I recently introduced myself at the intro board ( http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?threadid=25704 ), but I thought I'd tell my life story here (ok, just a part of it) as an intro to the commuter board.

I got my first "real" job right out of college, and my commute by car was about 20 miles each way. After a year and a half of that, I got sick of driving that distance every day, and moved to within 5.5 miles of work. Still, I continuted to drive.

After nearly two years of driving that relatively short distance to work and back, one day I happened to have to go home during lunch. It was a nice summer day, so I figured I'd try riding my bike back for the afternoon. It worked out well, I realized there was nothing to stop me from doing it every day, and I've been bike commuting ever since (although I have now moved even closer - approx. 3.5 miles).

Probably nothing too remarkable so far. However, sometime after the fact, I looked back and realized that prior to entering the "real world", I had been bike commuting for much of my life. I started in 7th and 8th grade, when we moved too far from school for walking to be practical. Then I did the 3 miles back and forth to high school for a couple years instead of taking the bus. I rode my bike everywhere all through college, doing 5-10 miles per day. But for some reason it took me THREE YEARS to come up with the thought of commuting to work. And this is a extremely short commute to an extremely relaxed and flexible work environment. It's basically the ultimate bike commuting situation, and even with my abnormal predisposition to bike commuting, I simply never considered it.

So imagine how impossible it must be for someone who has never commuted before, who has a longer or more difficult route, or who has a more formal work environment. Breaking away from the thought that "I'm supposed to drive a car to work" (at least in the U.S.) seems incredibly difficult to do on your own.

I don't want to be all doom and gloom, so I'll mention that since I began commuting, a coworker also did it for several months, and my brother has now been doing it for quite a while. So I guess the point is that we really have to lead by example, because most people probably aren't going to come up with the idea on their own.

How did everyone here start commuting? Was it always an obvious and natural thing to do? Did you follow someone else's example? Did you see that there was a section titled "Commuting" at bikeforums.net and wonder what that was about? There has probably been a thread covering this already, so you can just point me to it if it exists in the archive.