HighColin Deaso, 30, travels more than an hour each way from his home in Sterling, Va., to his financial-services job in Washington, D.C. Though he has a newborn baby at home and is needed there, he schedules his drive around commute traffic. He leaves the house at 6:30 a.m.; in the evening, he waits until he thinks traffic has cleared, getting home by about 7 p.m.
"I despise sitting in traffic," Deaso says. "Don't get me wrong -- it's difficult to leave early in the morning. But we could afford a bigger home here."
Sacrificing hours each day on the road seems like a necessary trade-off to many Americans. Many are willing to move farther away from their jobs as long as weekend time is spent in communities they like, where they can afford the kinds of homes they want. 
How far is your commute?
"We've seen decentralization for decades now," says Patricia Mokhtarian, a professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at the University of California, Davis. "People are having to travel further away not just to have a house but to have a three-bedroom house with a yard that we can afford." What's the trade-off?
Longer commute times translate directly into savings on housing. Take San Francisco, where the average cost of a home was $1.45 million in 2007, according to Coldwell Banker's Home Price Comparison Index. A 13-mile drive across the bay to Oakland could’ve nabbed you a home for $955,000. Make that $874,000 if you didn't mind driving an extra 12 miles inland to Walnut Creek. That would have been a savings of roughly $575,000 in exchange for a 50-mile daily round trip -- more than $11,000 per mile.
Want another example? Try Dallas, where the average home was $302,000. If you had been willing to trade time on the road for a cut in home prices, you could have driven 21 miles north to Plano to get a house for $204,000 -- or 32 miles west to Fort Worth, where a similar house was just $151,000.
Talk back: What does your commute cost you in time, money and fatigue?
Granted, commuting isn't all downside. In some families -- where the commute time follows rushing the kids to school, dropping shirts at the cleaners and pouring coffee into spill-proof travel mugs -- the commute can be a sanctuary of sorts. Sometimes the car is the only place to steal a few moments alone.
The rest of us seem to be getting used to long commutes. Nearly 2 million Americans now log at least 90 minutes door to door -- what is sometimes referred to as "extreme commuting." Chart: The worst commutes
When Scott Anderegg, 47, took his job as an attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission