Thanks for clarifying what you meant by "the upshot"! :)

From what I understand, folks in NYC can deal with hour-long commutes because of the reliability and continuous operation of the area's public transit systems. Perhaps I am mistaken? The public transit situation in the Bay Area is far more dire.

Because I have next-to-no knowledge of the character of each of NYC's boroughs, please excuse any such inaccuracies in the following hypothetical alternate-universe scenario:

Imagine that you live in The Bronx, and work and party in Manhattan. In order to get home from Manhattan in the late evening you either have to

* Be on the subway before midnight (because the subway shuts down from shortly after midnight till 04:00 every day of the week) [This assumes that you're lucky enough to live within walking distance of a subway stop] (the same caveats apply to the commuter heavy rail system),

* Hail and pay for a cab/Uber/Whatever, then spend 30->45 minutes inside of it,

* Or, -if you're spectacularly lucky- spend 45->90 minutes inside a bus, then walk for another 15->45 minutes to your apartment.

Your commute to work will be somewhat awful. Both the subway and the heavy rail is not infrequently late. The subway runs once every twenty minutes. [0] During rush hour, the heavy rail runs once every 15 minutes to once every 30. Outside of rush hour, it runs runs once per hour. Either system will be unable to get you to work at least twice a year due to service outages. Once you disembark from the subway or heavy rail, pray that your connecting bus is actually on time. If it's not, and your destination is within a 30 minute walk, you're almost certainly better off walking than waiting for the next bus.

The absolute best one-way doorstep-to-doorstep commute you can reasonably hope for here is 30 minutes, [1] but then -because of proximity to a subway station that's very close to Manhattan- your rent is almost the same as living in Manhattan.

If you decide to drive, remember that everyone wants to get into Manhattan, and that there are exactly three roads that serve the borough. If you don't like sitting in traffic for literal hours, make sure that you have a schedule that allows you to avoid the two+ hour stretch of rush hour traffic. Also, pray that there's not yet another accident on the damn road. ;) Also, make sure you can afford $3600/year in garage fees, as street parking is effectively impossible.

As an aside: I know that most of this can be considered #firstworldproblems complaining. I spent most of my life in both rural and urban Alabama. The best public transit available in the state was a few bus lines in Huntsville that took folks from downtown to the indoor shopping mall and back. ;) I know that the Bay Area has far better services for car-less people than most parts of the country. My reason for explaining all of this is to illustrate what I understand to be the vast gulf separating Bay Area public transit and public transit in many other major metropolitan areas, but NYC in particular.

[0] If you're lucky enough to live near a subway station that has multiple lines pass through it, this interval will be smaller.

[1] My absolute best one-way doorstep-to-doorstep commute time [2] was 90 minutes. My typical time was more like 120->150 minutes.

[2] Admittedly, from SF to a workplace ten to fifteen minutes away from a heavy rail station in San Mateo. However, reversing the commute direction would have had little-to-no impact on its total time, and surprisingly little impact on the rent I was paying.