October 20, 2006
It’s good to no longer be extreme
I walked, occasionally rode my bike and often got rides to my first job. Even when walking the commute took only a few minutes and often getting a ride meant a longer commute if you count the time spent waiting to be picked up in the total.
In college I worked at a pizza place, and walking was again the easiest way to get there. Sometimes I could scam a ride home from one of the delivery guys, but even if I couldn’t it wasn’t too bad of a walk. Three years in I actually live across the street from the place, and Foster Place was much more of an L-shaped alleyway than a real street, so it was like having work right on my doorstep.
Right after college I started driving to work, but it wasn’t really that far. I pulled out of my driveway, went past the butcher shop/slaughterhouse next door and then the empty lot before taking a right and parking across the street from the office. The drive was a block-and-a-half but I did need my car on a moment’s notice for work and I usually walked home at lunchtime.
I didn’t really become familiar with this thing called commuting until I moved back to the Chicago area. For my first five years back here I found work on the rapidly expanding edge of the outer ring of suburbs and the close to 40-mile trip usually took an hour-and-a-half each way. Now I’m driving out a different way and it takes between 40 minutes and an hour to cover the 18 miles.
The hardest part about the commute is getting used to it, but once you overcome the botherations of other drivers or learn a reliable way to vent, (I recommend, in-car yelling, timely and appropriate deployment of the horn and finger, good background noise and slow, steady breathing to deal with all the gas, break, honk.) the in-traffic fits of frustration cease and the time spent commuting becomes less of an annoyance. The advent of the cell phone also helps in this regard, but it admittedly adds to the danger on the road as well. Sure commuting by car doesn’t afford any time to read like those lucky suckers piling into trains and buses, but it provides time to listen to music or the radio and glide slowly past the signs reminding you that driving ten times as fast would still be legal.
The federal government’s Transportation Research Board just released their latest study of commuting patterns and I found it interesting to see where my daily excursions to work fit in with the rest of the nation’s forced commuting habits. Overall, the study seems to show that there’s lots of us on the road and that we’re leaving earlier and spending longer getting there.
I’m not sure how much the feds paid for this study, and the depth of the research provides much more useful stuff than those nuggets, but I could have told them about that situation for a lot less if they’d just asked me. I leave my house around 6:30 most mornings in order to beats the heaviest traffic and shave an average of 20 minutes off my drive. The study shows that people leaving for work when I do are the fastest growing population of commuters, which makes sense. I mean who wouldn’t want to save 20 minutes in the morning.
The average commute time for the nation sits at 25.5 minutes, up about three minutes from the last study ten years back. I’m sure those average commuters hate their half hour of slow going, but I’d love to have that extra 15 minutes in the morning and evening. Still some days when there’s rain or angular sunshine or just slow people lazing their way down the road, my commute creeps over an hour each way. The study shows that on those days, I’m joining one tenth of the other Illinois commuters. I feel their solidarity with every achingly slow tick of the odometer.
But the best part of the study was the new term it taught me. It seems that people in my previous predicament of driving 90 minutes or more each way are now know as “Extreme Commuters.” Who knew that driving slowly to work was such a renegade thing to do. Although, now that I think about it, extreme commuting wouldn’t be too bad an entry into the next X Games. If people were called upon to compete in real traffic conditions it would test their creativity with routes, patience with others and their daring as they run yellow lights and risk speeding tickets whenever the road opens before them. OK, so maybe it’s not an idea for the next X Games, but I bet following the right extreme commuters would be a great reality show.