A slight variation on No Motor's current thread
 

Do you drive to a parking lot and then ride to work? If so, how far is the drive and then how far is the cycling portion?

If you could drive to a parking lot adjacent to a MUP, would you commute to work more often? If so, how far would you consider driving to get to the parking lot?

I'm looking for data (albeit not perfect) for a local presentation.

Thank you.

My typical commute is a 15 mile drive to a parking lot and a 15 mile ride to work. If the weather is bad, I can park on the street closer to work, making for a 10 mile ride. Occasionally I ride the entire 30 miles each way, or I leave my car at work, ride 30 miles home, and ride back in the morning. If the traffic is bad, sometimes I park on the street a couple miles farther away, making for a 17 mile one way commute. The area I usually park at is on a MUP. There are many car and bike routes to work, so the one I choose depends on many factors, but proximity to a MUP is very important.

I’d only consider it if there were no parking at work and the lot was free

I don't own a car. Car ownership in NYC is hell. Driving and parking here are hell. Most households here don't own cars.

I don't see the point of this. (Though I'm not bothered by anyone who does it. More power to them.)

Seems like it would be easier to just drive the whole way to work then come home earlier and go for a leisure ride.

Once I'm in the car or on the bike, I'm staying there.

I had wondered about that too, but didn't want to complicate the poll I used by asking for total distance. I've read others here mention the multimodal commute before,but didn't anticipate the guy who rode and rollerbladed for his commute.

If you lived in the DC suburbs and had to cross the Potomac River, you would understand. Takes about 10 minutes more on average riding a bike 15 miles of my commute than it does driving. Sometimes if traffic is really light, I’ll drive all the way and ride after work, but that is pretty rare. Sometimes, such as yesterday, a major commuter road was closed due to a sinkhole, which made things even worse. On my bike, I breezed past all the traffic jams to where I parked, and the roads from there to my house were clear.

I work at multiple sites for my company, all within driving / bussing / riding distance 10-30 miles depending on location. On occasion I'll drive to one site, take my bike on the bus to go to a second site, and ride home from there.

The following day I'll ride to the first site, and drive home.

This allows me to be flexible in the scenery and still get in my "commuting training" rides while fitting in multiple meetings and making the best use of my company time. Not to mention it impresses the co-workers. However it does take a ton of pre-planning as it's not a simple task.

In Delaware, we have no subways and the bus service is very lacking if you're traveling outside of the Wilmington City limits.
I live 38 miles from work and can't do the whole commute by bike due to time and roads. I'll often drive 25 miles, park and bike the last 13 miles. If I lived closer, I'd happily pedal back and forth. Many people here live a fair distance from work. If I still lived in NYC, or another large city, I probably wouldn't bother with a car much like noglider.

In Delaware, we have people with opposing views regarding spending money on road improvement and accessibility versus recreational path (MUP) development. I posed the original question to see if paved path access with parking would enhance commuting, realizing that such a survey here is not scientific or conclusive.

My commute is currently ridiculous.

To work: drive 30 miles to a parking lot, ride about 11 in.
From work: ride about 11, drive about 15.

But, I'm moving soon.

we have one of those in Bedford. was thinking I could drive there then bike to work more regularly than biking all the way from home. it would cut the round trip cycling part from 44 miles to approx 20 miles. I should try it on a quite Saturday morning. the lot is also on a protected path part dirt but mostly paved. if I worked in that direction, it might be handy for that as well

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...5ca4d76cb8.jpg

Drive ~20 to park & ride
Ride ~7.5 to work

MUP wouldn't help. Non driving days are Dr appts, too much junk to haul, etc.

I sometimes do a multimodal commute like this. When I do, it's about a 2-4 mile drive to the park and ride (depending on which one I choose) and then a 6-8 mile bike ride to work. I do this mainly in the winter so that I have the option of taking light rail most of the way back to the park and ride if it's raining. I don't like to ride in the rain after dark. Sometimes I do it just because I'm feeling lazy.

It would definitely be easier to just stay in the car, but I don't bike to work because it's easier. I do it because it's more enjoyable.

Parking is the key. That's why I mentioned it above. Parking at my workplace is free and plentiful, because there used to be many thousands of employees here 50 years ago and now there's hundreds; and the sprawl hasn't eaten us yet for various reasons. I live close enough to ride straight from home. But if I lived 20 miles away, and there were no parking, it would be something to think about.

Fair enough

I work in the suburbs. Parking is never an issue.

But I can see how working in a place like Washington DC, where parking sucks 24/7/365, would make splitting the commute type a viable option

I did the drive/ride thing for a short period when first experimenting with commuting. Guessing the drive was about 7 miles from home and the ride about 17. Parked in a park adjacent to MUP, although MUP wasn't very significant portion of remainder it got me deep into cross town residential. The drive leap frogged me past a section of nasty high density rush hour traffic on the home side. Eventually I tested out taking my bike on light rail. That was 4 bike miles to station, 4 on the rail, then 17 more on bike. In the end there was one last stretch on the work side I had too many close calls with and quit. The area is very industrialized with few options. I looked at various bus routes through that stretch, but the scheduling sucked and I just decided it wasn't a high enough priority. The additional time I spent riding was worth it, but not waiting around for 'connectors' making it longer yet.

Driving part way was never as satisfying as being completely car free for a day.

Same here, it seems that the marginal cost, one already driving, of a few extra miles is quite low. I ride both ways, the whole distance.

Now if the center miles were on the metro, or a bus, that I could understand.

That's part of it for me. I park just outside of where the beltway gets clogged and bike in from there. However, because of the distance I'd say that the time savings is almost a wash for me.

But I can't really ride when I get home. I have to pick my daughter up from daycare, and when I get home my wife and I have to take care of her and work on our house (we're fixing it up to sell). So it's either ride during the day, or not at all and wait for weekend mornings. Which I don't want to do, so multi-modal it is.

It may take the same amount of time to ride into DC as drive.

But think of the savings to your sanity by not having to deal with stop and go DC traffic nearly as much.

If you can average 10mph on a bike in city traffic you feel like you're flying.

But if you average 10mph in a car in city traffic it feels like trying to run through mud and is the most aggravating thing on the planet

ANYTHING that prevents you from having to drive inside the DC beltway is a good thing. Plus you don't have to park once you get there.

There's a parking lot adjacent to a popular multi use trail on my commute. It's only 3 miles away from home and a bit off my route so I just bike the whole way. No sense of driving the car that short of a distance to park and bike.

which must come with a fee ...?

this seems like an ideal or perfect reason for doing so. but can you add: why you bike at all?

I work all the way down in Old Town Alexandria, making driving a little faster, as the last 7 miles are at higher speed against the flow on the GW Parkway. But when I used to work downtown, riding a bike was usually faster than driving, and far less of a headache. The most telling contrast between driving and riding is what I check before heading out. Driving, it’s google maps for traffic, whereas riding, it’s the weather channel.

'cause. :)

At the last location we were working from, 5 mi each way, I could tell people it was to save money. Now it's not so clear. 20 mi drive vs 27 mi drive not saving so much. And when you include the time out the door, ~5:15 AM to 7ish PM...

Let's just admit I ride because it's fun. I'm single, so no wife to worry about. And I need the exercise to stay reasonable healthy and fit.

The longish days are a problem. Trying to treat this as an adventure. Possibly I could move to a closer job. But I've been with my current org since 91. They're like family and it's hard to think about leaving. I can retire in 2-3 yrs.

Before I moved I was 25mi from work and it took me 2hr each way. When I started cycling I would drive to work with the bike, ride home, ride back the next morning, and drive home. And do that no more than once a month. But that's parking in the free lot at work, same as regular days.

One time on bike-to-work-day, I scheduled my car's oil change on that day and rode my bike to work like 1mi from the oil change place.

But then I moved 5.5mi away from work and there is no reason to drive partway.

One of the things I say when I occasionally get contacted by headhunters is that I won't consider any new job I can't bike to.

I have daydreamed, it would be pretty awesome to buy one of these condos, and have a job in Mira Mesa or Sorrento Valley, so I could commute on the trail through the canyon every day. If Qualcomm ever comes at me with an unsolicited job offer, I'd really think about it.

Oh that is definitely part of it. I'm almost at the point where I have to decide to either ride or get on happy pills. :)

Decisions are hard....

Do both!

i've never been head-hunted, but one thing i told my wife when we we're last looking for a new home for our family was "no more than 10 miles from my job in evanston".

fortunately, she agreed. she has a work from home gig; her only geographic constraint being reasonable proximity to a major airport because she travels a bit for her organization.

we ended up ~6 miles from downtown evanston (8.0 mile bike route), and ~6.5 miles from downtown chicago (the largest jobs center in the interior of the nation), should i ever want to explore a job change.


by design, we live 0.6 miles from the head of an MUP and my office is 1.4 miles from the MUP at the other end. no multi-modal required.

but i understand that not everyone has the ability/flexibility to be so intentional about home and work location decisions in regards to bike commuting.

When I first started commuting about 10 years ago it was an adventure. Even with preriding a familiar area to find a good bike route, it was still an adventure when I set off for work by bicycle. I needed the exercise, wasn't saving much money by commuting with buying more stuff for the trip, but the adventure part made it easier to continue. It's still a bit of an adventure some days inspite of the routine, and that's one of the factors that keeps me coming back for more.

This!

I can't even motivate myself to calculate the cost-benefit of biking to work, and I love data. I track my mileage. I track how much I spend on my bikes. I track the cost per mile for each bike. All of this is just to satisfy my inner nerd (who is even nerdier than my outer nerd). I don't make any attempt to find out whether or not I'm saving money because that's not why I'm riding.

Convenience is a factor for me. I'm lazy by nature. But convenience is mostly an emotional measure, so that gets rolled up into total happiness. I don't have a way to quantify this, but it's easy to regulate. Some days I don't feel like riding so I drive the whole way. If I drive too often I get unhappy about it so I figure out a way to ride the bike. If I have a reason to leave the house in a car, stopping somewhere and biking from there usually makes me happier than driving the whole way would. That is, the pleasure of riding the bike outweighs the convenience of just driving the whole way.

Let's be clear, riding a bike through the suburbs in a bike lane next to heavy traffic isn't something I would do for fun on my day off, but it's better than driving in that same traffic and I feel better physically when I ride.