Ennui of the City Streets

I hate commuting. I never wanted to commute, and I moved to the middle of a city (Denver) hoping to find a job somewhere in range of my bike or at least the city bus. So after three months of fruitless job searching, I finally found something. Where? You guessed it: the suburbs. And not just any suburb, but Longmont, which is really not even a suburb it's so far away. So now instead of floating in my cheery urban bubble, I have to haul ass out of town every morning and home every night.

This is more trying than I first thought. Usually when I leave work, I'm tired, but not freaking exhausted. Plus I'm pretty pumped to be coming home, so I can get some dinner, see my girlfriend, and do some reading (not necessarily in that order, dear). But after driving through worthless amounts of traffic on I25, I AM freaking exhausted. Traffic on I25 southbound in the evenings is freakishly heavy. Usually not as bad as northbound, but I can't figure it out. When I drive north in the morning, traffic is usually pretty light. I laugh at the people driving into Denver, who are usually going about 10, but I secretly wish I could trade jobs with one of them, someone who works close to downtown, preferably with a nice office. (OK, as long as I'm wishing, I wish I had an awesome job as a mountain guide or renewable-energy researcher. Yes, I'm a nerd and that would excite me.) I guess southbound traffic is just heavy, no matter what.

So here's the point of my excursion into traffic patterns: Why do we put up with this shit? I like driving sometimes, when there aren't a lot of people around, and it's nice to have a car sometimes so you can get certain things done without sitting on the bus for hours just to go 5 miles across town. But when I'm going to work, the same route every day? I would pay bankloads of money to get to ride a nice train or subway to work. I could read, listen to music, or just relax. Let someone else worry about running into stuff or crashing in a snowstorm. I honestly don't get why Americans are so into driving. It's become one of the major headaches of modern living, and if we only had decent public transit I think people would realize this.