A 30-minute commute from apartment door to garage door?

If you commute to work by car and plan to rent a high-rise apartment, you’d be well-advised to do a reality-check on rush-hour travel time from your apartment door to the street. You might receive a rude shock.

There are high-rise apartment buildings that have notoriously slow elevators and / or one or more elevators that are frequently out of service. Ten- to 20-minute door-to-ground-floor travel times are not unusual in some buildings at peak hours.

The next step in your commute may be switching to a different bank of elevators to access your parking space. Add a few minutes to your morning commute.

Is your parking space on one of the upper levels of a 10-story or higher ramp? In one of the apartment parking structures with terrifyingly narrow spaces and traffic lanes? Will you be queued up behind a dozen cars ever so slowly backing into the ramp ahead of you? Will the car in front of you find a way to merge into the crush of street traffic?

Your next reality check comes if you need to travel any distance from east to west to access the expressway. The east-west streets can be agonizingly slow at almost any time of day.

First-time high-rise renters rarely know what their commute will be like until after they’ve moved in, and many give it little thought until they have a lot of time to think about it – every working day.

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