If you thought your commute was long, consider Janeen Speer’s more than 670-kilometre trip to work.
Ms. Speer recently accepted an exciting new job in Vancouver. The hitch is that she and her family live in Calgary. Her solution? She’s decided to travel between the two cities, spending part of the week in Vancouver and her weekends at home.
As the new director of leadership and organizational development at Lululemon Athletica, Ms. Speer anticipates her new schedule will look something like this: Leave home about 5:30 a.m. on Mondays to catch a flight to Vancouver; be at her office by 8:30 (crossing the time zone allows her to gain an hour). Stay at a rented condo while in the city. On Thursday evenings, travel in reverse, returning to Calgary in time to tuck two daughters, ages 2 and 5, in bed.
Relocating the entire family to accommodate her job wasn’t a suitable option, she says, since her husband works in the oil and gas industry in Alberta.
“For us, this allows him to maintain the career that he’s worked really hard to build,” she says. “And, in our minds, it’s a feasible solution to give me also the opportunity that I’m looking for and not stunt my career.”
This unconventional commuter lifestyle is certainly not for everyone. But rather than sacrifice career opportunities or the comforts of home, some are dividing their time between two locations.
In the United States, media reports suggest that, spurred by the recession and limited employment opportunities, extreme commuting has become an attractive, albeit imperfect, option for Americans who don’t want to uproot their families and disrupt their personal lives. According to the last available data from the 2006 census, only about 1 per cent of Canadians worked in a different province than where they live. But there are signs extreme commuting is on the rise in Canada as well.
Camilla Jadhav, general manager of the Level Furnished Living extended-stay hotel in Vancouver, says the demand for rental suites from ultra-long-distance commuters seeking a regular place to stay during the work week is “absolutely huge.” Several of the hotel’s long-term clients commute from as far as Toronto each week, flying home on the weekends, she says.
At Toronto’s One King West Hotel & Residence, director of sales and marketing Matt Black says he’s also seen a growing clientele of extreme commuters. Part of the appeal, he suggests, is the ability to maintain a certain lifestyle that wouldn’t necessarily be possible if one were to relocate to a more expensive city for work.
“They’ve got their space, they’ve got their land, you know, you can have your two-car garage,” he says. “Trying to get something like that downtown, you’re going to be paying through the nose.”
The technology that allows employees to stay in touch with both work and family remotely as well as a work culture that now embraces greater flexibility also make extreme commuting more practicable.
Although the travelling can get tedious, extreme commuters say they find that the geographic division between their professional and domestic spheres allows them to better devote their energy to both.
Paul Milkman, a senior vice-president in technology at Toronto-Dominion Bank, says that as a result of his weekly travel between his office in Toronto and his home in Potomac, Md., he’s more focused when he’s on the job. When he’s in Toronto between Sunday and Thursday evenings, he’s able to work up to 12 hours a day, relatively uninterrupted, and on Fridays, he works from his U.S. home.
“My productivity is much higher,” says Mr. Milkman, who has been doing the commute for two years. “I don’t have to save up any social energy for family stuff, ’cause there isn’t any. That sounds sort of cold, but it’s true.”
