The Unsustainable Absurdity of Driving To Work In North Dakota Winter

 

Original image from the 1865 book Alice in Wonderland. Thanks to the public domain, we can enjoy the magical imagery of "down the rabbit hole" in music like White Rabbit from Jefferson Airplane and the classic red pill/blue pill moment in the foundational film The Matrix. Public domain image via Wikimedia.

In the 1999 classic The Matrix, Keanu Reeves doesn't realize he is living in a strange and artificial world until he takes the pill that makes him wake up. I had a waking moment several years ago when I lived within walking distance of work for several years. The awakening comes from all the extra time at the beginning and end of the day and a wallet not drained from gas and car maintenance. Once one awakens to the possibility of a life not chained to a car, things are never the same. 

After my awakening, when my wife and I went back to being forced into the servitude of the daily commute, we decided it was time to move. I left a good job I'd held for literally decades because I couldn't spend two to three hours a day in the car anymore. I am obsessed with commuting time since, as I have written earlier, I have spent a year of wasted time and money driving to work and back. Part of our decision to move to Williston was that the furthest commute might take fifteen minutes. Goodbye, major drive time, but we still have to drive. If Rube Goldberg, the famed designer of senseless, absurdly comic machines that do simple tasks in the most complex and absurd way, were to design a transport system, it would be the one we have created.

"Self operating napkin" by Rube Goldberg. Published in Collier's in 1931, but copyright not renewed. Public domain via Wikimedia commons.

 
Consider the daily commute that my wife and I take. Our commute is modest by American standards, being less than half the average commute of 27.6 minutes and riding in one car instead of separately like most Americans. Yesterday the temperature was just below zero, so I piled on several layers of clothes before walking out to the garage to start the car. Once the car was started, because it was ten degrees in the garage, I let it warm up five minutes before driving up to the apartment to go inside and get my wife, letting it idle another five. We then drove the three miles to her work, where I dropped her off, and I went another half mile to work, which took ten to fifteen minutes. After work, I reversed the process. Walked out to the car, warm for five minutes, and then drove over to wait for my wife, idling my car in the cold another five minutes before going three miles home. All told, this relatively short commute, including warming up car, takes about forty five minutes to an hour each day.

A tank of gas in my tiny car lasts about a month, so the costs are low. We usually drive the old tiny car because the parking lot is a madhouse in a school of nearly 1000 kids with no busing-- which is pretty insane once I write it down. A fender bender on my little old car wouldn't be bad like our newer car. It is pretty absurd to own something and not use it. So all told, we spend four to five hours driving to and from work each week, stressing in the morning madhouse of schools with hundreds of kids and few buses where everyone drives. To me, that is the very definition of absurdity. An absurd house of cards that depends on cheap energy.

 

I have spent enough time in a few of the top cities on this list to know that they are still not what they could be if we prioritized communities designed for humans and not cars. Public domain graphic, U.S. Census Bureau.

As I still am writing this a day later, the temperature is -17 this morning so I let the car run for fifteen minutes. What is the cumulative waste and pollution of all these cars across cold America idling for endless hours add up to? It is absurd to think that we have designed a system that forces us to drive even in a relatively small town because of bad urban design. Think of the cumulative waste of our story multiplied by millions of Americans. Then think of the millions of new car owners in the developing world doing the same thing. My wife grew up in a family of seven kids in Asia with no vehicle, yet today each of those seven families has at least one car, motorbike, and sometimes both. It doesn't need repeating here that the world cannot sustain 8 billion Americans.

As Americans, we have had the privilege of being in the global minority of car cultures up until recently. The growing car culture globally has enormous ramifications for our future. Even if we switch out every gas vehicle for electric tomorrow, it is still a colossal  unsustainable waste of resources that impacts the planet. As many urban and design thinkers have pointed out, the challenge is in designing our communities better to meet the challenges of a future where we all need to have less impact. As I have written previously about our new house and urban development in our little corner of America, that really isn't happening.

A coworker walks to work from a block away, which I envy, but no matter where you live, you will have to drive for something. Stores are still far away and poor design precludes any non car movement, especially in winter. Even though the town is small, it is spread out to the degree that, even in nice weather, makes anything but a car impossible. It is a system that serves everyone poorly and marginalizes anyone who is not at least middle class, healthy, lacking impairments or old enough to drive. It also marginalizes the middle class because of the huge amount of resources we need to devote to personal transport. This is before mentioning all the "hidden" costs of all that sprawled infrastructure of roads that we pay for. Now that is absurd.

As a closet urbanist, I have realized that our drive in a modestly sized town could be eliminated with good urban design. We need to build communities in a way that things are located to make noncar transport easier. Some might say that nobody would want to walk, but I have worked several jobs in large urban areas where commuting to work still required a long walk from the parking lot or garage, doubling the fun. Now that is absurd.