Bike to work amateurs

I’m a bike to work amateur, and so are you.

Bill Main, a physicist at a Silicon Valley medical equipment company, included me in his video promoting bike (and transit) to work for his company.

Bill talks about the learning curve associated with trying a different style of commuting, especially if you have a long commute like mine and his with multiple connections, but it doesn’t take long to learn what’s optimal for your situation. We do the same thing driving without thinking as much about it whenever we get a new job and discover which highways and roads and travel times work best.

In the video you’ll catch a glimpse of my daily commute, and you’ll see Bay Area cyclists dress in a mix of athletic gear and casual wear while riding. Some of you might also notice the very few women who bring bikes on the train. Caltrain riders may see a couple of familiar faces.

Bill gave me two minutes of his video beginning at about 5:40. I like that I don’t sound like the complete idiot I usually transform into when somebody puts a video camera in front of my face. I’m a little bit sweaty because Bill caught me immediately after a 25 mile evening ride from the office to the transit center in San Jose. You can tell that was an unplanned ride by the Gatorade bottle in my bottle cage. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but trains were delayed, and it (unusually) was faster for me to bike than to take the train that evening.



Bike to Work Day 2011 in the San Francisco Bay Area is Thursday, May 12.

For more bike content, here’s a short (90 second) bike-eye-view video of my morning commute from San Jose to Menlo Park via train and bike.



7 Comments

  1. Train car, wifi on a bus… nice, wish such services were made available in my neck of the woods. What’s at stake here, how ’bout our children’s health and their financial future.

  2. I appreciate when people say that yes, it takes thinking and planning — and the reminder that we do it with the stupid cage thing all the time, but because it’s a shared stupidity, it is an accepted one.

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