Avoiding The Stress Sandwich - or - How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love the Bus

In my first go-around at university, I was extremely lucky to live two blocks from campus, so I walked or biked to class every day (I also worked on campus for the summers I spent in Saskatoon – no doubt the gas money I saved in university helped keep my expenses low). However the downside of this was that unlike most University of Saskatchewan undergrads, I did not learn to use public transportation. I still had to pay for the bus pass, which I grumbled and complained about very publicly in a RedEye article that we shall not speak of ever again, and proudly never once used public transit during university.

When I went back to school about 8 years later, I applied for a parking pass, because the bus, ew. But seconds before I clicked the button to purchase the pass, I finally started thinking like the engineer my resume says I am:

• I already had to pay for a bus pass whether I used it or not
• I was about to plunk down $400 (plus future gas money) for a parking spot a 20 minute walk from the building where my classes and office were located
• The bus stop was a block from my house, and would drop me off literally across the street from my office
• A bus ride would be 30 minutes, a drive about 15-20 plus another 20 minute walk
• At the time my only guaranteed income for the coming year was $4000

Okay! I should probably learn to take the bus.

I am not exaggerating when I say that taking the bus is probably the thing that changed my life the most in the past few years. (I guess if we want to chicken/egg it, I would never have started if I hadn’t decided to go back to school...) At first I kind of hated it, especially when I had been waiting for 10 minutes on College Drive and then saw my bus go by, full to capacity and unable to stop, meaning another 20 minutes of waiting. Eventually I learned which times of day the bus had a tendency to fill and I’d go shove my way on early at the main pickup point, Place Riel (I also realized that they would usually send another empty bus 5-10 minutes later to pick the rest of us up). I didn’t know where the stops were at first, so pulled on the cord a bit early a few times. But after a while, I started to wonder why anyone would want to drive when taking the bus could be a viable alternative.

Don’t get me wrong – Saskatoon Transit is NOT perfect (though in about 5 years it should be vastly improved! I’m so excited for this!) and there are a lot of places where it makes way more sense to drive a personal vehicle. My sister lives on the opposite end of the city which I’d need a couple transfers and at least an hour to get to, and if I’m going to her house it’s usually a weekend or evening when the bus is running reduced service. Of course I will drive to her house. If a person needs to trip chain all over the place, again a vehicle usually makes sense. But if you need to go directly downtown or the university area during Monday-Friday working hours, it seems to make so much more sense to take the bus.

Of course, in a lot of cases, unless you routinely spend copious amounts of time hunting for a parking spot and/or end up parking a 15-20 minute walk from your intended destination the bus will probably add at least 10 minutes to your commute. I get that some people just can’t give up that time, but I also think it might be not be as hard as you think to add it in. The big question is - why would I encourage something that actually increases my commute time, in a world where time is so precious? In my opinion, the mental health benefits of not driving to and from work are too huge to ignore.

When a person is driving, especially in a city, their brain is in hyper-response mode. A study in Maryland concluded that the brain might be required to process over 1300 pieces of information PER MINUTE when driving 30 mph*. Besides you know, responsibly operating a deadly weapon, you are likely worried about bad drivers, the weather, icy roads, the horrible news you’re hearing on the radio, etc. This is all EXTREMELY STRESSFUL! No wonder people get to work grumpy and exhausted, and get home grumpy and exhausted. Why would you want to do something like that before and after another stressful activity like working for 8 hours?

I eventually realized that a lot of the change in my mood during grad studies was not totally due to the career change I’d made, but the fact that I wasn’t designing my day as a stress sandwich. On the bus, you can turn your brain off and let someone who is trained and paid to drive worry about all those other things. You can look out the window and see what’s going on in the city, close your eyes and listen to a podcast without having to also focus on the road, legally use your cell phone, read a book, etc. i.e., use the commute time to take a break and do something that ISN’T stressful.

Even better, at the start and end of said bus commute there’s probably at least a block or two of walking. And we should all know by now how even just a tiny bit of exercise can shift a person’s mood!

I’m not saying everyone can and should convert to bus commuting tomorrow. I know you’ve got kids to drop off at daycare! I know you have to go to Costco to get gas on the way home (do you really though?)! However, maybe on the days your car is in the shop, or you want to have a few extra after-work drinks, or it’s -40 and you dread the 20 minute walk to your parking spot – give the bus a try. Google Maps and the Transit App make it super easy to see where the bus is and can tell you exactly where and when to get on and off. And the awesome part is that the service is only going to get better over the next decade.

*Stat taken from Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us), referencing Street Graphics published by the American Society of Landscape Architects Foundation