Human Power!

I live about 8 miles from where I work, and there's simply no good way to drive there. It takes me 35 minutes or more to cover this distance, and it requires a lot of time sitting in traffic, waiting for lights, and being stuck behind lost souls who think that slowing to a crawl will somehow reveal their whereabouts.

So I've been thinking for a while about other means of transportation. I could take a bus, or a bus and subway combination, but that would take an hour and a quarter at best, and longer when the subway train goes missing, as it so often does. This is mainly due to the bus schedule. The trains are usually fast and frequent, but the bus invariably involves a long wait, and a slow ride.

I've started bicycling recently, and I enjoy that tremendously. There are some drawbacks, though. I've never liked riding in traffic, and will go out of my way to avoid it. Luckily, for the cost of a couple of extra miles, I can ride most of the way on bike paths and multi-use paths, with only a short stretch of sharing the road with cars. It makes the trip 10 miles instead of 8, but it's well worth it to me.

The bigger problem is weather. Sure, it's beautiful now, but we've had frequent thunderstorms lately. Worse, these are not predicted in the morning, so I wind up with my bike at the office, trying to think of a way to get it home. Also, in this part of the country, there are inevitably at least 2-3 months of very cold weather, accompanied by snow, ice, freezing rain, and other delights. I don't have a bicycle solution for that. I suppose I'll have to go back to the car for that period, but that will be a real let down after the near complete independence of being able to just hop and my bike and go.