You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one – John Lennon

San Jose Mercury News had a front page cover story today about alternatives to commuting by car. Spurred by high gas prices, it appears that ridership on public transport such as Light Rail and Caltrain are up, biking to work is up and people seem to be loving it. The story is titled “DRIVING LESS, AND LOVING IT”. Here are the first two paragraphs from it:

Gas at $3.37 a gallon is painful, but some plucky commuters are finding ways to beat the record prices — and are coming away more relaxed and proud of themselves.

Instead of idling in traffic and burning up precious fuel, they are taking the train and working on laptops, jumping on bikes and shedding unwanted pounds or easing off the accelerator and boosting their mileage.

Another alternative taken up by people is driving slower. Locals said Highway 85 was called that way because of the speed at which people drove on it. 280 was another popular high-speed highway. Now, people are beginning to appreciate the value of driving slowly, though most started it to reduce the amount of money that they spent on gas. A couple of quotes from people in the story:

Dave Medlicott, a 52 year old engineer from Campbell: “This is something I’ve never done before. It has an amazing calming effect and I’m saving money. I never thought I’d drive like an old man — let alone enjoy it.”

Robert Foglia, Vice President at Aptek who was a “lead foot” driver and now takes the public transport and bikes to work: “I was becoming angry, and I decided I needed to relax.”

While cognitive dissonance maybe at play with some people, I’m fairly convinced that when people slow down, they’ll begin to appreciate life more because they can actually see it.

The story is not all rosy of course. US gasoline demand was apparently 9.2 million barrels last month which was unchanged from last year (I don’t know if being even is progress since I don’t know the yearly trend). In this age of speed, that commuting by public transport takes much longer doesn’t help of course. We went to see Ashish’s play in San Francisco yesterday using Caltrain and BART. The wround trip was a little over 4 hours which included a 40 minute wait at Millbrae for the Caltrain. If we had driven, it’d have taken us half that time.

Another interesting link on the web page about the story is about the numbers of people using public transport, searching for hybrid vehicles instead of SUVs etc.

I have been biking to work almost every day for the past 9 years and I’m happy to see many others join this small, but growing group. I must thank Magic for first putting the idea in my head and loaning me bikes to try it out, Atri for actually pushing me to start biking when we started biking to work together, the local bike associations that have struggled hard for so long to get us bike lanes, allow bikes on public transport, popularize it and finally Cisco for providing Ecopass which is essentially Cisco paying for a yearly pass on the public transport.

I had a nice, lesiurely bike ride on Stevens Creek Trail from Dana St to Oregon Expressway. After my long run yesterday, I wanted my legs to get some rest. I had not done the trail from Shoreline Park to Oregon Expressway before. With an easy pace, it took me about 90 minutes to finish the ride. The trail is very pretty. Next time, I’ll take my camera with me.

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