You are not exercising, doing challenging work, having sex, petting your dog, or playing with your kids (or your Wii). You are not doing any of the things that make human beings happy. Instead, you are getting nauseous on a bus, jostled on a train, or cut off in traffic.Huh. I'm another bike commuter, so I am exercising when I commute, although not very strenuously. I guess that I have found commuting by car pretty soul-crushing, but I haven't really felt the same way about other kinds of commutes. I've had some long public transit commutes, but I could read and therefore didn't really mind it. Do they differentiate between different modes of transportation?
It’s unhealthy, sitting in traffic and wishing I’m anywhere else under the sun. What I’m doing is important to my family. What I’m doing is not worse than what so many other people do, for much less. But thinking about the clock of my life ticking away every day while I’m sitting there, just waiting to be somewhere else, I feel the gulf between my body (where I am) and brain (where I want to be) widening. The two growing further apart, until I’m only aware of the distance between them. ...posted by kliuless at 9:22 PM on May 28, 2011
Sometimes you try to be in the moment, but the moment sucks, and you think back to another moment, which also sucked, but had a twist ending. Do long, traffic-filled commutes ever come with twist endings? Not the car-accident kind, but the good kind. The kind that will make a moment in your life stick out as so magical it almost makes up for how unbearable everything else was at the time. Something that says, “OK, yes, there was all that, but there was also this.” You inch along and you pray, and the days pass, and you look, and you wait.
Do I win?No, not really. I've lived in some fairly rough neighborhoods, but I'd be really bummed if I lived somewhere where I was afraid to walk two blocks during the day. That sounds awful.
I have to wonder if these studies take into account the stress of losing a job, having to change jobs, having to find two jobs in an region where jobs are moving out from the city to lower-rent outlying areas, or other reasons why people might not live close to work other than wanting a big house or more land.I live in a low-density neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Most people who live here are working-class folks in service industry jobs, and there are a lot of families with kids. There aren't too many places in my town where they could afford to live, because we aren't blessed with an over-abundance of affordable housing, and the other working-class neighborhood has a reputation for crime and bad schools. (I think that reputation is really overblown, but I'm also coming from a place that has really bad crime and truly terrible schools.) My neighborhood has practically no reported crime, and the schools are pretty good. (I'm not going to say that there's no crime here, because there may be things like domestic violence that go on behind closed doors. But there's no noticeable crime. It is, for instance, completely normal for kids to leave their bikes outside overnight with the expectation that their bikes will still be there the next day.) There's also a critical mass of Spanish-speakers here, so it's an ok place to live if you don't know much English, which is true of many of my neighbors. I don't think most people move here for space. I think they're pretty focused on creating better opportunities for their kids, and this area seems like it has the best combination of fewer chances to get in trouble and better chances to get a good education.
a decrease in food costs (instead of expensive "workplace food", I walk home to cook)To be fair, you could have saved the same amount by putting your leftovers in tupperware or packing a sandwich.
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-- bike commuter
posted by circular at 8:34 PM on May 28, 2011 [5 favorites]