Ask Annie: husband's choice of public transit is taking hours away from our family every day

[lemonsharks]

Dear Annie: My husband is passionate about doing what we can as individual citizens to combat climate change. He believes the largest impact any one person can have is decreasing their driving. So, to do his part, he has started using the public transit system as much as possible.

Our city’s public transit is far from perfect and transforms what would be a 20-minute drive into a two-hour train/bus/bike trip. This has dramatically increased the amount of time he spends commuting.

I want to support his desire to be more eco-friendly, and I agree with his argument that using public transit more often will help increase ridership and, eventually, with luck, increase and improve service. But right now, it is taking a very long time. We have a small child, pets and a household to run. Every time he spends four hours to do something that could be completed in less than one, I feel so frustrated that he is choosing public transit and climate consciousness over his family, leaving me with more work to do.

How can I honor his desires and passions while also trying to strike a balance where I am not shouldering the extra work? -- Frustrated With Public Transit


Dear Frustrated: Props to your husband for his noble goal. When his humanitarian spirit starts affecting his personal relationships, however, it might be time for a compromise.

There are many ways to lead an eco-friendly life, and driving less is certainly one of them. Why not create a list of sustainable practices that do fit into your lifestyle? For example, you could start composting or stop using disposable plastic food containers.

On days where public transit is too much for you -- for example, when you have a pet and a baby in tow -- remind him that your household is doing its part in other ways. Then you can protect your time and still greenlight his green lifestyle.

Comments

[lemonsharks]

Sounds like husbando would rather have 4 hours on transit a day than 3 hours and 40 minutes tending to his home and family.

[sathari]

Cosigning. Hubs may indeed have some environmental sensibilities here, but LW at least gives the appearance that the timing is suspicious--- "small child" + "husband started this comparatively recently (when with COVID still being A Thing I would expect anyone at all not to want to be trapped in small, poorly ventilated spaces with strangers, unless of course their desire is to combat climate changing by helping COIVD kill as many people as it possibly can)" is that, especially what with the pandemic lockdown, hubs got a bellyful of "oh, noes, must parent the child I helped to create," and has now seized on climate change as an excuse to be anywhere but at home parenting. Now, I could be wrong, especially about the overall timeline--- I am admittedly extrapolating from the way LW describes the timing--- but basically, I completely agree with you here.

[torachan]

Yeah... He gets to spend that time on the bus doing whatever he wants and that's four hours less he's at home raising his kid. Pretty sure he's not entirely altruistically motivated here.

[jadelennox]

composting and using less plastic are tiny retail changes that fix nothing and create the illusion of individual change for a systemic problem. (Disclaimer: I do both. But I'm clear-eyed about their limitations.)

Taking public transit is also an individual retail choice, but it's one with a much larger footprint than the other two. So on that note, Annie's advice is garbage. Also she ignores the fact that LW isn't complaining about taking public transit herself; she's complaining about her husband taking time biking or taking the bus instead of driving so he can do more chores!

Better advice: "Your husband can make the moral choices that matter to him, but he can't make them for you. And you can't make them for him. You can divide the household responsibilities, and he can decide how to get his done. If he chooses to bike to the grocery store, maybe that means he has to stay up until 3AM folding laundry, or he has to use his play money to hire a kid to do the raking. You don't get to tell him he has to drive, but you do get to tell him that the pair of you agreed to split household responsibilities down the middle."

And don't take Annie's advice, or Husband might realize that actually effective environmentalism involves massive political activism and next thing you know he won't be around to bike the baby to day care because he'll have been arrested with Extinction Rebellion folks.

(Second disclaimer: I know most of us can't do real effective environmental activism. I also self-soothe with composting and farmer's markets and canvas tote bags. I am not shaming anyone who can't do those things, because that's literally the point: Annie is part of the system of trying to persuade us all that we can save the earth through capitalism and individualism. There's no evidence LW feels that way, to be fair; she's just exhausted that her biker husband isn't pitching in enough. I shame nobody in this situation except for Annie, and possibly Husband, depending on how he responds to a reasonable pitch from LW.)

[purlewe]

I agree with this. Annie didn't have any real help here.

[lethe1]

+1

[castiron]

Yours is much better advice.

I sympathize with LW. I spent a year without a car after divorcing my first husband; getting from work to daycare to home in the evening by bus took three hours. Biking would've cut it down to an hour and a half, but would've required going on roads with 40 mph speed limits and no bike lanes. Once I had a car, I could leave work, get the kid, and get home in 30 minutes. I was living a more environmentally friendly life without the car, but it was also a more stressful life, and I had no time for anything beyond the most basic household necessities.

I'm curious, though -- if Husband is really serious about the environment, has he gotten a vasectomy yet? On most sites I've seen where you can estimate your environmental footprint, having kids is the big footprint increaser.

[lethe1]

Yes, that was my first reaction: if Hubby was really concerned about the environment, he shouldn't have created that baby.

[lemonsharks]

• You can divide the household responsibilities, and he can decide how to get his done.*

I suspect that LW needs her husband at home for parenting duties during times when he is absent due to his commute. For example, cranky/overly energetic early evening little kid time or wake up the kids and get them ready for the day time.

I can also see “husband is awake until 3AM doing chores” leading to husband performing poorly at work and experiencing the consequences of that, which serves no one.

TBQH i think his concern for reducing his carbon footprint is a smokescreen for wanting to do less than his fair share of the homemaking.

I think it’s more than fair for LW to draw a line in the sand here: either figure out how to convince his boss to allow him to work from home 4 or 5 days a week; find a new job with a 20 minute or less commute by transit; or drive to work.

[cereta]

Yeah, I was going to say, childcare is not really a "chore" that you can make up for by staying up late, unless you have a colicky infant. Because of our relative job schedules, I spent much more time at home with our kid when she was tiny, and NGL, there were times when I resented his seeming determination to do anything other than hold the baby. (Note: things vastly improved when she got a little older and childcare didn't involve just holding her.)

I applaud the husband's idealism, but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that he prioritize time with family until the child is old enough not to need constant supervision.

[lemonsharks]

Edit: wrong thread

Hubs gets to make moral choices but not at the expense of doing an equitable amount of parenting.

[purlewe]

OK I get it. Husband wants to do his bit. Compromise might be (and only if the wife is interested) in meeting said husband part way. Say drop him off/pick him up at a terminal hub. It is a step closer to what he wants and doesn't take the full 2 hrs one way.

I agree tho that it sounds like he wants to have 4 hrs without family every day.

mass transit realllllly sucks most places. And even sucks in places it shouldn't suck (looking at you Baltimore with your terrible system to get to the DC area which is practically next door.) He either needs to find a compromise or he needs to drive half time to help out around home more.

[laurajv]

Assuming such a hub exists and is conveniently located, neither of which can be relied on to be the case. :/

[minoanmiss]

It's pretty telling that what husband chooses to give up to environmentalism is time that he could use for helping his busy wife with the small child and pets.

[lemonsharks]

+1,000

[harpers_child]

How's the quote go? "Yeah he's a feminist, but does he wash the dishes?"

[lemonsharks]

I_want_a_wife.1970

[laurajv]

I feel for the LW here. We used to live in a location where my bus to work took 30 minutes, but spouse's involved 2 or 3 busses (depending on which line arrived first) and took a minimum of 90 minutes. One of his coworkers, who owned a car, moved a few blocks from us and started giving him a lift to work in exchange for splitting the gas money -- it was a 10 minute drive.

If we'd had a small kid at the time and he'd chosen to bus when the ride was available, I would have been.........let's go with Extremely Not OK With That.

Husband is making trash choices that unfairly impact the LW. But Annie's answer is trash as well. A more serious discussion is called for (is this something husband can do 2x a week instead of every day? is it possible to move somewhere that makes mass transit or biking a more reasonable choice? etc)

[melannen]

Switching from car to transit commute helps even less if the transit commute is really long and inefficient. (In particular, it does nothing to help create a world where there are choices other than cars or long transit commutes. No, your husband doing it will not magically make the government realize it needs better transit options; it will at most convince them that what they have already works.)

LW if your husband is serious about this, he needs to be looking at changing either where he lives or where he works so he doesn't *have* to take several hours a day in commuting; changing to more condensed living patterns shaped by where transit actually *is* is an indispensible part of creating a world less dependent on individual cars.

Either way though, those choices are going to mean sacrifices - moving, switching to maybe a less-well-paying job, or spending hours a day on transit - and those are sacrifices that affect the whole family that he shouldn't be making on his own (and shouldn't be thinking he can make on his own!) You need to tell him that something that changes the pattern of your family life that dramatically needs to be a cooperative decision, and then talk over with him why it doesn't work for you.

If you are also serious about the importance of public transit, you should be working with him to think seriously about moving to a more transit-friendly neighborhood. And/or about taking that three hours a day of commute time and spending it on political activism instead of just sitting in a train car, which will have much more long-term usefulness.

[gingicat]

I actually gave up public transit because of family responsibilities and the fact that driving generally takes a third of the public transit time.

[lemonsharks]

I feel this so much.

Yeah, when I was commuting to a nearby suburb (an 4.5 mile commute), it took 90 minutes each way by transit.

The most efficient route took two busses and a train; or one bus, bus, one train, and a .75 mile/20 minute walk up a steep hill, sometimes over black ice/unshoveled sidewalks or in -50F wind chill/+100F heat index. Unlit at night.

It was a 15 minute commute by car in bad traffic.

Commuting from the far Northside of Chicago to downtown (8 miles) was 45+ exceptionally stressful minutes by train each way, but it was also an exceptionally stressful and expensive 45+ minutes by car. (Including cab/ride share)

[azurelunatic]

My 45 minute by car commute into Silicon Valley took about 3 hours if I did it the cheap way, less if I did it the expensive way with more hops, and each end was a tricky and bad connection.

Work wasn't interested in creating a "tech bus" (a scourge of San Francisco and Silicon Valley), which, good for them, but it did give our colleagues at Facebook etc. a commuting advantage. So more than one of us at work asked for a work shuttle between the nearest hub and work to solve the "last mile" problem, and we did eventually get one -- sadly, it didn't expand the hours that transit was available, but it did provide a direct route instead of something meandering with a lot of walking, and it did get a pretty good uptake.

[resonant]

I once had a 90-minute commute for a year, and I'll tell you what: Even if the husband were single and childless and not responsible for so much as a houseplant, this wouldn't be sustainable. One year, two years, during which he had no time to meet neighbors, have a hobby, take a walk, go out to a restaurant at a normal time of day, see daylight in the winter, and he'd be looking for either a new home or a new job.

This doesn't address the wife's very reasonable desire to have a spouse and co-parent rather than an unseen source of money and laundry, of course. Just means he'll be divorced first and then looking for a new job or a new home.

[joyeuce]

YMMV. I had a 2 hour commute in the job pre-child, and though I didn't like the early rising, the actual commute was fine - I could read or sleep. And I still managed to have hobbies, walk, see friends, etc.

[lemonsharks]

I think it depends on one's tolerance for being squished in with other people as well as how many transfers there are and how precarious those transfers are. Plus the work culture itself.

Two hours on one commuter train where you have a seat and entertainment is much more pleasant than a bus transfer to a train then transfer to a different train (all standing while the vehicle jerks around and starts/stops suddenly), followed by a 20 minute powerwalk up a steep hill while worrying about being late because of a reactionary and draconian attendence policy.

[lilysea]

I wonder if the family could buy a second-hand electric car as a compromise?

The price of second hand electric cars is going down all the time...

[ethelmay]

Vanpool might be another option. I take it telecommuting isn't.