CommuterPageBlog

Out of my comfort zone and into the saddle

 I work to educate, provide information and encourage people to get out of their cars and use public transportation, walk, carpool, rideshare, vanpool, telework and bike to work, among other things.  For my own commute, I use the metrorail and bus and occasionally walk.  I own a bike and live within an easy biking distance (less than 3 miles) from work but was too timid to attempt the different form of commuting.   I enjoy a bike ride with my husband (who is an avid bike commuter) on the weekends or evenings after work, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know how to ride, I was just plain nervous about riding on busy roads in morning rush hour.  What if I fell off or got too sweaty?  For months my husband asked me to ride to work, even offered to take me along with him on his way to work but I refused, the train was just fine for me. It was the urging of a new coworker, who happened to live on my block, and peer pressure that finally got me onto the saddle and biking to work.

It took about four days of persistence for my coworker to talk me into commuting by bike.  I finally worked up the nerve and we decided to meet at 8am the next morning.  The night before, I packed up my back-pack in which included a small towel, a full change of clothes for work, my lunch plus snacks, my purse and make-up bag. My coworker, Tim, was already dressed for work in his slacks and dress shirt and only had a teeny, tiny, small backpack with his breakfast and lunch in it.  At first, I felt oddly overdressed in my yoga pants and tee shirt with super stuffed backpack but nonetheless, strapped on my helmet, took a deep breath and hit the road. 

We are lucky enough to spend the majority of our ride in designated bike lanes.  Even with that small comfort, I was still very nervous not only about biking on the streets, but I was sure I would crash into his back tire or worse, a parked car and completely embarrass myself in front of my new colleague.  After the first 2 blocks, my nerves calmed a bit.  Fifteen minutes later, we walked/rolled into the doors of our office; I had survived!!!  My confidence soared, I felt triumphant.  I was more energetic and ready to start the work day. 

 

Nine hours later, I was back in the saddle, slowly, and I mean slowly, pedaling up the Rosslyn hill towards Courthouse.  Did I mention the ride to work is mainly downhill from Ballston to Rosslyn?  Two hills and 18 minutes later, I was home.  We decided (and by decided I mean, Tim made me) to meet the next morning and try again.  I can’t honestly say that I was looking forward to it; I was still timid but by the end of the second day, I was already looking forward to riding in the next morning.  By the end of the week, I was hooked.  Not only did I get a little bit of exercise, but I felt more energetic, and saved about 15 minutes on my commuting time.  Tim actually doubled his commute time by riding along with me, but hey, eventually I will get faster!  I have already shaved off three minutes from my first day.

 I have been biking to work for about two weeks now and looking back, I am glad I went outside my comfort zone and tried a new commute option to work.  Even though I spend my days urging people to leave their cars at home and try something different for their commute, I understand that is not always an easy decision.  It is hard to try something you aren’t familiar with.  If you have a friend who bikes to work or takes the bus, ask to tag along so they can show you the ropes.  It is worth having the commuting mentor to help you discover new options to get to work or around town.  I can now proudly say, thanks to my coworker’s persistence, I am a bike commuter!  (Side note:  My husband was right.  Biking to work is a lot of fun, I do enjoy it and yes, I should have started months ago!)

 

Diane Kean, Arlington Transportation Partners.  Diane lives, works and plays in Arlington County, Virginia using public transportation, walking and now biking to get to work and around town.

Why NYC is Taking The Lead in Taking Back Streets for Pedestrians & Bikes

Why is New York City becoming the national leader in taking back streets from cars and turning them over to people and bikes? The answer is simple: Janette Sadik-Kahn. And she's taken full advantage of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's appointment of her as Transportation Commissioner and his charge to make New York greener and more livable. No where in the country are they doing more innovative things to make an urban area more livable by taking back the streets. Forbes Magazine has a wonderful look (Take Back the Streets, by Susan Adams, October 5, 2009) at this visionary leader and what's she's doing to transform New York City. She's one of the reasons a bunch of us Arlington Transportation staffers visited with her staff on a learning trip to NYC this summer. We all could learn a lot from their good work and put it into practice here in the DC region.

Chris Hamilton is the Commuter Services Transportation Bureau Chief for Arlington County in the Department of Environmental Services, manager of CommuterPageBlog and a Metro/biking commuter from Rosemont in Alexandria.

Cycling Made Safer and More Accessible

NYC continues to provide fantastic inspiration for doing more to make it easier to use a bike as transportation. 

Chris Hamilton is the Commuter Services Transportation Bureau Chief for Arlington County in the Department of Environmental Services, manager of CommuterPageBlog and a Metro/biking commuter from Rosemont in Alexandria

Making It Easy With Pocket Schedules

The Arlington neighborhood called Westover is a neighborhood about a mile east of the East Falls Church Metro and about 1.8 miles west of the Ballston Metro. It is centered on a group of neighborhood shops: the Lost Dog Pizza Deli, Lebanese Taverna and Ayers Variety Store among others. The #2 Metrobus runs directly through the center to both Metro stops, although the majority of riders I've seen take the bus to Ballston and then transfer to Metrorail there (or Ballston is their final destination). I think this is a good example of two nodes that would benefit from a simple, easily accessible and usable schedule.

Arlington Transportation Partners, which provides transportation information throughout the county, stocks schedules and maps in one of the local establishments. I have noted that whenever the #2 Metrobus schedule is stocked they immediately get snatched up, while the other schedules and maps tend to languish longer. However, almost all of the information in that schedule is extraneous to most of these users. All they really need to know is when the bus is going to Ballston and when it's returning. I suggest that a very simple, easy to use pocket schedule would be a powerful tool for riders between these two nodes. It could look something like this:

If designed to be the size of a business card folded once, it would easily fit in a wallet. There's no need for a map or other destinations or really anything else. It would serve most of the people who might ride the bus to or from the Westover area. It's so easy, it might lure people who pick up one of these schedules at the ice cream shop to consider taking the bus.

There are certainly dozens of these nodes that directly connect two locations together and are highly used. A couple obvious ones to me are Shirlington-Pentagon and Shirlington-Ballston. Especially now that Arlington has built their nice, new transportation center in Shirlington, providing riders with really easy pocket schedules would be a great boon for users. There are several different routes that serve these points, so having a concise, combined schedule would simplify information and make it more accessible.

One of the big barriers to people riding the bus is they don't know when it comes and schedules can be hard to figure out sometimes. NextBus is one tool to help with that, but it doesn't tell me when I can get back. It also doesn't help me with, say, tomorrow. The WMATA web site can, but a pocket schedule like this requires no computer, no smart phone, no Internet connection and is probably way faster than any of those. It can sit in a pile on the counter of a coffee shop and be tucked in a wallet and used immediately.

I imagine there are scores, if not hundreds, of these highly used node connections. Would it make sense to print all these individual pocket schedules? Maybe not a bad idea. By being enterprising, this might be a good way to get more people on the buses while partnering with local businesses. Why not get a local business to sponsor the schedules to offset the costs? They could pay for the printing, which would be a relatively low-cost advertising vehicle, and they would get a little space on the pocket schedule for their marketing message. It's highly geographically targeted marketing, since the only people who would be interested in that particular pocket schedule are those who travel to or from that one location.

While Metro is spending millions on rail cars and infrastructure maintenance and upgrades, and billions on a new rail line, there are truly low-cost/no-cost measures that can make the system run better. I've proposed a couple in the past (the Farragut Virtual Tunnel and A/B rush-hour service). This is another of those. Intelligently done, these simple little pocket schedules could be provided for free (both to passengers and for Metro) to thousands of riders and make riding the bus way easier.
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Steve Offutt, Arlington Resident and fan of Ayers Variety Store

ART 41 & ART 42 Changes on Sept. 28

Beginning Monday, September 28, ART 41 Columbia Pike-Ballston-Court House will have a new schedule.  The new schedule will start earlier at 6:00 am and run later until 11:17 pm. Schedules and route map can be found on the ART 41 web page.

Also starting on Monday September 28, ART 42 Ballston-Pentagon will take over the weekday Metrobus 24P route. ART currently operates this route on Saturdays. The weekday route and schedule will remain the same as the 24P. The only difference is that ART will provide service instead of Metrobus.

Downloadable schedules for your mobile device are available for each route at CommuterPage.com.

Stuff to Ease the Trip

There's an interesting article in one of the Eastern Shore papers about sensors that have been installed along Route 50 between the Bay Bridge and Ocean City. The thing that makes this interesting is the thought that vacationers would actually go online before they left the house to check on the speeds along Route 50. Do they really think that things will not have changed, one way or the other, before they actually get there? As to the use of the mobile devices to get the information on the fly I have always had a difficult time getting information-heavy websites to work well on my mobile device but that's just me. It would have also been nice to have put this up last spring when beach season was beginning rather than when it was over.

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I can't decide whether this is a good idea or not: An engineer has developed an audio recording that is supposed to take the stress out of driving. Drive Time RX uses subliminal messages embedded in "soothing" music to ease your angst during the commute. It sounds like the kind of stuff that used to be advertised back in the 1970's.  The ad for this product states that: "The words are subliminally encoded so softly in the music that you usually can't hear them. Your subconscious mind does, however, and responds automatically!"

Here are some examples of what your subconscious mind might be subjected to: "I am relaxed and alert at all times. I exhale stress and tension and return to my center of calm. I check my rear view mirror frequently. I am in control of my emotional response to inconsiderate actions of other drivers."

Now, if one of our readers can come up with a transit version for the commute then we?ll have an entire region of peaceful commuters.

Seriously, though, if you are intrigued by this product you can get more information by following this link.
 
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I think it's wonderful that Metro is finally getting around to making changes in the door systems on the 1000 series rail cars. These are rail cars that date back to the time that Jimmy Carter was in the White House. These are rail cars that Metro was told several years ago to upgrade or put in a landfill. The system has made a number of decisions based on a lack of money that are now coming home to roost.  Once again, all of this should be a huge wake up call to federal and local governments to pony up the money to fix this system before more people die.

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Yesterday was Car Free Day. Local officials were hoping to double the 5,000 plus that pledged to leave their cars at home last year. This year's event seems to have gotten a bit more publicity so maybe the numbers will go up. At the same time, the price of a gallon of gas is about a dollar less than it was last year so that big incentive is minimized. I also wonder if all of the negative press about Metro might have given people pause. We'll have to see where the numbers end up.

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Steve Eldridge is a long-time reporter, observer and commentator on the Washington region's transportation issues. You can contact him directly by writing to: Steve@SprawlandCrawl.com. Unless otherwise requested, letters or portions of letters can be used within future columns. Letter writers will be identified by their first name and city/neighborhood.

Car Sharing isn't just healthy for the environment, it's also healthy for business

As a manager of a small work group of 25 employees in Arlington County, I have the need to own a van to transport goods and materials within the Metro region.  This van is great, but it comes at a fairly high cost.  These costs include insurance, parking, gas, maintenance and the cost of the vehicle.  On average our van costs my work group close to $1,000 per month and it gets used extensively.  At times, we need a second vehicle, this is where our car sharing account helps us save money.  If we were to commit to purchasing another van, we would be on the hook for a minimum of $1,000 per month for this amenity.  Instead, we utilize our Zipcar account (www.zipcar.com) and "share" a car as needed throughout the month.  This service costs less than $9.00/hour and allows us the flexibility to utilize a variety of vehicles to serve our needs.  We spend an average of $200/month for our 2nd vehicle (saving us nearly $10,000 annually)  The majority of my work group takes public transportation to the office (healthy for the environment) and Zipcar allows us to meet our other "car" needs each month (healthy for our business).

Jay Fresch is a Project Manager within the Arlington County Commuter Services Bureau.

Car-Free Days - Day One and Counting

There's been a lot of news today about World Car-Free Day 2009 and we hope you've gone car-free or car-lite, at least for today! If you did, make sure we know about it by registering at  www.carfreemetrodc.com. Even if you commute car-free or car-lite every day, you can still pledge as a way to highlight your choice of using alternative modes of transportation. (Either way, make sure you register so you can win prizes!) 

Whether you walked, biked, took transit, carpooled with a friend, or worked from home today, you are now among the ranks of the car-free!  Congratulations and welcome to the club!  You'll soon find that membership has its privileges, like staying fit, saving money, building community, and reducing your carbon footprint!

But first, an invitation. As Car-Free Day turns to Car-Free night, join Arlington County Commuter Services to celebrate your car-freedom at Arlington's Car-Free Diet Celebration. The festive night of car-free fun runs from 4-8 p.m. tonight (Tuesday, 9/22) at Mister Days in Clarendon.

We'll be celebrating World Car-Free Day and the launch of Arlington's new Car-Free Diet Seven-Day Plan with free food, raffle drawings, trip planning assistance and more! 

And thanks to Arlington's Car-Free Diet Retail Partners, you can start off the first four days of your Seven-Day Plan with Car-Free Day discounts at participating establishments from today through Friday, September 25. Just print out this Car-Free Day coupon and be sure to thank our Retail Partners for supporting World Car-Free Day!

Oh, and if Arlington's World Car-Free Day goings-on aren't enough to convince you to ditch the gas-guzzler, the entire week of September 21-25 is Try Transit Week! What more incentive do you need?

Whether you walk, bike, bus (ART 41 and 77 or Metrobus 38B and 24P) or Metro (Orange Line-Clarendon), we hope to see you at Mister Days tonight!

Lauren Hassel
WALKArlington

Commuters Urged to Ditch Their Wheels for 'Car Free Day'

ABC 7 News coverage of area Car-Free Day activities.

Advance Look at Streetcars Coming to D.C.

The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) posted a link to this YouTube video on their Facebook page. DDOT says "While we’re on the subject of streetcars, watch this STREETFILMS video about the South Lake Union Line in Seattle which uses the same cars that will run in the District. It will give you a great taste of what to expect when the DC Streetcar is operational."

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Joe Chapline is Web Manager for Arlington County Commuter Services.