Commuting
Some facts
All dependent on me having done my arithmetic right, of course. I'm using USA Today's figure (great source, I know) of 1.45 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles (2.33 per 100 million vehicle-kilometres).
Every time I commute there's a 0.0000032% chance I die. There's a 0.011% chance I'll die commuting by the end of the year (0.0166% for a full year). If we move to western Toronto that number will be 0.011% per year. 0.0037% per year if we move to Hamilton.
Every year I would burn about 2900 litres of gasoline commuting, which produces about 6700kg of carbon dioxide. In comparison, the average human produces 4330kg per year (the average Canadian about 3 times that), including industrial processes. Just from commuting alone I'm well over the human average. Factor in how much milk I drink and things aren't looking good :PAnyway
I'm actually really enjoying my commutes. It's about 70 to 80 minutes each way in traffic from North York to Burlington. I try to leave about 7:15am to avoid the worst of the traffic, though there's only so much you can do: there is no time between 5am and midnight when traffic is not going to be horrible on the 401.
The fun thing about commuting during rush hour is it's a fantastic form of people-watching, though more specifically it's driver-watching. Driving on a highway during rush hour offers drivers a rich vocabulary through which they can express their individuality, and through which they really have no choice but to express themselves.
I think the two most common scenarios where personalities show themselves are when there's an exit approaching and when a lane is about to end. When a lane is ending, you have two general personality styles, though who try to get out of the lane as soon as possible, and those who zoom ahead and try to get into the lane later on. I've seen threads on reddit with a lot of passion and vitriol aimed at either side. It seems like a hot topic for religious wars, akin to the divide between liberals and conservatives or the divide between overhand and underhand toilet paper configurations. It's true that in either extreme you can cause delays by trying to force your way into a lane when it's not opportune. The mushy middle personality styles still rife with people thinking they know the best way to do it. As much as the merge-earliers like to claim otherwise, there really is no set ethics guide for driving and a lot of the time it actually is better for traffic flow at large to hold off merging until later on. Of course it requires a certain amount of confidence to put off merging, which rules out the risk-averse. In my observations, I think the merge-laters are typically more prone to be troublemakers, though.
How people signal, whether they wave "thanks" after being let in, how quickly the start slowing down in anticipation of a pile-up, how quickly they start accelerating after getting through a pile-up, there are all sorts of individual quirks people have and seem to betray their personality a little bit. One interesting one I've found recently is what to do when the car in front of you is going, say, 3km/h slower than you are, and the passing left to the left is free. Most people will pull out in the passing lane but there is a significant minority who will just be like "ehh I guess I'll just start going 3km/h slower now".
What's most valuable about seeing people during rush hour is it really does force them to betray their social masks. It's been said that principles aren't principles until they're very hard to keep. So it goes with the values you bring to driving, I think. You can't tell much about a person's driving values when they're out for a leisurely drive, but pack them onto a crowded highway with hundreds of thousands of other drivings with delays everywhere and they only have 12 minutes left to make it to work on time, and you get to see people's real values. Do they really believe in being nice and letting people cut in front of them or do they go into survival mode? It's easy to fall into confirmation bias mode and focus on the jackasses, but my observations are that the vast majority of drivers out there, the ones you hardly notice, really are nice people and look at the commute as a team effort. They'll let out exasperated sighs when they come across big delays, but they'll be really considerate of everyone else while they're doing it. Go Team Commute!
The other nice thing about the commute is you get to see people in aggregate. In spite of the preceding part of my entry, you don't spend much time focusing on individual drivers. You try to look at traffic as a wave instead of a bunch of particles, as it were. To be a good driver is to be able to anticipate and predict everything that could happen around you. You should be able to anticipate what the road is going to look like 2 or 5 or 10 seconds from now. This is my favourite part of my commute because it's such a huge challenge in rush hour. You have so many cars around you, all of them trying to fork themselves off into different streams. I like to think I do pretty well but still every day I come into situations that catch me off guard. "Wait why are we speeding up? I never would have guessed that".
I know you're supposed to hate commuting, but I really love it. It's such a raw expression of humanity, the commute. Maybe I'll get bored of it, I don't know.
I do feel guilty about it, though, for the reasons listed above. I'd like to say that I'm so important, or what I do is so important, that it's worth me burning 10 litres of gasoline every day. I'm probably not that important, though :(. We've looked into GO trains and GO buses and everything and it's really just not feasible. This is what I hate most about the GTA, is that it encourages you to waste time and fossil fuels getting, well, anywhere. This is a problem which most other civilized metropolises have done a much better job of.
All dependent on me having done my arithmetic right, of course. I'm using USA Today's figure (great source, I know) of 1.45 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles (2.33 per 100 million vehicle-kilometres).
Every time I commute there's a 0.0000032% chance I die. There's a 0.011% chance I'll die commuting by the end of the year (0.0166% for a full year). If we move to western Toronto that number will be 0.011% per year. 0.0037% per year if we move to Hamilton.
Every year I would burn about 2900 litres of gasoline commuting, which produces about 6700kg of carbon dioxide. In comparison, the average human produces 4330kg per year (the average Canadian about 3 times that), including industrial processes. Just from commuting alone I'm well over the human average. Factor in how much milk I drink and things aren't looking good :PAnyway
I'm actually really enjoying my commutes. It's about 70 to 80 minutes each way in traffic from North York to Burlington. I try to leave about 7:15am to avoid the worst of the traffic, though there's only so much you can do: there is no time between 5am and midnight when traffic is not going to be horrible on the 401.
The fun thing about commuting during rush hour is it's a fantastic form of people-watching, though more specifically it's driver-watching. Driving on a highway during rush hour offers drivers a rich vocabulary through which they can express their individuality, and through which they really have no choice but to express themselves.
I think the two most common scenarios where personalities show themselves are when there's an exit approaching and when a lane is about to end. When a lane is ending, you have two general personality styles, though who try to get out of the lane as soon as possible, and those who zoom ahead and try to get into the lane later on. I've seen threads on reddit with a lot of passion and vitriol aimed at either side. It seems like a hot topic for religious wars, akin to the divide between liberals and conservatives or the divide between overhand and underhand toilet paper configurations. It's true that in either extreme you can cause delays by trying to force your way into a lane when it's not opportune. The mushy middle personality styles still rife with people thinking they know the best way to do it. As much as the merge-earliers like to claim otherwise, there really is no set ethics guide for driving and a lot of the time it actually is better for traffic flow at large to hold off merging until later on. Of course it requires a certain amount of confidence to put off merging, which rules out the risk-averse. In my observations, I think the merge-laters are typically more prone to be troublemakers, though.
How people signal, whether they wave "thanks" after being let in, how quickly the start slowing down in anticipation of a pile-up, how quickly they start accelerating after getting through a pile-up, there are all sorts of individual quirks people have and seem to betray their personality a little bit. One interesting one I've found recently is what to do when the car in front of you is going, say, 3km/h slower than you are, and the passing left to the left is free. Most people will pull out in the passing lane but there is a significant minority who will just be like "ehh I guess I'll just start going 3km/h slower now".
What's most valuable about seeing people during rush hour is it really does force them to betray their social masks. It's been said that principles aren't principles until they're very hard to keep. So it goes with the values you bring to driving, I think. You can't tell much about a person's driving values when they're out for a leisurely drive, but pack them onto a crowded highway with hundreds of thousands of other drivings with delays everywhere and they only have 12 minutes left to make it to work on time, and you get to see people's real values. Do they really believe in being nice and letting people cut in front of them or do they go into survival mode? It's easy to fall into confirmation bias mode and focus on the jackasses, but my observations are that the vast majority of drivers out there, the ones you hardly notice, really are nice people and look at the commute as a team effort. They'll let out exasperated sighs when they come across big delays, but they'll be really considerate of everyone else while they're doing it. Go Team Commute!
The other nice thing about the commute is you get to see people in aggregate. In spite of the preceding part of my entry, you don't spend much time focusing on individual drivers. You try to look at traffic as a wave instead of a bunch of particles, as it were. To be a good driver is to be able to anticipate and predict everything that could happen around you. You should be able to anticipate what the road is going to look like 2 or 5 or 10 seconds from now. This is my favourite part of my commute because it's such a huge challenge in rush hour. You have so many cars around you, all of them trying to fork themselves off into different streams. I like to think I do pretty well but still every day I come into situations that catch me off guard. "Wait why are we speeding up? I never would have guessed that".
I know you're supposed to hate commuting, but I really love it. It's such a raw expression of humanity, the commute. Maybe I'll get bored of it, I don't know.
I do feel guilty about it, though, for the reasons listed above. I'd like to say that I'm so important, or what I do is so important, that it's worth me burning 10 litres of gasoline every day. I'm probably not that important, though :(. We've looked into GO trains and GO buses and everything and it's really just not feasible. This is what I hate most about the GTA, is that it encourages you to waste time and fossil fuels getting, well, anywhere. This is a problem which most other civilized metropolises have done a much better job of.