My mental block on sprawl

There's something that prevents me from understanding the motivations behind people who move to Charles Town, W. Va., an hour and a half away from their jobs in Washington and its closer-in suburbs. Yes, you can get much more house for your money, but will you ever see it?

I once had an hour-and-a-half commute -- it only lasted for two weeks before I moved down here from Baltimore, but it was unbearable. Leaving the house at 7:10, I would spend 20 minutes in a car, an hour on a train and 10 minutes on foot to get to my job. Leaving work at 5:30, I did the same thing in reverse, and I was lucky to make it back home by 7:15. Allowing for 7 hours of sleep, I had to get to bed by 11, which left me with a little under four hours to run errands, do housework that couldn't wait for the weekend and have a social life. If I had chlidren, they would have never seen me.

Among long-haul commuters, I was one of the lucky ones. With the train taking me most of the way to work, I could sleep on the train if I wanted to go out the night before, or I could do some of the reading that would have been done during my precious few hours awake at home. Had I drove, I would have been at the mercy of the traffic, ranting and cursing at other drivers, unable to relax and let someone else take charge.

Maybe I am one of a very few people who think this way, but I would pay more or settle for a smaller home closer in if I actually got to spend time in it. It's not a schools issue in the same way that it is for people leaving the city proper - Fairfax and Montgomery counties have some of the best schools in the country, while West Virginia, aside from the fact that new commuter towns' schools are buckling from the stress, has large swaths of Kreationism Kountry who vote for the people who buy the books.

Part of the problem with finding room in close-in areas for families is that outer-ring development takes away from funds that could be used for inner-ring suburbs in places like Virginia. It happens like this: developers put up a few thousand houses in Louduon County, once an outlying part of the Washington metroplex. People coming in on Loudoun's country roads start noticing congestion, so they demand the roads be widened. The state alleviates Loudoun's traffic, drawing more development and starving existing suburbs of the money they need to modernize and increase density to handle a growing population. Continue this for a few decades and you have people driving to work farther than they used to drive to go camping. It's madness.

ADDENDUM: The owners of property in Tyson's Corner, where they want to expand mass transit, show the benefit of "if you build it, they will come" over "if they come, you had better build it" transportation spending.