Commuting has been a subject of perennial debates. A staggering majority of ordinary people who have to travel a few to several miles to and fro every day hate commuting and they do consider it to be a sheer waste of time. Many city planners and urban architects have criticized the compulsion of commuting more than an hour which easily becomes more than two hours for most working Americans.
Is Your Commute Wasting Your Life is going to shed some light on how much time you actually spend on the road, especially in major cities. Many people consider long distance commutes to be particularly undesirably but it is not the distance that actually makes it troublesome. It is the traffic. Drives along the freeways or where one can speed up without being halted at red lights repeatedly are not very troublesome. It is only when one enters a city or is about to enter the business districts and is travelling within the city limits that commuting becomes more than a sore pain.
As you explore the info-graphic, you will find out that on a commute of forty minutes, which should be the time that you would spend on a given distance, you actually spend more than an hour. The excess time is accounted by the red lights and numerous halts that anyone will have to indulge in. In Los Angeles, for a 39 minute drive, an average commuter spends more than 90 hours every year just being stuck at traffic. That is a whopping three days and eighteen hours or close to four days spent at signals. That is definitely not something that Americans can be proud of. Whether one blames the idea of concentrated commercial development and relatively affordable suburban homes and lifestyles or one complains the need for commuting alone since almost 80% of commuters drive alone in their private vehicles, there is a need for some serious introspection and subsequent planning.
The number of vehicles will only increase in the future as has happened in the past twenty years, there will be more commuters driving alone and the population will also increase, no matter how slowly. As a result, the carbon emissions are on the rise and will rise further leading to severe levels of air pollution that is already high, more people would be on the streets and on commutes wasting more time of their lives.
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