I work a bit of a weird shift from 3pm-3am, which means I get to skip a lot of traffic. My commute is almost exactly 10 miles and takes about 20 minutes. There’s plenty of other cars on the road when I go in, but not so much that traffic gets backed up. On my way home I consider it to be a busy day if I see 3 other cars.

I live towards the rural end of the suburbs, a decent amount of woods and farms and such around, and my work is in a slightly denser part of the suburbs.

My drive is pretty straightforward, I make a total of 10 or 11 turns, 3 are leaving my neighborhood, 4 or 5 (depending on if you count veering slightly right to go through the employee entrance gate instead of stopping at the guard shack) are getting around my work campus. There’s 8 traffic light and 3 stop signs along the way.

The first 10 minutes/6 miles or so are mostly on a 2 lane state road, it’s mostly flat, a little windy, and runs parallel to a creek. About 1 mile of it is the main street for a small town, where the speed limit is 25mph. The rest of it is 35mph, lightly forested, with some scattered houses, businesses, a high school, etc. along the way.

I come to the end of that road where it connects to another small town, this one a bit larger, I turn left, cross a bridge over the creek I had been driving along, and immediately leave that town, the road opens up to 4 lanes, the speed limit goes up to 40, go through sort of a small commercial district, the speed limit goes up to 45o, then down a fairly large hill that cuts through a small, forested state park, crossing a smaller creek at the bottom of the hill, then back up another hill through a mostly residential area, turn right, then turn right again and im going up the driveway to work.

The roads usually get plowed pretty well when we get snow, I’ve never had any major issues with that, although I do drive an SUV. Parts of it are prone to flooding though, being along a creek, and with all of the wooded areas we’re also a little prone to downed trees and power lines.

Theres a lot of side roads and such that I can make detours onto if needed, although depending on how severe the weather is, some of them are really hilly, narrow, and winding, heavily forested, and don’t get plowed as well, so usually that main road is still my best bet. It happened once that due to flooding I was basically unable to get more than about ½ mile from my house in any direction, but that was also a 200 year flood, and it wasn’t nearly so bad the year before when we had a 100 year flood (and yes, it was disconcerting that we had major flooding events in consecutive years like that. Climate change is very real, they used to be able to harvest massive blocks of ice from dammed up streams in this area just a little more than a century ago, one of the damn still stands to this day, but I’ve never seen any of our waterways freeze over more with more than about an inch at most.)