I'll start by saying that I decided to live off campus this year at the University of St. Thomas. I live 3.5 miles away from campus. This is a relatively short commute, 7 min by car and just under 20 min by bike. Yes, I timed it. I was looking forward to saving money by biking to school, and also getting in shape. I've been in school for almost a month and this has not happened yet and won't at all this semester. Why? Because of construction.
I live north of a good set of railroad tracks. These can only be crossed in three places (near me). In the image below, red circles are where you can cross the tracks and the green circle is where I live.
The middle red circle is where I usually cross the tracks when traveling to school. This railroad tracks go over the road. This is where the construction is taking place. They are working on the bridge which means you cannot cross here. This turns my trip from 3.5 miles to 5.2 (one way). Because it almost doubles the route distance, I do not bike for it is too far. The 5.2 mile route involves a freeway, meaning I cannot bike this way, which changes the bike route to about 6 miles, and would take about 45 minutes. So I choose to drive to school.
As I mentioned before, my drive time before was about 7 minutes. With construction it's closer to 15. The image below shows my old route and new route. When you look at the new route and your thinking "that doesn't make any sense" please know that I've done my research and timing, it is the fastest and shortest way to get to my school.
So as you can see, this is frustrating for me. Thank God I don't work south of the train tracks. Oh and I forgot to mention the best part of this situation, the construction will be going on from Sept. 7th to Nov. 8th. Yes, two months. It would be way too over optimistic to hope for them to finish ahead of schedule. Like I said at the beginning, most the time construction is nice, but this time, it's a royal pain in the fucking ass.