On clear roads driving under the speed limit I can complete my commute to work in 30 minutes, it usually takes 40 or so minutes due to people driving unnecessarily slowly (seriously, on one segment through an industrial area the speed limit is 60 mph, but you are almost guaranteed to get stuck in a queue of traffic behind a car travelling at 40 mph or less for no apparent reason)
So today I worked it out, now this is very rough and my maths is weak but over the course of a 35 year working career I would be losing 126 days of my life behind slow drivers. This can’t possibly be right can it?
20 minutes per day x 5 days = 100 minutes per week x 52 = 5200 minutes per year x 35 = 182’000 minutes over a 35 year career
182’000 divide by 60 = 3’033 hours divide by 24 = 126 and a bit days
*needless to say this is a very rough estimate, I’ve had commutes varying from five minutes to around two hours in my working life so far.
You didn’t count time spent behind accidents. While speeders are dangerous also, slow drivers encourage people to change lanes to pass them, and each lane change on a busy road increases the chances of a collision. And accidents slow up traffic long after they are gone.
On the roads I used to drive, it was a lot easier to drive 20 mph below the speed limit than 20 mph above it.
We have a bit of Interstate that winds through the downtown area at 45 mph. It’s very hard to drive this slow here, but we usually keep it at or below 55 to appease the locals. Every damn morning somebody decides that the locals don’t need appeasing and neither does the rest of the rush hour traffic so they change lanes like a demon, tailgate like crazy, and make the commute dangerous. Then he comes upon the sanctimonious person who decides that 45 mph must be his exact speed. Someday, one of the speeders is just going to explode from frustration of being behind the sanctimonious fart. I hope I’m there to watch it.
I certainly hope you don’t work 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, for 35 straight years. That’d make you go insane faster than anyone going 20 miles under the limit.
The problem with your math is that the “lost” time doesn’t actually add up. It’s just absorbed into other unproductive time periods throughout the day. Worst case you get to sleep 20 minutes later, but you dont start 20 minutes later next day.
I’ve found most people who drive the speed limit don’t. If its 45, they get their car up to 45 then look away from the speedometer and begin to slowly slow down. Then after they spot that they’re going 38 they accelerate to 45. Repeat.
Actually, it seems to me the math problem could be with the very premise itself of the time loss. It seems unlikely to me that someone gets 10 minutes added onto their commute SOLELY because of one driver going 40 mph instead of 60. I think this would require about 21 miles of being stuck behind the person going 40 mph. That’s a 21-mile, continuous segment of a single-lane, 60-mph road, stuck behind the slow driver the whole distance, without any way to pass. Who has a commute like that? Only winding mountain roads are like that, and those aren’t normally 60 mph anyway.
The OP further predicates that this happens both going to, and coming from, work–EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK.
I get as frustrated as the next person by unreasonably slow drivers, but the rational side of my mind still tells me that the inconvenience, in the end, is mostly psychological, rather than a lot of lost time.
Accidents are very rare actually, and I don’t mean speeding, you can drive quite safely at the speed-limit on most parts of the road, and probably significently faster but still safely if you were willing to break the speed limit.
And ironically the 40 mph drivers tend to do 40 mph on the 60 mph main road and through the 30 mph speed limit areas.
It was a very rough calculation, of course some times you work more than five days a week, others less.
That is annoying as well, also people who acclerate vvvveerrryyyy slowly, so they’re just getting up to a reasonable speed when they have to slow down again for something.
Its a knock-on effect rather than just one slow driver. On days when the road is basically clear I can get to work in 30 minutes, without speeding and in fact driving quite casually, the difference is I’m continually moving forward at a safe achievable pace.
On most other days the journey takes around 40 minutes because of said unnecessarily slow drivers, so yes it basically is every working day annoyingly and it isn’t psychological because I’ve timed it.
I’m from Northern Ireland, my commute is 3/4 over country B-roads and through villages, with the last quarter through an industrial area, its the last part that tends to slow things down most. It can be hard to find a safe over-taking place on the B-roads and through the industrial area traffic is usually too heavy to overtake at all.
Okay, that makes sense. But in that case, then isn’t the problem more just the nature of traffic itself? It’s slow in the same way water is wet.
I’m more likely to get upset at “Sunday drivers” on surface streets, who drive like they’re on drugs, or as if they were going on a sightseeing tour of strip malls.
Well when you get stuck at the tail end of a queue of vehicles behind a car doing 20 mph below the speed limit its hard not to personalise it.
And especially if there are cars in front of them pulling away, the ‘keep up with the flow of traffic’ thing needs to be more strongly enforced or taught.
Actually I understand that some people are elderly or just driving a slow vehicle etc, its those who slot happily in behind them and make no effort to go past that are worse, at that point its much more difficult to overtake safely, three cars and you can forget about it. Of course some people get impatient and overtake anyway, at which point my heart is in my mouth every time.
Though when you eventually manage to pass someone who is doing 30 mph and who you can see is sitting forward in their seat with a white-knuckled death-grip on the steering wheel and a look of sheer terror on their face because it is raining slightly you have to wonder if they should be driving at all.
The math seems right but if your job doesn’t ever give you vacations or holidays I’d strongly consider looking for a new one. Bonus, the commute may be shorter &/or a different direction which could alleviate or solve your problem.
It was a very rough calculation, including leave etc would lower it significently but at the end of the day you are still talking weeks or even months of your life wasted.
This by far isn’t the worst (or the best) commute I’ve ever had, but its about average.
Try driving in the Bay Area some time. When I left work and looked at Google maps there would be four or five Waze reported accidents listed. And though they might be rare given the number of cars on the road, their impact was quite substantial.
When I used to commute through back more or less country roads, there were few accidents and a slow driver would be far more annoying than a fast one. A fast one when the road was icy tended to take care of himself.
No you aren’t. A few minutes wasted time here and there don’t “add up”. They aren’t even missed. You make up for it with a few minutes less time dawdling in the hall or restroom here and there without even realizing it. At the end of the day you’ll get the same amount of work done, get home at more or less the same time, go to bed at more or less the same time and wake up the next day at more or less the same time.
I don’t agree, if you have a set 8 hour work day then you’ll spend 8 hours there, losing twenty minutes per day on your commute is twenty minutes each day you could be doing something else at home outside work.
If I would get home at 1630 hours if the road was clear but I actually get home at 1640 hrs how is that anything other than wasted time?
No one has every single second of the day scheduled with meaningful activities. That twenty minutes or so just gets absorbed into the several hours of downtime that we all have each day both before and after work. The only way it could accumulate in any way would be if each ten minute delay somehow caused every event for the rest of your life to be shifted ten minutes later.
It doesn’t have to be meaningful, it could be as simple as ten minutes reading a few pages in a book of my choice, or going for a walk, or simply doing nothing at all. The point is those minutes are being taken up unneccessarily by other people, they are quite literally wasting my time.
My free time, what you call downtime, is important to me and I’m sure it is to other people.
I did four years with a five minute commute, but then I moved departments. A thirty minute commute is fine, I actually enjoy driving, when I’m not stuck behind a slow car that is.
