“It’s not just an annoying time waster — there’s a case that it’s a public health issue.”

Austin Frakt – New York Times

It’s no secret that commuting to or from work or school in a car is enjoyable by any means. Maybe it’s a 20-minute commute. Maybe it’s a 30-minute commute. It might even be a two-hour commute. 

There’s one thing that makes a commute so hectic. It’s annoying. It’s dreadful. It’s unavoidable at some point. It’s, traffic. 

While traffic takes a toll on you mentally–allowing you to get frustrated, tired, or irritable, recent studies show that sitting in traffic on a day-to-day basis can really affect your health and well-being.

This article written by Austin Frakt in the New York Times, explains how commuters spend an ungodly amount of time in traffic, and it is worse depending on where you may live. Therefore, the more time you spend in traffic, the more fuel you’re burning, the more pollution is racked up. This, being the first health effect talked about in the article. 

Another study in the article shows (briefly mentioned above), is that traffic takes a toll psychologically on someone. Some of those being “helplessness” and “unpredictability.” Thus, for all the time wasted on that, people reported that could be doing other “leisure” activities (Frakt 2019).

Coming from a perspective of someone who goes to school in a big city, lives 45 minutes away in a suburb, and has had a fair share of sitting in traffic, these all seem to make sense. It really make me think about traffic as a whole, and how it does affect the way I go about the rest of my day. For all the hours I’ve sat in traffic, I could have been doing homework, applying for a different job, making dinner, etc. 

My sister Emma Hinton, 23, has commuted to the city for her job five days a week for a year now. “I probably spend 6 hours a week in traffic. For all of the other things I want to do when I get home, I lose almost all motivation to do them. It just drains you.”