So, in my first full day in California, I returned the rental car and got a rental commuter bike. My house is 2 flat miles from work on a lightly-trafficked bike route. Cycling is the sanest form of commuting when it isn’t pouring rain.
\nPalo Alto has a passive-aggressive downtown street parking system. You can park for 2-3 hours at a time with no charge in a several-block zone marked with colored signs. Then, you need to move your car to avoid a $25 fine. So a workday in downtown Palo Alto involves getting up and moving your car every few hours.
\nThey don’t make it impossible to park by making sure there are fewer parking spots than people who want to park, like they do in Cambridge. They don’t have pirhana towing, like they do in the Boston area, where predatory towtrucks circle timed parking areas and abduct your car to a distant lot where it must be ransomed for an exhorbitant fine. They just make it really annoying.
\nSo far the transportation scheme is working. I’ve done the hour-long drive to San Francisco and Berkeley twice for fun things, and otherwise had a short and healthy daily commute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, in my first full day in California, I returned the rental car and got a rental commuter bike. My house is 2 flat miles from work on a lightly-trafficked bike route. Cycling is the sanest form of commuting when it isn’t pouring rain. Palo Alto has a passive-aggressive downtown street parking system. You can … Continue reading “Commuter bike”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-fq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}