OT: moving to Marin or Sonoma county Options

[mightyohm]

To any members up in Marin or Sonoma counties...

Big news (for me at least), due to a change in employment, it looks like I will be relocating to the North Bay within the next few weeks. I am looking for advice regarding where to live (rent). My aim is to be able to commute to work daily in Santa Rosa, but still be within reach of San Francisco, where my girlfriend lives and works. Ultimately my girlfriend will be moving up as well so the location should hopefully have a tolerable commute both directions.

I think this pretty much forces me to go with San Rafael or Novato, although Petaluma has a lot of charm and the cost of living seems to decrease quickly as you go north... Housing prices in Santa Rosa are about 1/3 what I am used to in the South Bay!

I hear the soutbound 101 commute in the mornings is horrible, how bad is it?

[lapuwali]

I'll agree with Mark on the ferry comments.

I commute by train from San Mateo to Sunnyvale, which takes roughly 1 hour each way. It's a 20-40 minute drive (depending on the day, the weather, and the accident rate on 101). However, I get so much more reading done by taking the train that keeping myself in books is actually a problem. If her job ends up with her commonly reading a pile of email every morning, then having a laptop, downloading the email at home, then taking it on the ferry to read and answer them, works very well. Some mass transit is also getting WiFi on board now.

I know people who live in the City and commute by train to Sunnyvale that manage to get enough work done on the train that they can justify counting the commute time as work time, so they come in late and leave early, yet still do a full day, effectively driving their commute time down to almost nothing. Not everyone can do that (esp. if you have lots of meetings as part of your job), and sometimes mass transit can be very constricting (last minute 6pm meeting can often be impossible), as well.