It's just after 4 in the afternoon, and I'm crammed into a seat in a 14-passenger Ford van winding its way over the dusty hills outside Fremont, Calif. The woman next to me has begun to snore softly. Next to her, another woman has pulled a checkered blanket around her neck. Loath to disturb anyone, Diane Jenkins, who works in the machine shop at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, leans forward from her seat behind me and passes up a scribbled note: "Here's my two cents -- I think this is crazy!!! I'd rather have a life than a house. I'm moving back to San Jose in January."
What's crazy -- and not just to Jenkins -- is the commute she and a dozen others endure each day. The group, half of whom are Stanford employees, rides in a vanpool that runs daily from California's Central Valley to Palo Alto. Round-trip from the van's first stop -- on Blue Gum Avenue in Modesto -- to Stanford and back is about 180 miles and takes 4.5 hours. That comes to 900 miles a week -- and more than 22 hours on the road.
For these commuters, alarm clocks ring no later than 3:30 a.m., and the van leaves that first stop at 4:30. It stops twice to pick up more passengers before heading to Stanford. The van passengers arrive at the University between 6:15 and 6:30 and leave work between 3:05 and 3:30 p.m.
The trip home ends just before 6, when the last rider clambers out of the van back in Modesto. Most of these commuters are in bed well before 10 p.m., trying to grab what little sleep they can before they wake up and do it all over again.
The drive has a routine, almost mechanized feel. Members of the vanpool board each morning in nearly total silence. No one dawdles, thanks to the printed "guidelines and policies" advising that "it would be nice for everyone to be on the van within one minute after the van pulls up to their stop." (The three-page, single-spaced handout also admonishes riders to "maintain personal hygiene -- bathing, good breath, limit perfume or cologne use, clean clothes, etc.") Ready with blankets and neck pillows, most of the commuters are asleep within minutes.
As we creep over the Altamont Pass on Highway 580, it's clear we aren't the only ones making this trip. A steady line of red taillights inches up the hill. At times the traffic slows us to a 20 mph crawl.
In the evening, the van passengers are more social -- and more awake. Mike Mayo, who coordinates the vanpool and is the primary driver, tunes into a traffic report or the advice of pop psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Still, by the time the van reaches the east side of the Dumbarton Bridge, several have nodded off.
Most of the riders endure this grueling commute for one simple reason: so they can buy a house. With the average price of a single-family home in Santa Clara County now topping $500,000, more and more Silicon Valley workers are moving to places where land is plentiful and houses cheaper.
Valerie Stone-Reeve, a health and safety specialist at SLAC, just bought a four-bedroom home on a quarter-acre lot in Newman, a half-hour south of Modesto. The price: $140,000. That same house in Tracy, 45 minutes closer to Silicon Valley, would have cost an extra $85,000. In Palo Alto? The average price for a three-bedroom house approaches $800,000.
Which explains why Diane Jenkins and her husband decided to move into an apartment in Tracy 18 months ago. The idea was to try out the commute before buying a house there. But Jenkins hates it. She's put on nearly 15 pounds, she says, because she no longer has time for regular workouts at the gym. In the evenings, she's too wiped out to do anything but fix dinner. Jenkins dreams about washing the car after work or taking dance lessons with her husband. The couple now plans to rent for a year or so in south San Jose -- where the commute to Stanford will take a mere 30 to 45 minutes. After that, they'd like to buy a home in the same area. It's the only way she can imagine starting a family.
Stone-Reeve, who bought the four-bedroom house in Newman, hopes to keep up the commute and have a family. At the end of October, she took a leave from SLAC and the vanpool. In October, she gave birth to her first child; she plans to return to work in January. The logistics will be complicated. She'll be up at 3:30 and out of the house by 4:30, she says. Her husband will drop their child off at day care early in the morning (he is a consultant who works all over the Bay Area but has an office in Pleasanton), and Stone-Reeve will be responsible for picking the baby up back in Newman before 6 each evening. That tight schedule may mean she has to drive her own car rather than rejoining the vanpool. "It's going to be very difficult," Stone-Reeve admits. "I'll probably be a zombie."
The vanpool passengers, who hold low- and mid-level staff jobs at Stanford, say they've considered looking for work closer to home. "You think about it -- until you see what's available and the salary," says Mary Chenoweth, an administrative associate in the information technology department, adding that similar jobs closer to Modesto might pay one-third less. The vanpoolers also say they like their jobs at Stanford and share a strong camaraderie with their co-workers.
After all that time together, the commuters know each other's stories and quirks -- that Chenoweth moved to Modesto from Mountain View to care for her granddaughter, that Larry Whicker, who joined in July, still can't manage to fall asleep in the van. They also celebrate together -- before Stone-Reeve left to have her baby, they collected money for a Toys "R" Us gift certificate -- and grieve when members are laid off, which has happened a half-dozen times in the last 10 years.
The stalwart of the group is Mayo. A campus steamfitter, he has been making the trek from Modesto to Stanford since 1987. He started out driving solo and later commuted with another Stanford employee. In 1989, they started the vanpool; seven years later, Mayo took over as the coordinator. In exchange for riding free (the others pay $155 a month), Mayo maintains the vehicle and collects the money. Through all the miles he's racked up, he's had just one fender bender and received two tickets -- the most recent a $145 citation in August for exceeding the speed limit by 22 mph on a rural road (he says it was more like 15). Not a bad record, especially considering he doesn't even use his turn signal in the morning for fear of waking up his passengers.
But Mayo knows better than anyone the toll the drive can take. After 16 years of marriage, he and his wife are divorcing. The tidy house they bought 12 years ago for $87,000 is on the market. Mayo believes his long commute -- and the lack of time it left for the couple to spend time together -- contributed to the marriage's breakdown. "You both have to put effort into a marriage to make it work," he says. "At some point, she and I just stopped doing that."
You might expect those who make this trip regularly to be bitter or frustrated. By day, they work in the land of dot-com millionaires but don't get even a taste of that wealth. In the evenings, they return home to see kids playing with their parents outside neatly manicured middle-class homes, but they have little time to enjoy that life themselves. This is what it takes, they believe, to have a good house and a good job.
Still, the day-to-day realities can be depressing. As passengers step out of the van at Stanford one morning, one painful fact is obvious: it's been three hours since they woke up to go to work, but it's still dark outside.
