[Fat Charlie]

If you want to go north or west out of town then you're going over one bridge that's got two northbound lanes, and in a normal universe that wouldn't be a problem. Here, we've got the only big mall in the area and an Air Force base turned into a major office park just south of the bridge. They throw four on-ramps at the highway right after it has a lane reduction. It's an ugly mess at rush hour. On Friday nights it hurts. On Friday nights before long weekends or good ski conditions it's almost not worth it. Now that we're this close to Christmas it's brutal.

Sometimes one of the cool kids decides that he can get one car length ahead in the traffic mess with a badly timed lane change. If we're all really lucky, he does it a bit south of the last on ramp so at least some people can get home, but usually it's on the bridge. Then the people that aren't trapped on the road all go east into Maine and fight their way up a back road and then through another downtown to get back on the highway.

On Friday I had to swing downtown on my way out of work and wasn't looking forward to getting by the mall and the bridge- then I checked Waze and saw an accident. I took that back road. Instead of making my way around to the highway I kept on this secondary route until it ended and then took local roads all the way back home.

Normal route home, "ideal" conditions: 40 minutes.
Normal route home, conditions as good as you can realistically hope for: 50 minutes.
Normal route home, normal conditions: 1 hour, maybe 1:05.
This back road: 1:20. Lack of familiarity added to that, but I wasn't starting out at work, so maybe it balanced out.

So it looks like a waste of time except that in warmer times I can see 50+ mpg on the morning commute and 40+ mpg on the way home. This time of year it's an amazing day when I'm in the high 40s in the morning and I'm generally in the high 30s on the way home- on Thursday morning I closed out a tank at 39.83 mpg. Friday on the way home I got 50.3 mpg! Lower speeds and fewer traffic opportunities really help the numbers. I can't make that my new route home, but maybe I can use it one or two nights a week. Tonight I'll see how going that way directly from work compares to the monkeying around downtown that I had to do. Time to do some A-B-C-D-E-F testing, trying out different start routes and different ways of popping through the one little downtown where I have choices.

It's nice to have a new project for my commute. It'll be sweet if I can make this work.