Blake Broussard works a part-time job, owns a house, raises a 19-month-old daughter and drives at least 45 minutes to school most mornings.
But like many students and teachers who commute to school from places like Lafayette, St. Francisville and New Orleans, he doesn’t mind it too much, and he likes where he lives.
“With traffic, I always leave about an hour-10 before my class starts,” said Broussard, a junior history major who lives in Gonzales but commutes to Baton Rouge every day for work and school.
He, like many commuters, listens to the radio during the road trip. But even two of his favorite radio hosts, Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic of ESPN’s Mike & Mike in the Morning, can’t always make it smooth sailing.
“It’s definitely monotonous,” he said, “You can kind of zone out and just wake up when you find a parking spot.”
History professor Maribel Dietz, who has worked at the University for about 15 years, said she moved from Baton Rouge to Lafayette about eight years ago, switching commuting roles with her husband, who serves as the dean of the liberal arts college at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.
Dietz usually finds car-pooling buddies to lighten the load of an hour-long commute at least three days a week. This semester she splits driving duties with French instructor Amanda LaFleur.
“The good thing about the commute is that we don’t have to go through Baton Rouge,” Dietz said. “The only time we have trouble is when there’s a bad accident.”
Biology professor Adam Hrincevich, however, does travel through Baton Rouge, and he’s been commuting full-time from New Orleans for about five years.
Hrincevich said he spends about $600 a month on gas nowadays, but it’s still considerably less than the $1,000 a month he used to pay to rent a spare apartment in Baton Rouge.
“I don’t mind the drive, it’s actually therapeutic,” he said, adding that the other drivers can sometimes entertain him as much as anything else.
“You see people putting on makeup, reading books, eating, foot driving — you really have to be a defensive driver to deal with that,” he said.
Although he said he loves LSU, Hrincevich doesn’t see himself ever moving permanently from New Orleans, which he described as “a much more culturally stimulating town…unlike any other place.”
Kathrin McLean, a wildlife ecology senior, wakes up around 6:15 a.m. to make it on time for her 7:30 class from St. Francisville.
“[My parents and I] found that between how much it would cost for me to have an apartment compared to the gas prices, that it’d end up being cheaper for me to just deal with the gas,” McLean said.
Other students also reported that the savings from living at home more than compensate for the cost of gas, despite the average cost per gallon of regular gasoline rising to $3.66 for the Gulf Coast region, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Some students try to schedule classes so that they only have to drive in two or three days a week. But others, like 34-year-old petroleum engineering sophomore Clayton Campbell, actually spend more time in a car than in the classroom each week.
Campbell endures about an hour and 15 minute commute to and from Madisonville at least five days a week and sometimes six if there’s a weekend study session he needs to attend.
“It’s about $140 to $200 a week [for gas], almost as much as tuition,” he said, adding that he budgets about $3,200 a semester for gas in his Chevrolet diesel pickup truck.
Dietz calls gas a sunk cost in commuting, so she doesn’t worry about it too much.
“In an ideal world, we’d have a train or a bus,” the history professor said. “But unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world.”
