Yesterday, I had some urgent work to complete the final presentation for submission. I decided I shall go home; take a nap and then work late to be ready with my presentation today morning. However, Bangalore traffic knew better! The on average 1 hour bus ride ended up being a 1 hour and 45 minutes torture; it gradually ate up my nap time too!
It was during this time when I did some math assuming a few facts i arrived at a fact that if Bangalore’s infrastructure remains the same and I spend the next 30 years of my life working here (assuming early retirement!) I would lose over 332 days of my life in unnecessary travel. See the math below:
Ideally your workplace shall be 20 minutes from your home; however you end up spending 1 hour in travelling in one direction from home to work i.e. total extra time spent a day in commuting = 80 minutes
We have 22 working days a month, but we have around 21 holidays in a year too = 22*12 – 21 = 243 working days per year
Assuming we do not go to work with regular bus service and reach earlier on 43 days; thus 200 days per year during bad traffic.
Total time per year = 200 * 80 = 16000 minutes or 266 hours wasted due to extra traffic conjestion in a year!
This equals to 30 * (266/24) = 332.5 days lost in a 30 year working period!
I know the assumptions are quite simplistic and may be broken; but even if 10,000 people in this city end up living like this we have 3 320 000 days lost of their lives due to bad infrastructure!
Okay, that was the math of a useless guy in a bus cursing his luck!
Well that’s an interesting observation. When I was working in CMC Delhi, my office was in Janakpuri and I used to travel atleast 2 hours by bus in one direction from Sector 62, Noida to Janakpuri. While coming back if there was a traffic jam (which was always true!) I used to get frustrated terribly!
Hmmm… One of the reasons I opted to move out of Bangalore.
Going by your calculations, I had already lost one complete month gazing hopelessly out of my company bus at the traffic on Bangalore roads – cursing, of course.
Advice: If you can afford and your body clock allows, try to take some sleep in the bus itself. I tried that, but failed. See if it works for you.
the thought that enter our minds during a long bus journey are indeed incredible or incredulous, depending on the way you look at it.
I too used ot spend long hours in the bus when travelling from my home to college during engineering days.
I to used to do some hypothethical thinking during this period which used to make me smile with people wonder if u have gone crzazy…
reading this blog post reminded me of those days…