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Oakley resident Liz Oleski quietly seethes as she sits in a stew of cars on Highway 4 every morning and afternoon, hurrying -- in her head, at least -- to get to appointments at work or with her family.
"I always feel like I'm rushing," said Oleski, a surgical assistant who said it takes 65 to 70 minutes to get to her Lafayette office on a good day. "But you just sit there and you hope to roll a little faster."
Long commutes are a way of life for many Bay Area workers. Roughly 150,000 East Bay residents spent more than an hour traveling to their jobs each work day last year, according to figures released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau.
More than 16 percent of Contra Costa County workers and nearly 11 percent of Alameda County workers have commutes of more than an hour.
Contra Costa County residents such as Oleski and her suburban neighbors face the worst commutes in California and rank among the worst in the nation.
The mean one-way commute of Contra Costa residents -- the average travel time for everyone who did not work at home -- was 31.9 minutes, the longest in the state among populous counties.
Only sparsely populated Calaveras County, where some residents drive long distances from the slopes of the Sierra down to Stockton or Sacramento, had a
The fact that long commutes are so commonplace in the East Bay can mask some of their toll.
"You come home tired," said Brentwood Mayor Bob Taylor. "You're glad to walk through the door. The minute you think you have something planned, there's a tie-up on 580 or 680 or Vasco (Road). There's really no shortcut. You basically have to go down the same roads."
Brentwood's residents had an average commute of 42.5 minutes, the second-worst in the state after the Central Valley community of Los Banos.
Los Angeles County, though known for its iconic congestion, had commutes averaging less than a half-hour. Transit experts suspect that might be because job centers there are more spread out.
The latest commute figures come from the American Community Survey, a questionnaire the Census Bureau mails to about 3 million American households each year. One of the questions asks: "How many minutes did it usually take this person to get from home to work last week?"
The data released last week was aggregated over three years -- from 2006 through 2008 -- so estimates are more reliable and smaller cities with as few as 20,000 people can be included.
Long commutes are expensive and stressful for people, and they take a heavy toll on the environment, planners say. Long drives aggravate traffic congestion, smog, fine-particle pollution and production of global warming gases.
Most were not surprised about the outer East Bay's high-ranking for long commutes because many people move to suburbs far from job centers to find more affordable housing and, in some cases, a higher quality of life.
"I'm not surprised Contra Costa commutes are so long," said Stuart Cohen, executive director of Transform, an Oakland group that promotes sustainable development. "There is such a huge difference in housing prices between the urban core and outer suburbs."
Brentwood's mayor knows about the nightmarish commutes along Highway 4 and Vasco Road because he was one of those commuters. For more than 20 years, he made the trek from Brentwood to Union City and back, which can range from 50 to 70 miles each way depending on the route. As he drove, Brentwood grew -- from 28,000 people when he was commuting to 53,000 today.
Though they remain long compared to others, East Bay commutes have become shorter since 2000, a trend transportation officials have attributed to economic changes. Alameda County's average commute has dropped to 28 minutes from 30.8 minutes in 2000. Contra Costa's was 34.4 minutes in 2000. As the economy improves and employment grows, commute times are expected to grow again unless there are drastic changes to transit networks or lifestyles.
The longest commutes do not necessarily mean the longest drives.
Chris McGee spends from an hour and 20 minutes to two hours getting from Berkeley to his teaching job at San Francisco State, but he does so exclusively by public transit and walking. He enjoys it, too.
"It spares me the cost of owning a car," McGee wrote in an e-mail about his commute. "When I add up the expenses of fueling, maintaining, insuring, parking and paying tolls for an automobile, I can't figure out how that would even approximate being as economical as the way I do it."
Standing room only BART trains are common during commute hours, but there are usually seats available when McGee gets on the train at the North Berkeley station.
"Except on rare occasions, that's time that can be spent working, reading or just relaxing," McGee said.
The three counties served by BART have California's highest rate of people who take public transit to work. San Francisco led with 31.9 percent of its residents taking some kind of public transit to work, followed by Alameda County with 11.6 percent and Contra Costa with 9.6 percent.
Oleski said BART is not a reasonable option to replace her 32-mile drive, since she would still have to fight the traffic just to get to a station -- and her round trip would end up taking longer most days.
On the way home, she often rushes to take care of her 1-year-old so that her 9-year-old son can get to sports practice.
"My husband's a coach so I have to be here for the little one to make sure they're out the door in time for practice," she said.
For all the complaints about East Bay commutes, there are dozens of counties across the nation that fared worse, including seven that topped an average of 40 minutes, according to the survey. The longest average commute by county, 44.1 minutes, was in Pike County, Penn., considered by some officials to be at the farthest western reaches of the New York City metropolitan area.
That offers little consolation to commuters such as Kroleski, a state employee who spends his 37-mile, hour-plus drive home imagining what to do with the rest of the day -- only to have 90 minutes or less before he must go to sleep.
"The brightest moment of my entire day is when I get home and open up the garage door," he said.
That's when Sparky, his 22-year-old terrier, welcomes him back to the house.
Staff writer Denis Cuff contributed to this report.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey
