The commutes that try souls
My parents commute to work together most days. It's a minimum of 45 minutes each way. I used to have a similar commute when I spent a series of summers working in the same office as my dad, as a data entry contractor. And, for a summer, it wasn't so bad. I came across a New Yorker article talking about some of the various extreme commutes while reading about developer Buzz Anderson leaving Apple to follow his dream [1]. As Anderson put it:
As the stress and hours increased at work, my 45 minute commute down 280, which I had initially thought of as a reasonable (even pleasant and scenic) drive, became a soul crushing daily slog.
Or, as the New Yorker article put it:
A commute is a distillation of a life’s main ingredients, a product of fundamental values and choices. And time is the vital currency: how much of it you spend-and how you spend it-reveals a great deal about how much you think it is worth.
Someone commutes to San Jose from the Sierra Nevada foothills daily, something a seven hour daily roundtrip. A friend was considering a three hour roundtrip to a new job. My instructor for a course I was taking took a van pool daily from south Sacramento into San Francisco to work for a dot com. The six figure income was worth sleeping a fitful hour and half. I don't know my instructor is still pulling that trip, but Amtrak's Capital Corridor trains are filled with Bay to Central Valley travelers. It's not uncommon.
But what scares me, is how I see this developing here along country roads on our sidetrips out of town to go cycling. On the way to Falls Lake, up Route 50, we saw proto-gated communities with $1 million estate homesites near the lake. Closer to Creedmoor, $120,000 homes, townhouses and such. But who wants a half-hour drive to the grocery store? What's traffic on 50 heading to I-540 going to be like in five years? We were speculating that the road is going to need widening if the growth near the lake continues.
A lot of these questions come up since my commute's grown from seven minutes to fifteen to recently 20 to 25 minutes as I moved in with Robin and then our office moved from just north of downtown to just north of Crossroads near Cary. Sure, more time to listen to WKNC and NPR, but there's now that little bit more of a rush to get home and check on the pets. No, it's not bad. But it is noticeable, such that we think about moving closer to the southwest side of town.
And while yes, there are an amazing and scary array of multi-taskers, the time driving is time not doing something else, like cycling or rock climbing or taking the dog for a walk or cooking. This is what people want? Driving 30 minutes through carbon copy sprawl with themed restaurants, blissfully homogenous? What else are we giving ourselves time for?