this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Years ago I learned that it's vastly better for my mental health to take a route that's 25% longer but has significantly less traffic.
Nowadays my commute is non-existant.
I take "the back way." It takes about five minutes longer (38 mins vs 33 mins) but I see more wild animals than cars. Most of it is along a lakeshore. I also get about 20% higher fuel economy going 45-60 vs 70.
I took a route 3 times as long with 0 traffic instead the shorter one, both were the same time. Even the gas was almost the same.
When we moved from the city to the middle of nowhere, our commute went from 8 km to 22 km each way. It still took about 20 minutes. But "rush hour" was the occasional herd of deer or elk instead of a bunch of drivers who were either too aggressive or too passive. A "traffic jam" was one vehicle, ours, waiting for a piece of farm equipment to move out of the way a few times a year instead of the weekly transformation from roadway to parking lot.
Even when I switched over to driving school bus, I could count on one hand the number of other vehicles I interacted with each week.
It's impossible to express how much that improved our mental states.