Sweating over the GRE, agonizing over a personal statement, applying to graduate school, taking out loans, writing research papers, studying for tests -- all were predictable stress points for a Wake County public school teacher when he decided to get a master’s degree in school counseling.
What Billy Lane didn’t anticipate before starting classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the extra helping of anxiety that commuting more than 30 miles on Interstate 40 from his home in Raleigh would add to his plate every weekday.
“It was intermittently awful,” says Lane, a former social studies teacher at Apex Friendship and Broughton high schools. “There were parts that were textbook stop and go and parts that flowed freely. But, to boil it down to a word, it was stressful. And eating 7 or 8 dollars a day for parking was not sustainable, either. After half a week of commuting on 40, I was done with it.”
Exploring his public transit options beforehand never occurred to Lane, who had lived close enough to Broughton to walk and whose high school schedule had spared him the worst of the rush-hour commute to Apex. Discovering the CRX and its park-and-ride lot 8 miles from his apartment and the GoPass, which UNC offers certain students and employees to travel free with any Triangle transit agency, was like winning a jillion-dollar Get Out of Jam free card.
What he could never put a price on, he realized after taking the CRX for the first time, was the amount of time he would get back each day for reading, writing or relaxing by letting GoTriangle do the driving.
“This is a grad school summer session, which means the work is flying fast and furious,” says Lane, an 18-year teaching veteran. “Every minute I get to work on schoolwork is worth cash money. Given how accelerated my particular program is, I need to be intentional with every minute of my day, and 25 or 30 minutes one way or the other is not an insignificant amount of time if you’re spending it doing work and not driving.”
What also was not insignificant is the amount of parking and gas money he would save, especially given current gas prices and his lack of income while on sabbatical. And taking transit even could lengthen the life of his 17-year-old truck.
“There really is a quality of life issue, too,” he says. “As you’re driving in the morning and traffic gets worse, there’s a multiplier effect on your mood and your state of mind. Seventy minutes of a relaxing commute with time to work is much better than a stressful hands-on commute. And I have a 2001 pickup that I do need to last through grad school and maybe a little bit beyond.”
After six hours of high-intensity classes, Lane often used his afternoon bus ride for a much-needed respite.
“I relaxed a little bit, listened to a Dan Le Batard podcast,” he says, mentioning his favorite ESPN sports show. “That was my little bit of self-care for the day. I treated myself to those 30 minutes of decompression. I was just listening and relaxing, and before I knew it, there’s Wade Avenue.”
Lane hopes more people will take the time to discover how much better their lives could be if they took transit.
“What I’ve already noticed is, the more you use you transit, the better you get at it,” says Lane, who taught civics and economics and honors law and justice for most of his career. “And the better you get at it, the more useful it is.”
Find your better way to go today at gotriangle.org/trip-planner.