California dominates most expensive commutes in the country but LA isnt No. 1

California commuters are paying a brutal price just to punch the clock and, surprisingly, Los Angeles drivers don’t even have it the worst.California claimed a whopping four spots among the nation’s 10 most expensive commutes, with San Francisco and San Jose taking the top two spots, according to a new ConsumerAffairs analysis.The rankings combine the estimated value of commuting time with fuel costs using wage, Census commute-time, federal driving and AAA gas-price data.Workers in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro area face an estimated annual commuting cost of a staggering $10,902, while those in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area shell out the equivalent of $10,636 a year.Stockton-Lodi landed further down the list at $8,362 annually, while the notoriously traffic-clogged Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro clocked in at $8,270.Washington, D.C.and New York were also among the priciest places in America to get to work.ConsumerAffairs calculated the totals by looking beyond what drivers fork over at the gas pump.

Researchers also put a price tag on something commuters may overlook, the hours they spend getting to and from work without getting paid.For someone working an eight-hour shift with a half-hour commute each way, that effectively turns an eight-hour job into a nine-hour daily commitment.Over hundreds of workdays, those unpaid hours can add up to thousands of dollars in lost time.And nowhere does that sting quite like the Bay Area.San Francisco-area workers spend an average of 62 minutes commuting round-trip each day, according to the analysis.With a median hourly wage of $35.70, that amounts to roughly 259 hours a year on the move, nearly 11 full days.Then there’s the pump pain.ConsumerAffairs used a California gas price of $5.65 per gallon in its calculation, pushing estimated annual fuel costs for San Francisco commuters to $1,643, the highest in the country.San Jose wasn’t far behind in the overall rankings, despite its shorter avera...