Drive 1.7 miles. I got a puppy, so I come home to let her out during lunch. Saves the rug. Well, relatively.
I figure I did my bit moving so close to work. And if I had to check out a city car every time I needed to go out into the field, I’d spend a fair amount of time just doing that.
Leave apartment about 8:10. 5 minute walk up the street. Cross instersecting street (if rainy, be sure to not walk at the crosswalk because the white striping is slippery when wet 
). Wait anywhere from -1 to 10 minutes for bus to arrive.
Bus trip: about 10 minutes, drops me off right at the museum; I just have to walk up a small hill.
(If bus is early: Go back home, add extra layer of deodorant, take a brisk walk up 8th avenue for approximately 35 to 40 minutes.)
Coffee.
[ul][li]My husband drives me to the LIRR (if he doesn’t, it’s one subway stop away). []Ride the Long Beach train to Jamaica.[]Transfer to the Ronkonkoma train. []Get off commuter train and take a bus.[]Run like a chicken across Turnpike and hope I make it to my sterile, lonely industrial park office building with my life.Tell myself for the thousandth time that I’m going to get a different job.[/ul][/li]
Total time-- 2+ hours.
Walk either west 2 1/2 blocks or east 1 1/2 blocks and get on the Brown Line el train (I’m halfway between two stops & which way I go depends on when the next train is due). Ride train for 25 minutes and get off downtown. Either walk four blocks west or take the bus, depending on the weather and how lazy I’m feeling (or if I’m running late).
I used to take a commuter train which stops four blocks east of my house and takes me one block from my office, but when I switched my work schedule to 4/40 the cost of the monthly train pass was no longer cost-effective.
Mondays: get up at 6:30, hit the road around 7:20, find parking space and reach building in time to teach first class at 8:00. About 12 minutes driving time. Same on Wednesdays.
On Monday and Friday nights: Leave by 6:20 or so, drive for 10 minutes to get easy parking and teach 7pm classes.
I don’t have it so bad, living between two campuses. It’s a juggle, though.
Most of the time I just close the SDMB window
Oh, the possibilities. But here’s the usual:
Turn right out the front door of my building. At end of block, turn left on 7th Ave. Walk two blocks to 17th Street or four to 19th (the sidewalks on 18th are narrow and busy), turn right. Walk to 6th Ave, turn left. Walk up to 20th St, turn right. Walk to 5th Ave, turn left. Walk one block to 21st. My office is on the top floor of the building at the northeast corner of 5th and 21st, with the Ann Taylor on the ground floor.
Total commute: 12 minutes. But as is typical in New York, you can spend more time waiting for an elevator and stopping at every floor than you do actually getting to the building.
And of course this is assuming I’m not making stops to drop off drycleaning, pick up prescriptions, etc.
When the weather is really awful I can take the subway. There’s an entrance to the 14th/8th Ave station about 100 feet from my door. I take the L two stops to Union Square, then transfer to the N/R uptown one stop to 23rd, which has an exit on 22nd and Broadway. My office building has an entrance at 21st and Bwy. I can almost manage without an umbrella! But it can take twice as long as walking.
Wow. Someone who has a longer commune than me. My commute:
15 minute drive from home to the park’n’ride
45 minute bus ride to downtown Seattle
15 minute walk up the hill to work. Especially fun on mornings like today when I oversleep and don’t have time to look for my umbrella.
From my driveway, 5 minutes to southbound interstate onramp.
Southbound to freeway interchange.
Switch to second interstate, eastbound.
Cross lake on floating bridge.
Get off interstate.
From offramp, another 5 minutes to work.
(For Pacific Northwest folks, that’s I-5 south from the Northgate area, into downtown, switch to I-90, cross Lake Washington, and exit near Bellevue.)
Total distance: About 15 miles.
Total time: Without traffic, 15-20 minutes. With traffic, 30-45 minutes. With event traffic (sports, concert, etc.), 30-60 minutes. With event traffic and bad conditions (dark, raining, more than one wreck, etc.), 60 minutes minimum.
I hate driving solo, but nobody at my job lives near me and has anything resembling my schedule. When I worked downtown, I took the bus. I would love to take the bus again, but it’s a choice between potentially spending two hours total driving time in bad conditions, and a minimum of three hours transit time under the best of conditions.
It’s that kind of Sophie’s Choice that has given Seattle the shitty traffic problems it has. We’d love not to drive, but the alternatives are simply unworkable.
I drive. About 1½ miles of surface streets and ~¾ mile of freeway (2 exits). 7-9 minutes from door to desk in the morning, about the same when I go home for lunch and 15-20 minutes for the return trip in the evening.
I’ve taken the bus from time to time and the journey is 45 minutes to an hour.
My take on public policy is that, if I were a Republican and I wanted to stimulate the use of public transport, I’d strive to make it compete with that 7-9 minute commute whereas if I were a Democrat who wanted to stimulate the use of public transport, I’d strive to somehow slow that privately conducted 9 minute drive down to at least 45 minutes.
Oops! Was that more opinion than we wanted on this thread?
I used to take the bus downtown to work. These days I’m in Shallow - umm- Palo Alto, CA. Must drive here! Public trans es mucho crappo!
6 minutes walk down the same road to my office. Oh, I have to cross the street at some point.
And dammit, those are 6 wasted minutes if you ask me! If I were able to drive a car or ride a bus, I’d be able to listen to the news or, or, or read a newspaper or something!