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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Fuck Cars
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Everyone commuting at the same time is borked. Drive around a 3 AM, there's no traffic. It'd be better if we pushed for shifts that don't NEED to be 9 AM to 5 PM out towards a different time like 6 AM to 2 PM.
What's "borked" is that we all conform to a weird strict standard of all leaving/returning at the same hour.
Years ago I worked with a guy who had a roughly 20 mile commute that was about 19 miles on a major highway that choked during rush hour. He worked from home in the early morning then drove in starting after 10:00. He’d then head home around 6:00 PM or later. He said traffic was almost always light.
He also never listened to traffic reports on TV or the radio. One day he got on the highway and was surprised to find traffic was virtually non-existent. He got about half way to the office to find the highway had been completely shut down due to a fuel tanker that was on fire…
How would you ever coordinate with friends and family though if one is you is always working? This is something I distinctly remember from the bad old days of shift work. It's so much easier when you and your friends can all pretty reliably be expected to be available in the evenings or on the weekend...
I think this is less and less of an issue anyway as telecommuting becomes more and more viable. Now companies fighting that is an arbitrary cultural norm holding us back.
Ah, that's the beauty of getting older: eventually you have no friends or family.
Tabletop gaming has solved that problem for me and might also explain my sensitivity to working around scheduling issues lol.
I mean yeah but we still find a time like once a month we both have a saturday off or something. I think the much bigger inconvenience is always having to miss work no matter what for a doctors appointment or something like that because they're all like 9-5 too.
That's mostly an issue with poor labor laws not allowing for time off when you should really have it, though.
I don’t, my day us shifted, so I commute later, instead of like an hour and a half my commute is 50 minutes (which is still a lot for a European) but in exchange I live in my hometown
Yea that's exactly what I'm talking about, you're saving like an hour a day simply by commuting at a slightly different time, AND you're not contributing to peak traffic hours.
I know this is a typo but I found it hilarious to think you were recommending 20 hour shifts as an improvement.
Yea it's 4 AM where I am and I haven't slept well for two days in a row due to financial stress.
One word answer: families.
Families is actually usually the reason for people to push for this, as having one parent for sending the child off and one for picking them up is often necessary if both parents wants to work full time
So one goes like 6 to 14 and the other does their 8 to 16 shenanigans
Yea, schedule is still mostly to blame, just think about how empty the streets are for many hours a night, or very little traffic at 11 AM or 2 PM. This is why I'm doing everything I can to try to avoid getting stuck commuting at normal times. I'd rather have a job that starts at 6 AM and ends at 2 PM.
Oh, you can drop your toddler off at daycare at 5 AM? Are your tweens fine readying themselves for school without any adults at home?
A car-centric society is the problem. The need to commute by car, both for the kids and the adults, is the problem.
I worked 6a-6p (3.5 days a week) with a toddler as a single mom, and daycare options were super limited. There was a whole two places available, could only use licenced in-home daycare folks.
I loved the schedule though. I did feel like someone elsecwas raising my kid on work days though.
commuting was easy peasy too
So then ask, why does a car-centric society exist in the first place. It stems from the decision of many to live in giant houses, where everyone needs their own back yard. From zoning laws and the need to live somewhere far from work. It's deeply ingrained in the US, which is why remote work is the fastest solution, but many corporations refuse for control.
It's what we got, so it must reflect what people wanted, right? Wrong. The reason that the U.S. is full of car-centric suburbia is that local leaders wanted to keep Black people out.
Not even kidding or exaggerating. My house is a little newer, but houses either direction down my street had racially-restricted covenants in the deeds. Many of them still say that you can't sell to Black people, though those clauses were struck down by the courts, and are unenforceable.
But once de jure housing segregation became impossible, they adopted poverty as a proxy: Drive up the cost of houses by making the minimum lot size big, with big lawns. Set the maximum occupancy low, usually single-family, so poor people couldn't double up. Make cars the only way to get around, because that costs more, and the automakers were all on-board. Then, subsidize white families through the original GI Bill, and FHA-backed, low-interest mortgages (a.k.a. red-lining).
This may sound like conspiracy thinking, but it's not. This was explicitly the plan. The leaders said so, in public, even wrote it down. The simple reason that we have big lawns and big cars engrained in American culture: racism.
One might think, yes, but cars were still what Americans wanted, but shockingly, no, we didn't. There were anti-car protests as late as the 1950's! It was a concerted propaganda campaign by the automakers to break down the opposition. They worked hard to re-frame streets as space for cars, and people as the interlopers. (They invented the conceit of jaywalking, for instance, and put out safety films about looking both ways before crossing the street.) Again, we have the memos that they wrote to each other as proof that this was an explicit, deliberate goal. To sell more cars
So, the idea that we have cars because Americans love cars proves that old joke about the KGB agent chatting with the CIA agent about propaganda: Ours is so effective, we no longer even recognize it as propaganda. (That, and we're so alienated from our emotions that many people think that they enjoy driving, despite all of the obvious signs that it makes them miserable.)
It stems from auto companies systematically destroying public transit across the country.
Edit: nvm, apparently I misunderstood the meaning of "tween"
Are your tweens (as in 20-something year olds) living with you and attending middle school? 😄 I would hope they can ready themselves just fine.
Guess you meant children or young teens
Tween means pre-teen…
Oh. TIL
That's called night shifts, and they actually weigh more heavier on the human psyche because humans are not typically nocturnal. The most thing I can actually state is that peopel should have more HOV Lanes like they do for Houstonians who live outside of Downtown Houston. But the problem is that HOV lanes have people who don't actually know how to drive the exact speed limit and those who do cause accidents.
Hov lanes help because all the dumbasses take it and the local lanes become a lot easier to navigate lol
Not really, night shifts are like 8 PM to 4 AM. I'm talking about a shifted schedule where people leave just 1 hour earlier to avoid the worst of traffic, and thus efficiency improves considerably. Most jobs could be worked from 6 AM to 2 PM instead of 9 AM to 5 PM.
Wouldn't work. We're familiar with the idea of induced demand spatially, as in building more lanes generates worse traffic congestion, but it would work temporally, too. Make more road capacity available by using the lanes we have at different times, and they'd just generate traffic congestion at different times.
By the way, I read recently that Houston no longer has a rush hour. It's just congested through the whole day, now.