I hate commuting.
It sucks.
I was reading The Enlightened Cyclist by Bike Snob NYC where Eben Weiss discusses the perils and inherent dangers of daily commutes. We are taking our lives into our hands when we travel from one place to another. I feel this when I am trying to merge on to 520 at 8:34 a.m. A friend of mine does a similar commute to Redmond. When I told her where and when I go, she immediately felt sorry for me. "I carpool with my husband so we pass all of the crazy traffic waiting to get on the highway."
Of the ten people in my training class, I live the second closest to the training location, and I bitch the most about the drive. On my drive home, I pass a sign that tells how many minutes it is to Everett. I've already been in the car for forty minutes, and I am one exit away from home when I see the sign. I think about the two people in my class who live near Everett who have 77 more minutes to go. I can't imagine.
Until I started commuting, I had also been incredibly naive about the traffic in Seattle. I know it was bad, but I didn't realize how much time it can shave off a person's life. I spend almost two hours each day driving less than nine miles. During non-rush hour times, the same drive takes about twenty-five minutes. And this is a reverse commute. The people coming in from the suburbs into the city are parked on the highway. The traffic I am in moves slowly, but at least it moves. Today, I was crawling, which means my car was moving forward, but my speedometer was reading 0 miles per hour.
I never did like driving, even schlepping my kids around. I had a short radius of how far I would drive my kids for an activity. One summer when Claire Adele was five and the Boy two, I signed Claire Adele up for a half day class at the Pacific Science Center in the summer. I would drive her down there around 9:00, and I would pick her up around noon. In rush hour, it took about a half and hour to get there and about twenty minutes to get home. Round trip, that was about 110 minutes with a toddler in the car. Instead of driving home, I'd find a park nearby for the Boy and I to hang out at, and then I'd get Claire Adele.
I hated it. If I only had one kid, it might have been fine, but with two, it was a disaster. Claire Adele has a friend who is an only child. This mother would sign her daughter up for classes on Mountlake Terrace (10.9 miles) after school and on Mercer Island (12.7 miles) in the summer. This woman wanted her daughter to have a friend in the class. Even though I was a stay-at-home mom, I couldn't afford the drive time to get Claire Adele back and forth. This mother agreed to take on the heavy lifting of the carpooling. Her daughter was going anyway--what was the big deal of bringing along another kiddo?
Which brings me to my theory about how far families are willing to drive their kids around based on the number of children in the family:
The team that I am going to join allows people to work from home one or two days a week to avoid the commute. I can see why people would want to re-claim those extra hours.
As I was driving, I thought about the people in my class who I have gotten to know over the past two weeks. A few weeks ago, I took a webinar where I was in the classroom, but the other students were streaming the class over the internet. I missed interacting with the other students. Here, I talk to people over break and during lunch. We work on group projects, all of which would have been missed had this class been taught online.
Social scientists and economists evaluate decision-making of citizens consumers. Why do I do this drive even though I loathe it so? Even though I hate it, I do it anyway. One might argue that the more I hate the drive means the more I like the class, as I am willing to put up with something I hate to do something I enjoy or get benefit from.
I am so glad the training ends in July. I think I can survive it until then.
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