Buying outside 128: what the commute really costs you

The trade looks obvious on a Saturday. Drive twenty minutes further out and the same house is two hundred thousand cheaper, with a garage thrown in. Then you do it every weekday for six years.

The arithmetic nobody runs

Forty minutes each way, five days a week, forty-six working weeks: 203 hours a year. That is five working weeks in the car, and it does not count the days the Pike is shut at Allston.

Against that, price. A four-bedroom colonial in a town outside 128 sits about $205,000 under the same house in Brookline or Jamaica Plain. Spread across six years of ownership, that gap buys the extra hour a day at roughly $1,010 per hour saved if you moved in instead.

The costs that come with the miles

Ten thousand a year against a $205,000 saving is twenty years to break even, and most of our buyers move again within nine. That is the case for staying in. It is not the whole case.

When the drive wins

Two days a week in the office changes every number above, and so does a job that is not downtown. Land does too. If what you want is a workshop, an acre and a garage that fits two cars and a boat, no amount of arithmetic inside Route 128 produces one.

What we tell people to do is drive it. Pick a Tuesday, leave the house you are considering at the hour you would actually leave, and park where you would actually park. Then decide.