My commute to work pretty much goes as follows. I drive about 25 minutes or so to get onto and then 22 miles down Interstate 3 to the town of Paulsboro, where I peel off and take Splinterstate 803. Including the usual delays at the entrance ramp, it generally takes me about 10 minutes to drive 8 miles down 803 to get to Castlewood, which is where I frequently get my gas. The drive from Castlewood to New City is another 6 miles or so. Once in New City, I exit to 740 and within 10 minutes or 5 miles or so land in Enterprise City and at my job at Mindstorm.
If you read the above carefully (you probably just skimmed over it, that’s what I would have done), you’ll notice something missing. I deliberately left out how long it takes to get from Castlewood to New City. I left that information out because I have absolutely no idea how long it takes, though I’d say that it averages about 30 minutes or so. If you’re keeping track, that means that it takes me about 45 minutes to cover 35 miles of the commute and approximately 30 minutes to cover the other 6.
But I didn’t leave the 30 minutes out of the initial description so that I could shock you with it later. I left it out because it is always the variable in my commute. My commute may average 75 minutes but that’s only if you’re looking at the median and the mode. That’s how long my drive usually takes in the morning. Somewhere between 70 and 80. Sometimes less, but sometimes much, much more.
I knew that having a daily commute time of over two hours would take its toll when I signed on to work at Mindstorm. I knew that it would be less time doing things that I enjoy doing and more time in the car and that there is the blood-pressure toll of long commutes in traffic (something that I never experienced in my long commute in Deseret, thankfully). I accepted that or at least thought that I did.
But what drives me crazy is the drive from Castlewood to New City and I don’t know how to make it stop driving me crazy. It’s not just that it takes almost as long as the rest of the commute. It’s not even that I spend that time barely going or weaving through traffic with all the success of Peter Gibbons in Office Space. It’s that so much of my day revolves around just how bad that six mile stretch is going to be. And perhaps moreso that I have absolutely no control over it.
My morning commute takes somewhere between an hour one day and two hours and ten minutes another. Anyone that’s lived in a city isn’t completely surprised by that variance, but what surprises me most is that the two hour drive was not marked by some sort of accident or closure or construction. As near as I can tell, nothing happened at all. When it’s construction you usually see it an can pass it and closures are also obvious enough. When an accident is cleared you can usually see the cars and people on the side of the road or even if you can’t there comes a point where everything suddenly speeds up and you say to yourself “Oh, okay, they must have cleared whatever it was that was causing the congestion. Nothing like that.
And 90% of all of the congestion takes place on that six mile stretch. If the drive takes half-an-hour more than usual, you can bank on 20 (probably 25) of those extra 30 minutes occurring between Castlewood and New City and most of the remainder being the stretch either right before it or after it. Every day, whether traffic keeps me on the road for an hour or more than two hours, traffic stops in about the same place, on Exit 6 to Castlewood. The reason that this is so frustrating and disheartening is that when you see the stall in front of you and you come to a half, you don’t know when you’re going to be moving again. When you’re driving to Paulsboro and then to Castlewood you are sailing but you know… you know… that you’re going to be sitting there in fumes and scrambling as best you can just to get one or two cars ahead. And so it’s like waiting for the shoe to drop or the hammer to fall. Since there aren’t many exits, if you think you might even need to go to the bathroom, fill your tires, or something like that you had better stop ahead of time just in case it’s another hellacious day.
I have driven in traffic and I have driven in traffic, but I have never in my life seen anything like it. Not just because I know every morning that it’s going to happen but because there’s just no way to account for it. I can leave at 6:45 in the morning and it will be there and I can leave at 8:30 and it will still be there. And there’s no pattern as to when it will be better and when it will be worse. I can’t say “If I leave at such-and-such time, at least it won’t be as bad”. On the three worst days I’ve had I left at 7:10, 7:40, and 7:50. I thought that I could avoid it by leaving at 9 or so because one day I left then and the roads were clear, but it was a fluke because it was the Friday before Labor Day. I tried it again and it took the usual (to the extent that there is ever a “usual”) buck-fifteen.
The only saving grace is that I have my audiobooks. I’ve made my way through the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio plays and audiobooks and am not working on Terry Pratchett. I’m considering Spanish tapes to try to make productive use out of my time. There are worse things than being trapped in a car, I’ve decided.
Like shared or public transportation.
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9 Responses to Six Miles To New City
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It sounds as if avoiding Splinterstate 803 is the key to avoiding potentially long delays. One idea might to stay on Interstate 3 for a substantially longer distance until you encounter 740, which you would then take via a rather … aquatic routing right into Enterprise City. This would entail remaining on Interstate 3 right through the center of Cascadia’s largest city, but based on my admittedly limited experience several years ago traffic seemed to move remarkably well in that area.
You must have been reading my mind, Peter. I was suggesting just that to Clancy a couple nights ago when I was going over my option. It seems ridiculous to go into the big city during rush hour just to leave out the other end, and it may be more time-sensitive than the current drive, but maybe it’s not quite as hopeless.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Is there a ferry that runs there? On a larger note, that six miles of traffic describes the entire LA experience. Are there any telecommuting options at Mindstorm to make the commute easier? I always hear about telecommuting, but I’ve never seen it happen in real life. Also, have you noticed any differences in the Episcopal churches in Cascadia versus the other places you’ve lived.
Will:
I second Peter’s suggestion, though I’m not sure it’ll work. One other thing that may help is to see if your manager will let you shift your schedule back or forward a bit. For example, I used to have a manager who got in at 6:00 and went home around 2:30, and I tend to work from 10:30-7:00 or so to avoid traffic. I don’t know whether contractors are granted the same flexibility, but it wouldn’t hurt to try. You might also be able to telecommute through rush hour and then go in to the office once traffic thins out. Even if shifting your commute doesn’t always work, it should help you on average.
There’s a web site (search for “Zaulem traffic” without the quotes to find it) that has a map showing live traffic data. They archive the map every 10 minutes, so you can look at the archived maps for planning purposes.
Ecco:
There are ferries crossing the sound, but none that would help. He’d have to drive around to the other side of the sound to use them, and the crossing itself takes over half an hour, so it doesn’t really save anything.
Will:
Actually, public transportation might not be so bad. The bus gets to take the HOV lane, and the Mindstorm-homeless ratio on the bus would probably be at least 10:1. Plus you can read or work on a laptop while you ride. I’d take the bus myself if it didn’t add an hour of walking (round-trip) to my daily commute.
Ecco,
There isn’t any telecommuting that I can do. At least not yet. Some of my coworkers do work from home, but that’s typically on weekends.
I haven’t noticed any big differences between the Episcopal Churches here and elsewhere. The most local one looks like it’s kind of small and conservative like the one that I attended in Colosse (where the pastor seemed to wish he was a Baptist). The other one looks more WASPy like the one that I grew up attending.
Any particular reason you ask?
Brandon,
All buses go through (and require a change) Zaulem. If there is a route that takes the Splinterstate I haven’t found it and I don’t generally see buses while driving on it. All of the ones that the public transportation website suggests for me are a minimum of two hours each way.
Carpooling or vanpooling may be a more plausible option. I’ve been mulling that over as a possibility.
Unfortunately, without a car I may not be able to take a laptop to work. Outside computers and whatnot are pretty strictly forbidden in our lab. Even my Pocket PC. So I’d need some place to store the laptop. If I need to take electronics now, of course, I can just leave them in my car.
My work schedule is gloriously flexible (I’ve never seen a company take work hours so lightly), though if I leave to aim to get to work at 7:30 or 10 it doesn’t make all that much difference. I also left at 3:15 one day and discovered that the traffic was worse than my usual departure time of 6:30. The fact that I can’t just tinker with my timing is one of the sources of frustration.
The traffic sites that I’ve found thus far have not been helpful. They may update every ten minutes, but it seems that there is a lag in their data collection (which makes sense if you think about it). The same is even true of the EPA signs that appear above the Interstate telling me how long it should take to get to New City.
After having a commute that was over an hour each way for four years, I have vowed never to do anything like that again. I would rather move than have to sit in the car for long periods of time. One of the nice things about my current job is that I can get there in about 25 minutes.
I hope you can find a way to shorten your commute.
Abel,
There’s something psychological about the one hour mark, isn’t there? I’ve had one hour commutes and they haven’t bothered me nearly as much as my current one does. It was like the 60 minute drive was psychologically closer to the 40 minute drive I had at a previous job than the 75 minute commute I have on a good day right now.