I live way too far to cycle in every day. It's a 90 mile hilly roundtrip on the bike so my typical Fall/Winter commute is to drive to the light rail station at the end of the line, park, and cycle from there. Local transit system is very bike friendly http://www.sacrt.com/biking.stm and I never have had any issues with parking in the lot at the station. I park out away from the platform. Common to see both local law enforcement and rent-a-cops to come through the lot on patrols and I always throw them a big wave as they go by.

With the longer hours of daylight in the Summer to mix it up a bit I ride from the house down to the light rail station, ditch my bike in a pay-as-you-go bike locker http://www.bikelink.org/ and ride light rail from there. I also have other options to do a multi-modal commute on intercity rail (Amtrak) or nice big comfy commuter bus.

In the dark days when I drove the car every day to work, I had no idea these services were out there to make it easy to integrate a nice bike ride into my commute and reduce, or ditch all together, the need to drive every day.

Good luck with your commute.