Ever notice your commute lasts longer than Rooney's career?
As I listened to 92-year-old Andy Rooney grumble his farewell commentary Sunday on "60 Minutes," I marveled at his 33-year TV career. How can anyone complain so well and so consistently for so long?
Then I realized that Rooney is just a novice complainer compared to us suburban commuters. Of course, we have a lot of time to grouch. We spend an average of 71 hours each year stuck in traffic jams in addition to our normal commuting time, according to the 2011 Urban Mobility Report, published by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University.
Listening to every "60 Minutes" commentary ever recorded by Rooney would take a little less than 55 hours. So during a typical year of commuting, we could listen to Rooney's entire career while we were stuck in traffic and still have 16 hours of down time left to whine about how Rooney would have to work until he's 103 to provide enough commentaries to fill all our extra time in the car.
Commuting is the worst part of the job for many suburbanites who are lucky enough to have jobs in this economy. We become so worn down, we don't even realize that our time wasted in traffic jams has steadily grown. We were trim with a full head of hair in 1982 when we complained about the 11 hours we spent in traffic jams each year. The realization that we now waste a whopping 71 hours stuck in our cars each year sneaked up on us just like those observations such as, "When did I gain so much weight?" "When did my hair get so thin?" "When did magazines start gracing their covers with celebrities I've never heard of?" and "When did the people at my high school reunion get so old?"
Adults with jobs aren't the only suburbanites suffering through long, wasteful commutes.
"I get calls from parents saying, 'My child is on the bus an hour and 20 minutes in the morning,'" says Cinda Meneghetti, director of pupil transportation for the Illinois State Board of Education. "Nobody wants to be on the bus for that long, but it is what it is for right now."
Cuts in school bus budgets have led to fewer buses, which means longer routes. At the same time, money-crunched parents don't have the luxury of a second or maybe third car that needs to be insured and have a full tank of $3.75-a-gallon gas just so a teenager doesn't have to endure a school-bus ride. While the state suggests a guideline of no more than an hour bus ride each way to school, the reality is that some kids spend more than two hours a day in a school bus because of the budget cuts.
"It is jumping the ride time up," Meneghetti says.
At least kids can send texts (often to the person sitting next to them) while riding a school bus. Adult commuters are supposed to be concentrating on driving.
Yet, in my years of commuting, I have seen (and in my feckless youth sometimes been) a driver reading a newspaper (God bless those folks), magazine or novel, gesturing with one hand while holding a cellphone with the other, texting, scribbling notes with a pen, working on a laptop, trying to light a cigar, listening to a book on tape, learning a foreign language, watching TV, playing a video game, getting romantic (PG-13 and R versions) with a passenger, tossing garbage out the window with both hands, changing clothes, disciplining children in the back seat, breast-feeding, shaving, applying lipstick or eyeliner, clipping nose hair, plucking eyebrows, brushing teeth, tying ties, removing pantyhose, eating messy meals with both hands while steering with the knees, flipping off people who veered into a lane while driving with their knees, drinking alcohol, tugging on pants to alleviate the pain of burning spilled coffee, ducking beneath the console to find something, working on a needlepoint, holding a loose and dented car door in place with one hand, and using traffic-jam time for those much-needed phone calls to Mom.
Get caught doing some of those things and you may end up getting sentenced to 71 hours of public service.
When the economy finally starts gaining steam, commuting will get worse, the study warns. By 2015, our annual delay is expected to grow another three hours, and our lost time should be worth almost two weeks of vacation time by 2020.
Of course, by then, I hope some grouch on TV is griping about how his solar-powered flying car still doesn't have enough cup holders.