[llamaorama]

My commute to my office is 11 minutes or 5.5 miles via car. I work 3 days a week in the office and 2 days a week at home. I live in inner southwest Fort Worth (Ridglea/Camp Bowie area) and my office is sort of close to TCU and Zoo area of inner FW so I don't use any freeways, I take a mix of side roads and one big road (Vickery). So it's not too bad. I also live very close to the grocery store, all manner of big box chain retail stores, etc. I don't actually spend that much time in a car for suburban, sunbelt standards.

When I lived in Houston I had to drive on 59 from my apartment that was on the edges of Kingwood (by the hospital/college/northpark HEB area) into northeast Houston where my job was (the ghetto). My company was in the process of moving to another plant near Greenspoint and IAH (also the ghetto, but newer). I didn't spend that long in the car, honestly, because of all the major freeways in Houston, the Eastex is probably the least congested. But I put a lot of miles on my car, I replaced my tires twice, I hit fragments of an aluminum ladder, a brick, and a trailer hitch and drove through a puddle of paint at various points, and I had to finally say goodbye to my Honda CR-V after I got rear ended by a pickup. To summarize, Houston is a very hard place for cars. My insurance went up a ton when I was there. Between the mayhem on the roads and flooding potential* there's a strong case for owning a truck if you live there, IMO.

*During Tropical Storm Imelda my work flooded. I was sitting at my desk and water literally came gushing out under the freaking walls. Thankfully we raised up our server racks(I do IT stuff) for Harvey so they were already on cinder blocks. Later I had to walk through and inspect some things in our plant and was ankle deep in nasty brown water surrounded by a bunch of machinery that hadn't been powered off, looking back I am lucky I wasn't electrocuted. Also some stupid lady drove her 90s Ford Explorer into the water and had to wade through chest deep water. It was higher than our truck docks, to give some perspective.