I've been meaning to blog about my commute for a long time. I drive 33 miles each way to my current gig, and frankly that's too far. About the only times I really enjoy my commute are sunny mornings like today, because when the weather is nice, the ride along the upper part of Highway 280 is really lovely. (Highway 280, if you're not familiar with the SF Bay Area, is an interstate that connects San Francisco and San Jose. It's more or less the neglected step-child of Highway 101, a north-south artery that runs all the way down to Los Angeles.)
At any rate, if you must commute, Highway 280 is a good commute to have, especially the part before you hit the more urbanized South Bay. Lots of green rolling hills, fields, even some cows as you pass near Stanford. This wiki link helps show what I mean but that's far from the prettiest scenery you pass on the stretch from San Mateo down to Cupertino. Still, it's a long commute, and even on a good, no-traffic day I'm in the car for 45 minutes each way. On a Friday night, it can take well over an hour to get home. And for a minimum of 4 months each the year (more if I work late a lot), I'm driving home after sundown, which means all I see is tail lights, not hills and trees.
What finally got me to write about the commute was this piece on commuting in the New Yorker. This is me:
Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each way. People travel between counties the way they used to travel between neighborhoods.
And here's the corollary:
“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told [the author of the article]. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,” about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”...
The source of the unhappiness is not so much the commute itself as what it deprives you of. When you are commuting by car, you are not hanging out with the kids, sleeping with your spouse (or anyone else), playing soccer, watching soccer, coaching soccer, arguing about politics, praying in a church, or drinking in a bar. In short, you are not spending time with other people. The two hours or more of leisure time granted by the introduction, in the early twentieth century, of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude. You have cup holders for company.
Not that I'm all that into soccer, churches, or bar-hopping (anymore) but those are just examples to illustrate the point. True, you can chat on your cellphone while you're in the car, but that is not very safe, and not much of a substitute for real social activities anyway. For example, I can't count the number of events I've passed on because they start in San Francisco at 6PM, which would mean having to leave work by 4:30 at the latest in order to get there on time.
If you'd told me 10 years ago what my daily commute would be like today, I would have laughed at you and called you a fool. Funny how things change. Many of the changes in my life since then have been for the better, but this one .... well, not so much.
