Commuting By Plane to Work

The L.A.Times reports:

Like thousands of other California workers, Ann Inman spends more than two hours getting to work, trekking westward from her suburban dream house to a high-paying job closer to the urbanized coast.

But Inman isn't battling bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 101 Freeway. She's aboard a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to San Jose, preparing for the first of eight days of mostly 10-hour shifts as a trauma nurse at Stanford University hospital.


When she's not at work, she crashes in a shared, no-frills, one-bedroom apartment near campus, 350 miles and a state line away from her husband back home.

"It's very intense for me, especially because I don't like to fly," said Inman, 60. "But I can make more money here than anyplace else, and I'm kind of getting used to it."

Blame a decade of soaring home prices in the Silicon Valley and other parts of California for the proliferation of what could be dubbed sleepover commuters. Working in a wide range of professions and trades, all that many of the new extreme commuters have in common are flexible schedules and a cheap place to stay when they're away from home, typically with friends or in one of the "commuter rooms" being advertised in the Bay Area.

It's too bad California has limited the supply of land for building homes.