The road not taken
My commute to work is three miles long. By car it takes about eight minutes. Not door-to-door, mind you. That’s just the time my butt is in the driver’s seat. Ironically, it takes another eight minutes to get from my parking space to my office. I drive through several quiet suburban neighborhoods during my commute and never have to get on a major highway. There are no traffic lights in my path. There are, however, nine stop signs. Thirteen streets. Thirteen turns (including the ones in and out of my driveway and parking lot at work). Eight left turns and five right turns on the way to work, the other way around on the way home.
Thirteen turns is a lot of turns. Hey, I’m certainly not looking for sympathy here. My commute is about as easy as it gets. I should be biking to work. Or rollerblading. Segwaying. Pole-vaulting. Still, thirteen turns is a lot of turns in only three miles. That’s 4.3 turns per mile. More turns than there are miles.
They get annoying, these turns. I run through them in my sleep sometimes. The way that Olympic slalom skiers visualize their downhill runs, I see myself winding around one street corner to the next. I hate it when I wake up and realize that I’ve already done my commute in my dreams before I’ve even gotten out of bed.
Here’s the interesting part. Everyday, on my drive home, I come to a street that if I take it will shave my commute by fifteen seconds and one stop sign. The shortcut only works on the drive home, as it would actually add a stop sign on the way to work. Seems like a “no brainer.” Take the shortcut, right? Well, here’s the rub. The shortcut adds two more turns. That makes fifteen turns on the way home or an even five per mile. See, the regular, non-shortcut way home takes a long gentle arc that meets up at the end of the shortcut, right at the spot of the redundant stop sign.
I have come to think of this shortcut as a philosophical test; one that I face at the end of every workday. To shortcut or not to shortcut. It’s not a very busy road, so I haven’t really observed in a statistical manner how other people react to this quandary. Surely I am not the first person to reflect upon this issue. Ultimately, the people who reach this crossroad by necessity break down into two camps: those interested in saving time and those interested in saving turns. I suspect that there is a lot that can be said about a personality based upon the preference.
By now you’ve probably guessed that I usually opt for the longer, straighter route. But it wasn’t always this way. Seven years ago when I started making this commute, I would take the shorter route. I was always in a hurry. Just knowing that I had saved fifteen seconds was reason enough to take the shortcut. These days, I’m pretty much tired of the extra turns. The time doesn’t seem to matter so much. After all, what’s an extra fifteen seconds?
Well, a quick calculation for this story shows that fifteen seconds a day over the course of a year amounts to about an hour. Several years, several hours. Given our busy lives, who couldn’t use an extra couple of hours at such a small cost? Still, all that extra turning. As you can see, this really is a dilemma for me. Fortunately, there is one other factor that makes my decision easier. Tire wear. That’s right, tire wear. The more turns a car makes, the faster the tires wear out. I figure by not making those two extra turns every day I probably get two extra days of life from my car’s tires. That’s the cincher. You see, philosophy is one thing, but the cost of a new set of tires, well, that’s something else.
10:03:55 PM 
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