#commuting

Weather, at least in this neck of the woods, and especially at this time of year, is more often foe than friend. It certainly was yesterday, when a sudden and very heavy dumping of snow arrived just at the beginning of rush hour, spawning a perfect gridlock that lasted for hours.

While your author didn’t have to drive in it, at least not for commuting purposes, the tangled mess of compact crossover owners all attempting to get to that warm cocoon of beige vinyl they call a home tied up freeway traffic well into the evening. For some reason, nary a plow was to be seen — quite odd for Suburban Canada, as Corey Lewis calls it.

The conditions yesterday mirror those experienced on the longest commute I’ve ever faced. Last year, driving from head office in Downtown Canada (Toronto) to my managing editor’s home in Suburban Downtown Canada (Oshawa), another perfect storm transformed what would have been a basic highway trek into a three hour, 15 minute hell slog. Let’s just say there were no secrets between us by the end of that trip.

Do you like commuting? I certainly don’t. It’s safe to say that nobody likes commuting. Even when you’re driving a car or riding a motorcycle that you absolutely adore, the fact remains that doing almost anything else with the car or bike in question would be more enjoyable than slogging along with a group of similarly condemned individuals down the Long Island Expressway or I-5 or I-75 or the Chicago Loop. Nobody commutes because they want to. They commute because they have identified a need or combination of needs in their lives that require it. Perhaps they’re a dual-income couple with geographically separate jobs. Perhaps they cannot afford to live near where they work. Perhaps they are temporary employees, the foot soldiers in our country’s mostly imaginary recovery, going wherever the work is found while trying desperately to cover their expenses at home.

Just in case, however, that you felt your commute to be a glorious triumph, a veritable quotidian adventure, the Times has commanded that a member of the fabled one percent disabuse you of this ridiculous notion.

It would appear as though the price of admission to traverse the longest floating bridge in the world on a daily basis has had quite the impact on commuting patterns in Seattle. A study to be issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation this week – barring another tragicomic display by the powers that be, of course – has uncovered that use of the Governor Albert D. Rosellini Bridge – Evergreen Point (colloquially known as the 520 floating bridge) has gone down by half since tolling began near the end of 2011.

The first generation Insight was a commercial failure. Eight years yielded fewer than 20,000 unit sold and a lingering doubt about the genuine interest in two seat commuter cars.

Honda tried again with the CR-Z, and apparently George Orwell’s early Animal Farm analogy about ‘four being better than two’ may be all too true for the American automotive marketplace.

Nobody wants an uber-frugal commuter car with two seats. It’s either four or no sale.