By: Lindsay Barr

Fort Collins, Colo.- If you were to ask someone about the happiest time of their life, the responses might include a birth, a wedding, or maybe meeting the love of your life. What you’re never going to hear is: “Oh yeah, it’s definitely my drive to work every morning.” Of course not! However, it is readily proven that the everyday, mundane commute is going to have one of the largest impacts on total life health and happiness. And what is going to be the main influence? The length. If you want to have a happy city, then a key aspect will be a short commute.  

In my own life, my commute is both the best and the worst part of my day. I’ll wake up, go through my school day, and hop on my bike to get to my workout… 30 minutes away by bike. It’s so beautiful! I get to see the changing leaves, take the beautiful bike trail, see the neighborhood and the dogs, and look at the ducks in the pond by the Spring Creek Trail! It is absolutely the most exhausting and draining part of my day, trying to find positivity when all I want is to lay in the grass and sleep forever.  

The truth is, my bike is so much better than a car. If you drive in a car, you are quite literally putting a barrier between yourself and the community around you. Every. Single. Day. When an audience is surveyed, the commute has the lowest happiness rating out of any daily task, lower than housework or a job. In truth, the best commute is a shorter one- though not nonexistent! It is still proven to have important psychological effects for a routine of preparation or decompression between home life and work. The happy medium, for the length of a commute, is around 16 minutes.  

In Fort Collins? The commute is a bit of a brag. Who else has heard (many times) about our awards for being a platinum level bike-friendly city? There’s no need for a car and a long, lonely commute when you have more than 289 miles of beautiful trails in every direction. If you do still need one to get around, you’ll find that Fort Collins will have much shorter commute times, likely because of the encouragement of other options, and the urban design of a grid system to provide many routes. As a city of 57 mi², we can see that the most surveyed commute time is 10-14 minutes (right in our best happiness range!), compared to another city of the same size, Garland, TX, which has the most commute times at 30-34 minutes.  

Because health and happiness have been seen to link so closely with these commute times, it is accurate to say that Fort Collins, as a community, is happy and successful partly due to their success in the regulation of commute and traffic and their support of other forms of transportation.  

Traffic Backup on I-95 North at the Intersection with the Downtown Expressway in Richmond. Photo by: D. Allen Covey, 2002.