He uses “commuting” to commute to school.
Tim Chen, a final-year economics student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has been flying nearly two hours round trip from his home in Calgary to school because off-campus housing prices have become too expensive.
“I thought, why not stay in Calgary and fly here? It’s like a one-hour flight, and it’s the same as taking a bus,” Chen said. he told CTV News.
Chen takes only two classes a week on campus and calls this unusual mode of transportation her “super commute.” According to a post on Reddit.
He exclusively flies Air Canada for his luxury commute, completing seven round trips in January.
Chen didn’t always have a grueling commute to school every week.
He previously rented a home in Vancouver, but stopped when he noticed the rent had gone up when he returned from vacation last fall.
“When I checked home prices, I thought, oh, they’ve gone up a lot,” he told the outlet. “He would have to pay about $2,500 in rent, so it doesn’t feel realistic.”
A nonstop flight from Calgary to Vancouver costs approximately $111 round trip.
Because Chen only has to go to school twice a week, she ends up spending about $890 a month while living at her parents’ home in Calgary.
A one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver, the country’s most expensive city to live in, will save renters $1,550 a month.
Chen claims he saves money by taking an unconventional commute.
“We have a total of three hours of class. After class, we will take the bus back to the airport,” Chen added.
Calgary is approximately 700 miles east of Vancouver, but with the luxury of air travel, travel time is reduced to approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Chen wasn’t the only student to change living situations while studying at UBC; some students started living in a van because they couldn’t pay rent.
“I couldn’t afford a bachelor suite for myself, so this was the only economically viable option,” Zerian Rowe told CTV News in October 2022.
UBC has an enrollment of 58,590 students, and first-year students are guaranteed housing, and returning undergraduate and graduate students will also be provided with housing, according to the university. US News and World Report.
A Wall Street Journal reporter recently admitted that he commutes from Ohio every day to his job in midtown Manhattan. This was because it was cheaper than buying a house in the city.
“We figured we could keep our combined rent and transportation costs in Ohio below the price of a nice studio in New York, which is about $3,200 a month.” chip cutter wrote in an essay In early January, he said he was paying his own travel expenses to spend three days a week in the office.
