Scrivenings of the King-Beyond-The-Wall

Travel Marvel #8

Describe what it’s like to sit in rush hour traffic in one of the busiest cities in the world? Oh, so you mean... describe my usual commute?

Thankfully, one of the silver linings of the pandemic has been that everybody is now better able to work from home, and I’m still classified as a remote employee so I only have to go into the office once or twice a week most weeks. But there was a time (almost twenty years of my life) where I was commuting five days a week, fifty weeks a year, between my home in Orange County and my work in North Los Angeles County. Which means that I have to drive through almost the entirety of Los Angeles to get to my office.

That means almost exactly 50 miles each way, driving through the heart of Los Angeles traffic. With no traffic at all, it takes less than an hour. In Los Angeles traffic? Just the normal ebb and flow of traffic (not taking into consideration accidents, lane obstructions, the occasional inclement weather, etc.) is between 90 minutes and 150 minutes each way. That’s a three to five hour round trip commute every single day. Before my wife and I adopted the kids, we just had a normal rhythm where dinner would be at 8pm or 9pm (whenever I got home), and we just stayed up late and the early part of the night was our evening.

Sadly, kids don’t work well on that schedule so we’ve had to adjust. But that’s where remote work has been a real blessing. Even on days where I have to go into the office, I’ll often head home around 3pm (so that I’m home for dinner) and then I’ll just catch up on the work I missed during the commute and dinner later in the evening.

The commute itself wasn’t all that bad; I got a lot of “reading” done via audiobooks in the car, so that I was doing something productive during that time. And I rarely came home in a bad mood (tired for sure, but rarely in a bad mood) because, no matter how rough the day at work was, I had at least an hour and a half in the car afterward to decompress and think through things before I got home. But it was still a ton of time to spend in the car. I think by some estimates, I spent more time commuting in ten years that the average commuter spends in the car for the entire life of their career.


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(435 words)


Prompt: Describe what it’s like to sit in rush hour traffic in one of the busiest cities in the world.