Gary Trippodo hops in his car, flips the radio to John Boy and Billy and, after a tricky left onto Sam Furr, enjoys a smooth ride to Charlotte.

It's 20 minutes, nonstop. Twenty-three if he needs to slip his credit card through the Texaco's pay-at-the-pump computer.

Commuting from Exit 25 is still simple if you're willing to leave early enough. But it's getting a little more difficult every day.

``It's brutal, man,'' Trippodo, 45, sighs as he shifts gears and slides his two-seater sports car past a Trans Am one dark Tuesday morning. ``Maybe not now, maybe not for a while, but eventually the traffic is going to be the death of this place.''

Trippodo and his family came to Huntersville five years ago from Marlboro, N.J., moving because the Hearst Corp., which publishes Esquire, Redbook and other magazines, relocated its customer service center to uptown Charlotte.

Trippodo gladly swapped his battered old pickup, the one he never feared getting dented or stolen, for a brand-new, cherry-red Mitsubishi Eclipse. He gave away all his long-sleeve shirts. He traded a grueling commute for an easy zip down I-77.

He came, like so many of his neighbors, seeking a new style of living, one beyond the hassles of the big city but more rural in feel than the early suburbs of the Northeast.

In New Jersey, Trippodo, a tall, burly, gray-haired man with a thick Jersey accent, used to commute 60 miles each way into Manhattan. By the time he moved, he was leaving the house at 5:30 a.m. every day to get to work on time -- 9 a.m. He tried driving, taking the train, the bus and a car pool van. Regardless, he'd get home every night about 9 p.m.

That left little time to snuggle with his wife or bond with his now-16-year-old son. Politics, sports and community news were, maybe, topics he debated or read about on the ride to work.

In short, commuting was his life.

``When we decided to move out here, the goal was to get away from anything that might detract from our enjoyment of our home. I didn't want to have to worry about traffic. I didn't want to have to worry about my kid getting shot at school.

``I just wanted to live my life in peace.''

Escaping his uptown Charlotte job each evening is more a game or a puzzle. Trippodo exits his seventh-story office by 5 p.m., rushing into the hall when he hears the familiar ``ding-ding'' that means the elevator is going down. (A single ``ding'' means it's headed up.)

By the time the elevator hits the lobby of the Carillon Building, with its glass walls and modern sculptures hanging from the ceiling, Trippodo has already tapped a cigarette out of a wrinkled pack of Raleighs. He smokes it in the five-minute walk to his car, throws his suit coat in the trunk and folds himself into the Eclipse.

Once in traffic, Trippodo lets loose a sigh -- the resigned, almost relieved sound of a man at home, if not exactly happy, in gridlock.

As he drives, he talks to himself in a voice that is alternately amused and annoyed. The Yankee within cannot be contained.

``Let's see whether anybody has lost their mind out here tonight. If 77 is bad, maybe we take Beatties Ford or 21. Or we could just sneak over onto 85 and pick up 115.''

The radio crackles as he scans, flipping from NPR to country to oldies in his quest for up-to-the-minute traffic reports.

``To get home without going nuts, you have to listen to the radio. You never know, Uncle Jed's turnip truck might have turned over up there somewhere.''

When he moved to Huntersville, Exit 25 was two months away from completion, and the drive home took 20 minutes.

Today, the trek takes from 30 to 45. On a bad night, driving a manual transmission becomes an adventure: Shift up, shift down, shift up, neutral. Shift up, shift down, neutral. The red glow of taillights snakes north into the night.

But Trippodo is home by 6 p.m. every day to a spacious, all-brick house on three-quarters of an acre. In a subdivision so popular that, just after they moved in, their developer expanded the planned community from 120 houses to 400.

Trippodo knows what all that extra construction means: The economic good times continue. And the drive gets worse.

Tomorrow: The builder

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