Commuting for work is part of life for so many families, and in the Northern California area, driving for hours daily is becoming more and more common. It's called super commuting.
Starting up the car is a sound Lee Sartain knows all too well. The small business owner of Ace High Concrete Supply lives in El Dorado Hills and spends around 25 hours on the road weekly. Within a month of getting his new pick-up truck, he's already put 7,000 miles on it, as a majority of his clients are in the Bay Area.
"If I don't do this for my business, I'm not going to survive," Sartain said. "If I didn't get on the road and do what I do, my business wouldn't be in the position that it's in. To be completely honest with you, I've tried not being on the road. I've tried taking a break and that's where I see a decline in sales."
Sartain has office spaces at his brick-and-mortar location, but his main office is his truck on the road with his "best friend" being his GPS Maps app, which he relies on on a daily basis.
Sartain picked Lapastora up around 7 a.m. at a Starbucks in Lathrop, starting his day with a large iced chai with espresso and six pumps of sugar-free vanilla flavor.
"I feel absolutely mentally, physically exhausted, but I also feel very rewarded at the same time, knowing that I'm putting in the time and the effort to make sure that my company stays in front of the competition," Sartain said. "And knowing that I'm doing everything that I can do to make sure that my employees can go home and take care of their families and not worry about anything. I feel absolutely blessed. The fact that I can do this for my team, 100%."
The first stop was Sartain's new Stockton brick-and-mortar location, strategically placed between the Bay Area and Sacramento.
"I'm getting a packing slip for materials that I picked up in Sacramento today," Sartain said.
Before heading over the Altamont, it's time to fill up at the pump, where in California, gas prices are averaging around $1.70 more than the national prices, according to AAA.
"We don't really think about it until we actually get to the gas pump and we realize how much money just came out of our account," Sartain said. "I mean, we're probably looking at about $120, $130, maybe more right now. But I do that sometimes twice a day."
Lee isn't alone on the roads as people drive by him with similar situations. 120,000 workers commute into the Bay Area from outside the region and just less than 60% of Bay Area workers actually live and work in the same county, according to Vital Signs, which tracks Bay Area trends related to transportation.
One of the tasks Sartain gets done on the road–calling his team and clients, some of whom also get what it takes to super commute, including Fusion Electric owner Dave, who makes the commute from Shingle Springs to the Bay Area.
"We have half the workforce in the Bay Area than we do in Sacramento and we make twice the money in the Bay Area than we do in Sacramento," Dave said.
Sartain continued talking to Dave over the phone on the road about why there are super commuters.
"There's a reason why people live up where we live because cost of living in the Bay Area is just too high," Sartain said. "And it's not as nice. We live in a nice, really nice, clean, safe communities up here, I'm not saying the Bay Area's not safe, but you just get, there's just a really good quality of life where we live, Dave, up here."
And for Sartain, the value of a handshake is worth hundreds and thousands of miles on the road.
"This is a trade, flooring is a trade," Sartain said. "This is a face-to-face, hands-on, this is built-with-your-hands industry. And that, to me, deserves that face-to-face contact."
Next stop was South San Francisco. After encountering traffic and a 2-hour and 20-minute drive, Saritan was able to do exactly that, shake hands with a customer while dropping off equipment.
After that drop off was San Jose, stopping to see some clients after an almost-hour drive, and dropping off more equipment from his pick-up truck.
One of the last stops before heading back, visiting Sartain's Santa Clara location, but not before getting some food. We stopped at Lee's Supermarket in San Jose, taking sandwiches to-go.
Arriving at the Santa Clara brick-and-mortar just before 1 p.m., we met with the location manager, Moses Santos. And because Sartain knows bumper-to-bumper traffic, he's designing a schedule for Santos to come in early so he can leave before rush hour to spend more time with his family–and less time on the roads.
"That's the reason I come to work because work facilitates me spending time with my kid without having to go, 'Oh, let me get this side gig, let me do'," Santos said. "No, no. I want to do this so that I can go home and spend time with my kid."
Sartain said that it almost put a tear in his eye as he heard Santos say that because "that's why we do what we do."
"I don't want to spend my life on the road," Sartain said. "Matter of fact, we're going to wrap our sandwiches up because it's just after one o'clock."
Hitting the roads again, we finish the trip up with picking up a check from a customer on the way back–in Livermore–just past 2 p.m.
"We're contractors, so we're in a business that's based on relationships," Garrett Baxley, DSB+ Construction vice president, said. "And so if you don't see your customers, you don't see your suppliers, we're just going to tend to do business with people that we see on a daily basis. So it's unfortunate he's got to do all that commuting. Fortunately, I live here in Livermore. I work here in livermore So I don't have to deal with the same amount of commute that he does. But we appreciate the time that he takes out of his days to come and see his customers."
But all of this almost went underwater. Sartain said his company almost went bankrupt, but over the course of the last three months, he and his team have been able to turn it around. And he's not looking back, driving forward many times before the crack of dawn–with the past in the rearview.
"You can't change the past, but you can change today, which will have a positive effect on the future," Sartain said. "You know, you can learn from your mistakes. It is truly possible to learn from your mistakes and change. It becomes something better and greater than you ever thought."
While he said the number of hours he's spent in trucks over the years isn't for everybody, all of this driving is for his family. He blocks out Fridays to spend time with his boys and catches up with them on the road.
"He's gotta do what he's gotta do," Nolan said. "Nothing I can do about it."
Gina said the further he traveled, the more his business grew and that it's been a "journey."
"It's a thought in the back of your mind, that it's scary to be driving, spending most of your time on road going back and forth. However, it is for financial reasons," Gina said.
Nolan said he loves his dad "a lot" and he likes that "he's a hard worker."
Sartain appreciated that and said that's why he does what he does.
"I do it for you, your brother and your mom, so thank you for saying that, I love you, too," Sartain said.
A phrase his family heard from Sartain is: "I'll see you when I get home".
"We're making some good time today," Sartain said. "So we were able to get in and get out, so we didn't hit the traffic on the way back because right about now, the traffic started to build up in the Bay. So, mission accomplished," Sartain said. "Yes. We got out. It's crazy, when you get out, you actually feel like you just did something super cool, beating the traffic."
Super commuters are not a rare breed. A recent University of the Pacific study shows in neighboring San Joaquin County, 1-in-10 commuters travel 90-minutes or more each way for work.
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