Travel Buffer

post by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2024-07-06T02:20:02.723Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

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I recently finished a nine-day road trip, playing a series of dances. This combined driving long distances with arrival deadlines: you don't want to arrive late. Not only is it unprofessional, but it's stressful rushing to set up and you'll likely have a bad night from skipping some nice-to-have steps. A concept I found pretty useful was thinking about allocating "buffer".

Let's say it's 8am in Pittsburgh PA and the hall in Bloomington IN opens for setup at 5:30pm. GPS says its a 6.5hr drive, so we have 3hr of buffer to spend. Some of the buffer we'll need to spend stopping for gas and restrooms. We might choose to spend additional buffer on a relaxed breakfast, stopping at interesting places along the way, or exploring Bloomington. Or we might be unlucky with traffic (or, heaven forfend, the car) and lose some buffer to bad luck.

Since the risk of things going wrong or taking longer than you expect is roughly proportional to distance, it's pretty risky to front-load your buffer consumption. You don't want to spend all by 30min early on and then run into a 1hr traffic jam. But the most enjoyable ways of spending buffer are probably distributed along the route, so the safest option of reserving it all for the destination isn't very pleasant. It's much nicer to spend the marginal half hour with your toes in a shady stream than waiting around in the parking lot outside the hall.

While this was somewhat useful in my own planning, the place where it really demonstrated its value was in talking with my tourmates. Getting close to the hall I might ask if anyone had anything they wanted to spend buffer on; playing at a park I could use it to explain to my kids why we should leave soon; it avoided people mistaking the GPS arrival time for our actual arrival; any proposed activity had a nice currency for considering its cost.

I don't remember thinking about this explicitly on past tours, or missing it before. I think the main reason is that we scheduled this tour much more tightly. On days when we had a lot of driving we still wanted to take nice breaks (one park had a serious zipline and a 90ft slide) and on days when we had less driving we did a lot of seeing things (boating on an underground river). I expect it to continue to be rare for me to be in a situation where I need to do this kind of collaborative planning around a deadline, but when I'm next doing it I think this will be a useful tool.

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