Last spring we moved to less than a mile from work. (Well, actually we moved in January and then work moved from ~2 miles away to less than a mile from our new house.) So last summer I really tried to bike to work. It’s under a mile! How hard can it be??
Well, there’s no sidewalk and no shoulder on the road. There are 4 stop lights and two highway entrances/exits in under 1/2 a mile of the trip. And 4 solid lanes of traffic that aren’t paying all that much attention to a cyclist.
This summer I didn’t even try. It’s just too dangerous.
I also tried walking once, but not only isn’t there a cross walk at one of the stop lights, there’s even a Do Not Cross sign at that intersection. So that turned out to be even more unsafe than biking.
I can bike around the city, but I hate city cycling. I have to wear a smog mask, which isn’t very fun, and I just don’t like being that vulnerable in traffic. Instead, I take transit, walk or use the car, depending on where I need to get to.
When I’ve been out of town for work, I love biking for hours on country back roads. I just can’t tolerate biking among cars, pedestrians and fellow cyclists in Toronto.
I am not a good bike rider. I learned when I was a kid on a simple coaster and haven’t ever really mastered the derailleur gear shifters. (I have a tendency to lose my balance when I shift gears.) I’m good for maybe a mile or two at the most.
On the other hand my commute to work is 17 miles. So I don’t think I’ll be commuting by bike anytime soon.
That’s better than my wife – she’s 40 years old and she NEVER learned to ride a bike.
When I lived and worked in the South Bay I found that riding my bike along Sand Hill Road got me from Los Altos to Menlo Park in the same amount of time as driving so I did that for a while. I miss that!
Right now I am lucky that I have a very simple commute (although it doesn’t lend itself to biking) - ten minute walk to the carpool and I work one block from the dropoff point in SF.
I biked to work today. On average I bike 1/week. I’ve biked as many as 3 days in one particular week. I only bike when the WX is good.
It is about 4.5 miles to work. One busy road but it has wide sholders - the rest is pretty low traffic streets. Mostly falt - the hills are mostly going up and down the bridges.
Almost impossible in Phoenix. Temperatures above 100 F most of the year. Plus, the city isn’t bike friendly and to get to my work, you’re going through major intersections. Even when the weather cools down, there are thousands of tourists who aren’t looking for cyclists. The drive is 15 minutes, the ride would be about 30.
We live at 11-2. I’m 25 miles from work. Work is 2000 feet below after 1 mile of gravel roads and climbing over the continental divide. Solid winter is 6 months out of the year.
My Wife is an IronMan finisher, 15 miles from work. Century rides are reallly no big deals for her. We both drive to work She does not even train on that road. In a word, um, no.
Strangely, I used to ride more often when I lived 20 miles away than I do now, only 3 miles away. When I do ride I try to take a long way home if only to justify putting on biking gear.
Yes (or at least when I’m working I do). It’s faster than the bus and much better for you, and you can clean yourself up in a snap with a couple unscented baby wipes and a fresh shirt once you get there. My idea of a horrible commute would be one which I couldn’t reasonably ride.
Work is within a fairly easy 35-minute bike ride from home. I have ridden in the past, but not this year.
The company has promised to install showers for the last three years–it’s even a design standard for our building–but they obviously don’t want to spend the money. I got tired of feeling gritty and half-clean; baby wipes and sticking my head under a faucet just doesn’t cut it. Besides, I’m pissed at my employer (a big telecom with initials that start with A) because they decided to ignore the federal Bicycle Commuter Act.
Yes, bike + train. I have a nifty laptop bag that slides and locks on the rack. It’s 1½ miles on either side of the train station, so 6 miles / day in stages. When it’s wet I walk instead, mostly because wet road + spinning tires = messy, muddy me.
It does keep me in shape, and I get a lot of reading done on the train, but I sometimes I look at the air-conditioned cars on the freeway and sigh with envy.
I have, in the past, at two jobs where it was 9 miles from my house. Most of my jobs, however, have been much farther away. In those cases, I’ve often taken my bike to work, and ride it at lunch time.
Work is about twenty miles away, and I’ve got some rather large hills and one river between me and it. Biking is out completely for me, and, while my city may want to become bike-friendly, it’s terrain is working against that. Face it, we have neighborhoods like Squirrel Hill, Polish Hill, and the Hill District, not to mention Mount Washington. What we don’t have much of are level places.
Yup, unless it’s freezing and wet. My commute is a little over a mile. I’d walk, but I work irregular hours and don’t want to be on foot in certain areas in the dark. Also, I’m lazy.
I live in a small town outside of Madison, WI. I bike to work as much as I can in the spring-summer-fall. Roughly early May through late September. Any earlier or later in the season than that and it’s a little scary dark to be on a bike on wooded county roads.
19 miles each way, made up of about 10 miles on county back roads, 8 miles of bike path along the highway, and another mile or so of city streets once I get into Madison. Takes me about an hour and ten minutes each way (vs. about 25 minutes to drive) so it adds a bit of time to my day, but on the plus side I get a boatload of exercise.
I try to ride 3-4 days a week depending on how easy/hard it is to drag my ass out of bed in the morning, though sometimes I’ll cheat and drive to the park-and-ride about halfway.
I’m lucky enough to have lockers and showers at work so I don’t have to worry about sitting at work all funky and gross (and I’m quite funky and gross at the end of my ride).
I bike to work (5km), to take my daughter to school (negligible distance) and, last year, to take her to preschool (2.5km towing 3 kids … makes it a lot harder than it sounds!)
Fortunately, my area is mostly flat. I’ve never biked the kids to music class, even though it’s only 3km, because towing roughly my own body weight up the hill that goes there is simply not going to happen for me.