Suffering The Rush Hour Commute

I have recently seen some changes in my job situation, and most of them have been good.  But there is this one thing – for the first time in a long time I have an actual peak-time commute to and from a workplace again.  And it is not an improvement.

 In my first career job as a young attorney, I lived in an apartment building that was a block and a half away from my office.  So of course I drove.  Because Midwest.  And because I bought a new car.  Actually I wanted to walk to work and back, but my office was in a place that required me to drive to courts and other attorneys’ offices fairly frequently, so what would have been a relaxing and head-clearing stroll at the beginning and end of each day became an inefficient waste of billable time in the middle of the day when I had to be somewhere.

I lived there for two years.  That one-and-one-half block commute was actually one of the less pleasant of my life, which required a left turn onto a busy city street both morning and evening.  During rush hour.  I had no accidents during that time, but the manufacturer of my new car paid for a new muffler under warranty because the many, many short trips prematurely rusted the one that should have lasted several  years.

Then I bought a house.  It was much better for my car, and I was now enjoying a fifteen minute drive.  It was a very scenic drive, along my city’s main street of classic old mansions.  It was perhaps the most pleasant commute I ever had, all things considered.

I bought a larger house that was just a bit farther away, but the scenery took a big dive.  Now half of my route (which was now about 20 minutes) required a drive along an inner city corridor that was a daily reminder of the way cities can deteriorate.  The other half was suburban normality.  Or normalcy, in the preferred term of President Warren G. Harding, who had been a newspaper editor and considered “normality” a poor substitute.

My first real commute came when I moved to an office downtown. I discovered that a thirty minute commute could be cut to about fifteen if I left at 7 am.  And so I did.  And if I stayed until after 6 pm the commute was about as short on the way home.  But heaven help me if I joined the mass of “normal” rush-hour drivers.

We moved our office to the suburbs after a few years, and I was now ten minutes from the house.  And we moved again seven years later, a move that cut that ten minutes to five.  That was my commute for over ten years:  One mile, two traffic lights.  Which I rarely hit when green.  On the rare days when I hit both of them just right my commute was less than three minutes.

A commute like that has a downside.  Your car never gets warm in winter or cool in summer.  And you don’t really have much time to get into or out of the “work” mindset.  Again, I should have walked or ridden a bike.  But I still had the same problem – I needed to drive places with some frequency, so walking or biking was a false economy.  And there was that highway.  One of my two traffic lights was for a four-lane highway.  Mrs. JPC (she who recently forbid me from climbing on my roof) outlawed crossing the highway on a bike.  I didn’t argue.  Though I did make the mile-long walk a time or two when we had a car in the shop or something.

It is hard to get a commute much shorter than 3-5 minutes, but I managed to do it when I started working from home.  How about a 15 second commute from the kitchen or living room to my office?  Talk about no time to mentally shift gears.

My final law office made commuting an event again.  One that gave me a choice of routes, because there is no really direct way to get there.  There were, instead, about four options which varied by only a minute or three whichever way I choose.  And because I was in charge of the beginning and end of my work day, I could avoid the worst of the rush hour traffic

When I began my trucking life, it was back downtown – or just a little bit south of it, in an old industrial area.  I started out working nights, which usually gave me about a 20 minute commute in when others were starting to go out, and then the opposite in the morning.  But now I am back to daytime work. And it is bad. 

My morning commute for a 7 a.m. start time is probably 30 minutes and has lately been close to 45 minutes going home at 4 p.m. It is funny how driving in traffic during the day (and being paid for it) is nowhere near as frustrating as being in traffic on my own time. Or maybe that isn’t so much funny as it is a truism. Perhaps it is time to just hit play on my current audio book and make for a little enjoyment during that final 45 minutes between work and home. And be thankful I live in Indianapolis and not in the many places where residents would laugh at me calling this a commute.

25 thoughts on “Suffering The Rush Hour Commute”

  2. Your commutes, other than your current one, sound reasonably familiar. My current commute is roughly 2.5 miles. I have been stretching my afternoon commute to about 4 miles or so to avoid a left turn onto a busy street.

    I have ridden my bike some (but not this year as I don’t ride if rain is in the forecast, as it is today) and it’s only 2.3 miles given the way the walking trail lies in relation to city streets. The downside, one year, was the guy smoking a joint every morning so I had to hold my breath and blow through his Mary Jane cloud.

    My commutes in Hannibal and St. Joseph were comparably short, which sometimes wore on me as, like you said, there is no time to transition out of work.

    When we lived in Cape Girardeau my commute was about 40 minutes given the distance I lived from where I worked (about 35 miles or so). That was an enjoyable commute as traffic wasn’t a thing and you could just drive.

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    • I always counseled my kids to avoid left turns whenever reasonably possible. Left turns always made plenty of work for me in my prior life.

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  3. Hindsight and all that, but a block and a half isn’t too far to walk back to the car when you have midday meetings. Hell, in some places, the car park is that far away from the office buildings.

    I’ve quit jobs I’ve really liked because of the commute. I’ve commuted from Colorado Springs to Denver Metro area for more than one job I’ve had; but after the Invasion from California got serious, it just wasn’t worth doing any more.

    It’s all a matter of degree, of course. 45 minutes might be a ludicrous, eye-brow raising commute where you are… It’s about the same amount of time my drive TO Denver usually was on good days and about half what it was on my drives home after all the other people became awake to fulfill their roles as constipators.

    Good luck finding a sweet spot, though.

    And Harding was an idiot, clearly — or at best a bad editor.

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    • I second the comments on the Springs to Denver commute in Colorado. In the 1990s it was reasonable to get to the south side of the city (tech center) and even somewhat dependable to downtown. Now I’m not sure I’d even consider the drive from Castle Rock. Winter weather always adds to the stress. The West Coast invasion has changed everything about the state and added a whole lot of lousy drivers… and attitudes.

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  4. I’ve lived all over, but currently live in a city that I also lived in during my 20’s. At that time, almost all professional business was done downtown, so you had an inbound morning commute and an outbound evening commute that was jammed. I remember sitting in stalled traffic on the expressway In either direction, just to get to and from the west side of town where I lived. Driving through town wasn’t shorter, and placed you in peril waiting at stop lights in some pretty volatile neighborhoods, and becoming a target for “smash and grab” criminals. Sometime in the late 80’s, a lot of professional businesses had moved to the outter ring suburbs, near where their workers, and more importantly, their senior managers, actually lived, and this resulted in traffic flow dropping way off! This did result in jammed and crowded suburban and ex-urban roadways that were never built to take the volume, resulting in about a twenty year arc of roadway construction and funding that suburban livers fought tooth and nail. I DO remember living and working in Chicago in a period of my life, where it was announced that inbound and outbound traffic was the same level of mess both in the morning and the evening, as so many people were living no where near where they worked, so there was no escaping it unless you lived near a rail commute station. BTW, I love rail commute, and took it all the time when I lived in DC, rarely getting into my car at all; even using it on the weekends. As they always say, the only true valuable mass trans is the one that does not use the same streets as the cars. I have many fond memories in both Chicago and DC of rocketing by stalled expressway traffic while riding the rail commute! When I lived in DC, it was $1.25 in each direction, vs. $200. + a month to park!

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    • I visited Chicago a number of years ago by train, and did all travel in the city with transit. I came to appreciate a well designed transit system. Although I understand that it is a money pit for the city.

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  6. Before my employer moved the plant, I travelled on the 401 to get to work. That’s the highway across Toronto that used to take me 15 minutes at 7 AM, but soon became 30-40 minutes for the same route, and you better be on there before 6:30 AM.

    Now to take approximately that same route is still 30-40 minutes because they have more than doubled the number of lanes each way. What used to be three in each direction is now eight lanes in places.

    Wiki says, “The part of Highway 401 that passes through Toronto is North America’s busiest highway” Ontario Highway 401 – Wikipedia.

    A recent study (depending on which one you read) showed that during rush hour, traffic here still only travels at 18 km/h (about 12 MPH), thus earning Toronto the third worst congestion rating in all of North America behind only the Windy City and Beantown.

    Traffic jams are one of the most stressful things that we do. It has led us to need dash cams front and back in our vehicles so that we have proof of what happened if we encounter an unfortunate fender bender.

    Stay safe out there.

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    • I am really fortunate to live where I do for driving. I have experienced rush hour traffic in NYC, Washington DC, Chicago and San Diego-LA. If Toronto and Boston are worse, I had better stay away!

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  7. Yup, that’s not too terrible.

    I’m about 15 miles from the office and post-pandemic the commute is more like 45 min there and an hour back. Luckily we are now told to go in twice a week, since the start of the year I’ve been going once since neither my manager nor anyone I regularly deal with is in that office. Nobody’s said anything yet, fingers crossed.

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  8. From my own experiences and those of my kids, it’s a wonder what commuters tolerate in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Dallas. When my daughter worked in LA, her commute was 90 minutes one way at peak times… and that got her a mere ten miles. When I took the bus from the SF Airport area north into downtown, it was 45 minutes one way without traffic (but at least I could read). And Dallas…. I’m not sure there’s any hour when it’s NOT the commute in Big D. The sheer number of cars and lanes on those metro highways is mind-boggling.

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    • I once visited a friend in Connecticut and had to go through NYC on a weekday morning on the way home. His father tried to tell me that I could leave about 3 hours after I planned to and I would come out ahead. I should have listened to him.

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  9. And this weekend will be bad traffic jams for sure with the Indy 500, though they are predicting a rainy race day, so maybe not? After your quiet overnight hauls, this is a bummer for sure JP. My first job at the diner lasted throughout my college years and was just five blocks away, so that was great, though I drove to school when I attended community college but it was just 20 miles roundtrip. When I transferred to Wayne State University, it was in Detroit with great connections (in those days) so I took the bus then and for years thereafter I just commuted by bus which gave me the chance to read. I have never read as much since I worked remotely from 2011 until I retired a few months ago.

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  10. My lost comment: Long commutes helped me retire early. My boss lived a couple miles away for four years. We made use of the time by carpooling. And the six years in Wichita were amazing. The surface streets from home to work took only 10-12 minutes but I paid 35 cents a day to take the turnpike to the next exit because it was exhilarating to go 65 miles per hour to and from work.

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  11. I’m lucky, because my commute is roughly 15 minutes door-to-door. Living in a region where the main city is small (population 48,000) does tend to spoil a person.

    Interestingly, I’ve discovered that simply waiting about 10 minutes in the evening allows me to avoid the 5 o’clock rush hour. I get home at roughly the same time, and spend less time sitting in traffic.

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