Look, I will state right from the start that I am lucky to live five minutes from work here in Burnaby.
But that doesn’t mean I haven’t suffered as a car commuter for many years – so I have felt your pain. I got to re-live that experience while I was on vacation last week. I ended up staycationing it with trips into Vancouver, which meant driving home several times in afternoon rush-hour traffic.
Facing that daunting task, I decided to try a little experiment based on my recent columns detailing the efforts of some Burnaby residents to slow down - or deter outright - ratrunners racing through their neighbourhoods to avoid congested roads such as Highway 1, Hastings, Canada Way, Lougheed and Kingsway.
One example saw me veer off of Hastings to head north on Boundary Road and then east on Dundas Street, where residents recently tried unsuccessfully to get enough names on a petition to have speed humps installed. (I could have also tried Triumph, just a few blocks away, as residents there say it’s also a ratrunners paradise.)
Another example had me take some of the streets with the “lawn” prefix northeast of Brentwood mall in order to avoid Lougheed, which has become especially slow thanks to lane closures stemming from the FortisBC project.
I timed myself to see how long it would take using these well-known ratrunner routes and then took Lougheed and Hastings on the other days I was driving home. (For the record, I also took transit on a few of my excursions into Vancouver.)
Of course, none of this is scientific - it was before Labour Day so traffic was lighter than normal. I’m sure if I tried this in November during a rainy day things would have been different.
But I just wanted to get a feel for the differences between taking the main route and going ratrunner.
I have a few observations.
One is that I didn’t really save much time. Yes, I did save a few minutes, but not enough to really warrant the experience.
Of course, one main problem is that while I did follow the ratrunner routes, I didn’t drive like a typically ratrunner. I wasn’t in a panic to get home and so I wasn’t driving as fast as most ratrunners – at least according to the many emails I’ve received from fed-up residents.
Many of these streets are quite narrow. Dundas only has room for one vehicle when vehicles are parked on either side. This narrowness made me more cautious about my speed.
This leads me to another observation – many ratrunners are angry maniacs. Some of them raced up behind me and started hitting their horns because I wasn’t driving in ratrunner-warp mode, which is far above the legal speed limit.
Some of them seemed pretty pissed that I was blocking their route to commuter salvation. I just couldn’t bring myself to become a true ratrunner. People’s lives are too precious.
Ratrunning is also more exhausting. There’s so much zig-zagging through the various streets, as opposed to just getting on Hastings and enjoying some tunes on the radio.
No, it all felt so sneaky and pointless. There’s so much work involved, so much risk to others, that by the time I got home, I felt dirty.
Saving a few minutes just isn’t worth it.
Follow Chris Campbell on Twitter @shinebox44.
