like bikes, even planes
Don’t gripe to your colleagues in the next office about how long it takes you to get to work. Chances are they’re racking up hefty commutes of their own.
Grappling with mass transit breakdowns and delays, creeping along bumper-to-bumper on the Garden State Parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike, and adjusting for unpredictable vagaries of weather, Rutgers staff and faculty may travel up to three hours each way to arrive at their campus workplace.
But many of these marathon commuters find the trip has an upside – or they at least they try to make the best of it..
For Susan Feinberg, an associate professor at Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick, the commute from Washington, D.C., to Newark means getting work done in peace on one of Amtrak’s quiet cars. “It’s like being in a library for three hours,” she says.
Feinberg arrives at the beginning of each week, teaches three days and rents in the Ironbound district, returning home Wednesday afternoons.
Megan Roesch, a career management specialist at the Rutgers Business School working in Newark, uses her one-hour commute each way from Clark to make calls using her Bluetooth® headset and plan her workday. She advises her fellow commuters to look on the positive side. “Use the time to think and be by yourself,” Roesch says. “Sometimes being by yourself gives you the best thoughts and soothes the soul.”
Long commutes are often a compromise. Employees are willing to accept the burden of traveling long distances if their current situation offers certain benefits, be it an affordable house or excellent school district. And many feel the trade-off is well worth it.
The U.S. Census bureau has a name for them – extreme commuters – those who spend at least 90 minutes commuting to work and back. New Jersey is among 10 states with the highest percentages of extreme commuters.
Tom Izbicki, a librarian at the Alexander Library on the New Brunswick Campus, doesn’t relish taking three different trains during his two-hour commute. Nor does he enjoy leaving his home in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, at 6 a.m. and returning 13 hours later. But the benefit is that he is able to spend time with his wife, a librarian at Haverford College near Philadelphia, every night. Izbicki uses his commute as an opportunity to unwind, reading mysteries and books he plans to review for library and academic journals. When the need arises, once or twice a month, he stays at the University Inn on the Douglass Campus.
Three years ago, Betza Feliciano-Berrios traded in her 12-mile commute to the registrar’s office in Camden to a 60-mile commute when she was offered the position of assistant dean of recruitment and student services for the University College Community in New Brunswick. Moving further north was never an option because she wanted to keep her children established in their lives.
“I felt it would be easier for me to commute than to uproot my family,” she says.
Feliciano-Berrios considers herself fortunate to have an arrangement that allows her to work occasionally from home or in the Cherry Hill Public Library. She calls remote access “a blessing” and appreciates being able to sleep a little later in the morning – she’s usually on the road by 6:45 a.m. – and being able to save money on gas.
Economic realities play a large role in commuters’ lives. Pam Scott, a laboratory researcher, drives 50 miles each way from Easton, Pennsylvania, to Piscataway, because housing prices closer to campus are too expensive. “If I could have found a place to live closer, I would have,” Scott says.
But the cost of the commute itself can add up. “When gas was over $2 a gallon, I was paying more than $300 a month for gas. Ouch,” says Feliciano-Berrios. She is giving serious thought to switching to a greener car to ease those costs – and to inflict “less torture on the environment.”
J.T. Barbarese, an associate professor of English in Camden, says his costs for crossing the bridge from Philadelphia every day recently rose to $20 a week, twice the amount he paid when he started commuting in 1997. Ken Perron, who drove for more than a decade from Philadelphia to the Newark Campus, where he is a fitness coordinator, switched to the train because of high gas prices. Though he now takes two trains, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) and NJ Transit, in his journey to work, he saves money on tolls and on wear and tear.
Whether they do it by train, car, bus, or some combination of the above, seasoned commuters try to make the best of it and can be creative in their commuting solutions. Assistant professor Chung-chieh Shan, for example, bikes for 10 minutes from his home in New York City to Penn Station, takes the bike on the train to New Brunswick, and then bikes from the train station to his office. Despite the hour-and-a-half journey each way, he enjoys his active form of transportation, which he says saves him regular visits to the gym.
Montague Kern, an associate professor in the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, spends four days a week living in a Highland Park apartment and three days in Washington, D.C. She also lived for one semester in the University Inn on Douglass Campus after she gave up her apartment to go on sabbatical.
Simon Reich, director of the Division of Global Affairs in Newark, goes above and beyond the average commuter – he does it by air.
Every Monday, Reich, previously a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, gets up at 5 a.m. to catch his flight from Pittsburgh. Once at the airport, he has to deal with delays due to everything from inclement weather to a missing pilot. The plus side of the arrangement is that he can get work done. During the week, Reich sublets an apartment in Manhattan before going home on Thursday or Friday.
The arrangement is only temporary, and Reich looks forward to moving closer to Newark.
For the most part, members of this hardy band of commuters are resigned to the large chunks of time that travel cuts out of their week.
“Why do I do it?” says Feliciano-Berrios. “I love Rutgers, and New Brunswick has so much to offer,” she says. The commute also helps her relate to Rutgers students. “I advocate for working professional and adult students who sacrifice their precious time commuting to be at Rutgers.”
And sometimes commuting can actually be fun, carrying with it an element of surprise. Anonda Bell, Interim Director and Associate Curator of the Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers–Newark, recalls her magical encounter with the 18th-century during her journey home to East Harlem one night.
She had worked until about 9 p.m. and during the last leg of her commute about 20 musicians in period garb boarded the subway playing musical instruments. “Everybody seemed to be really enjoying it,” she says. Since then, she’s seen break dancers and a mariachi band entertain travelers.