For a while I’d record when I left home, and when I got to the gate, to prove that I didn’t need as much time as I’d been allocating.
The wild card here is traffic, it can be between 25 minutes and 2 hours. And I almost missed dropping someone off for a flight years ago so I’m still a bit scarred.
Pre covid, i aimed for an hour plus time to park for domestic, or 2 for international. The only times I’ve been the person running were:
massive traffic gave me much less than 1 hour
connecting flight was late, racing across airport
in Hawaii, made the mistake of trying to fill the rental car at Costco. Holy shit was that a long line, and hard to get out of it, once we were in it. And there, i (with TSA pre) would have been fine. We only ran into trouble due to the combination of Costco and my husband not having TSA status.
In the interest of minimizing stress and reducing opportunity for things to go wrong, I’ve actually started accepting the “pre-pay the fuel” option when renting cars for personal travel, unless I’m familiar with and comfortable with the fueling options nearby…and those options are viable if I’m hurting on time.
It’s not the thrifty option, but I’m willing to pay a little to combat stress.
You clearly don’t live where I do. Google maps tells me what traffic is like this instant, not how it will evolve over the course of the drive.
It also fails to understand how one lane of a road can be completely stuck feeding into an on ramp, while the other lane is moving with through traffic. It averages the 2 and gets it very wrong. Same problem with left turn jams.
Waze seems better with both those things, but still can’t correct for how traffic will develop as one drives.
It’s an interesting psychological phenomenon of being conditioned to avoid paying $1-2 more for a tank of gas but be fine regularly throwing down $5 for a cup of coffee.
I really, really don’t ever want to miss a flight though… (doesn’t matter much, I’ve only flown once in the last 5 years - and that time, the flight was delayed for about 6 hours, so…).