Continuing my efforts to get around without a personal vehicle, I have worked out the following commute times between my house in Herriman and The Salt Lake Tribune at 90 S. 400 West, in downtown Salt Lake City.
Note: In my truck, I could get to The Tribune in 40-plus minutes, depending on the amount of traffic — which is a primary reason I got rid of it. If traffic were cholesterol, the Salt Lake Valley would be dead from a heart attack by now.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve figured out for a work commute so far.
Walking • Nine hours, 15 minutes (barring death by exhaustion, starvation, etc.).
Hitchhiking • Two hours, 55 minutes (barring death by serial killer).
Bicycle • Three hours, 10 minutes (barring death by own inattentiveness).
Bus • One hour, 38 minutes (barring — well, I think last week I proved that buses are fairly safe if somewhat inconvenient).
Come we now to TRAX. Or not. I’ve already used light rail to get about. In fact, I used it for years. Time: One hour and 14 minutes door to door, counting the shuttle to the station, one transfer from Red to Blue line and assuming that the train doesn’t hit a cow.
I stopped using TRAX after two physical altercations involving deranged and or drunken homeless men, and about a thousand incidents involving university students putting their feet on the seats opposite them.
How did I know they were college students? Textbooks. That and loudly expressed political opinions meaningful only if unicorns were allowed go to law or medical school.
Seriously, if you got through high school without realizing the impropriety of putting your filthy feet on the seats where someone else has to sit, it’s no wonder America continues to decline in math and sciences among developed countries.
There are some plus sides to TRAX. For example, if you fall asleep and miss your stop — which I’ve done several times — you can always get off and get back on a train going in the opposite direction for the same price. Try that in a car.
TRAX also provides an occasional floor show. Once, after moving some cannons around in the garage and putting THC cream on my knees before catching the train, the cops got on my car with a dog. Gunpowder and weed. I might as well have been in heat.
Then there was the time that a passenger asked a kid to get his feet off the seat, to which the kid replied, “Mind your own business.”
The passenger — who I suspect was human only because God changed his mind in the middle of making a tortoise — got up and sat beside the kid.
“There,” he said. “Now it is my business.”
Proof that he had paid attention in high school, the kid removed his feet from the seat and got off at the next stop.
Despite the presence of the vagrants and students, TRAX isn’t a bad ride. The cost is reasonable, the time isn’t that much different — provided you don’t have to make more than one transfer, catch a bus, and then call a taxi to get to your final destination.
The biggest difference I noticed between riding light rail and driving on the freeway is that I’m not alone. All of the people who drive me crazy on Interstate 15 are now inside the car with me.
Robert Kirby is The Salt Lake Tribune’s humor columnist. Follow Kirby on Facebook.