My Bike Is My Car

For years my bicycle commute was 30 minutes door-to-door each way. By car it was also just under 30 minutes door-to-door on average. This is because where I worked the parking lot for non-VIPs like myself was a good 10 minutes by foot from my office. With the bike I could park just outside the office. Imagine that! Now that my commute is longer (45 minutes each way), I’m not so sure that the car commute time would be so close to the bike commute time. Still, for both of my work sites the parking lot is far enough to add an extra 5 minutes at least to the door-to-door time. Worth considering.

In general I find that bike commute times compare very favorably with car commute times. For a brief, 3 to 5 minute car trip to the grocery store I hardly notice any difference with bike time to the same destination. Even longer trips can end up pretty even with bike time if you take traffic congestion and parking into consideration. For instance, if I were to compare two trips from my home in Sunnyvale to, say, Crissy Field in the Marina district of San Francisco, here’s what I’d probably get. Driving + parking time: between 50 and 70 minutes. Bike + Caltrain: 85 minutes. Not bad at all.