Commuting – a new Journey

As regular readers know, I’m pretty renowned for doing stupid commutes. Last year I worked in London for six months, commuting daily, which we worked out (from mileage claims etc.) to have resulted in 19,000 miles of travel ’til the end of 2011, purely for work.

The London run was a 70 mile drive one-way, so a 140-mile round-trip, plus the 10ish miles on the Tube each way. Amusingly, it took an hour to do the drive, and an hour to do the time on the Tube.

Since then I’ve taken on a new contract, this time working in Luton. The driving time is a bit less – about 2 hours in the morning, 90 minutes in the evening – for a few more miles, about 80 each way all told.

Everybody else insists I must be slightly mad to do the driving I do, but I really don’t mind it. It’s a longer distance sure, but it regularly used to take the same time to travel by bus from home to Oldham when I worked there. It used to take even longer when I was commuting by train between London and Bath, or London and Manchester. (And yeah, those runs were seriously insane)

In general I’m less stressed when it comes to commuting by car than when I’m reliant on public transport – people piss me off too much for me to want to travel with them now when I can avoid them.

I probably still am stupid for driving/commuting as much as I do, but it suits me, so I’m happy with it.