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Friday fun poll: how long is your commute?

Friday fun poll: how long is your commute?

If you like, skip to the end of this post to take the poll about how long your commute takes.

Last week: when did you start riding transit?

Last week’s fun post asked when you first started riding transit.

And it seems most of you (56%) started way back when you were kids! 21% started as teenagers, 18% said university or college, and just 5% said as an adult.

So many of you wrote about your experiences as a kid, and really, the comments were just lovely to read. There were so many fond reminiscences of taking transit with a parent or grandparent, or that first taste of freedom from using the system by yourself. Here’s Ella:

I’m sure I was riding transit much earlier, but the earliest I remember regularly riding the bus was to swimming lessons when I was 10. It was a huge deal because I was allowed to ride all by myself, and I had to transfer (very grown up things when you are a ten year old)!

JustMe had a story and a belated apology:

I remember my grandpa used to take me downtown to do errands on the Skytrain once a week. I also remember running up to the “drivers” seat while imitating the classic MKI sounds and doing all the announcements.. Come to think of it, it must have been pretty annoying, so I apologize if you’ve sat next to me back then. In my defence… It was awesome!

Plus Cow wrote in with a thoughtful note on how transit would have been great as a kid.

It would be interesting to see the correlation between whether people grew up in Vancouver or not along with the data. I started riding transit when I graduated high school and moved to A Real City; transit just didn’t exist in the middle of nowhere.
(I kind of envy kids who grow up in a city and can take transit to get around! Living where I did, you really had no independence at all until age 16 when you could get a driver licence and drive a car. Life with a transit pass is so, so much better. :D)

So really, check out the post to read everyone’s comments — they were truly a treat!

This week: how long is your commute?

I just remembered that I ran this poll for our BePartofthePlan consultation, but I never did it over here.

A few fun notes:

– My commute takes roughly 30-40 minutes, all on transit, and I really don’t mind it.

– In December 2008, Leslee Nicholson of Halifax won a Goodyear contest for having the longest commute in Canada — five hours of driving each way!

– Here is a really great article about commuting from the New Yorker in 2007. I thought this quote was pretty apt:

People like to compare commutes, to complain or boast about their own and, depending on whether their pride derives from misery or efficiency, to exaggerate the length or the brevity of their trip.

By the way, the longest American commute cited there was 7 hours a day — Leslee Nicholson would scoff at that, I think!

– And some follow-up questions: Do you like your commute or not? Or if you didn’t have to travel, what else do you think you might do with that extra time? (My answer: “Sleep in” :)

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