What are you doing about problematic traffic? (San Diego: real estate, apartments)

[Steve97415]

To those of you who complain about the traffic where you live...are you saying that from the viewpoint of a cyclist or pedestrian who finds traffic obstrusive and dangerous...or is your viewpoint from behind the windshield of a motor vehicle that is a contributing part of the problem? What are you doing to help alleviate traffic congestion?

1. Are you living "care-lite": using your motor vehicle only for trips of a hundred miles or more and relying on cycling and walking for work commuting and errands?

2. Do you make sure that you buy a home in an area that has mass-transit access to the area where you will work?

3. Do you testify at planning commission hearings to advocate for mass transit and better safer bicycle/pedestrian accommodation in urban planning?

4. Or are you an internal combustion lemming who practices a pious devotion to your car and thinks that other cars -- not yours -- are "traffic" and that you were endowed by your creator with an inalienable right to a place on the asphalt? Perhaps for you the solution is to move somewhere with less traffic, maintain the same pigheaded dependence on your car and start the same volume-to-capacity downward spiral all over again somewhere else?

[elousv]

4.

[buckeyenative01]

I lived five minutes from work, driving over the freeway en-route to my place of business, laughing at everyone else stuck in traffic.

[sav858]

definitely #4 for me too!! I got to go fill up my Hummer now and drive around aimlessly, accelerating really hard with the AC blasting and the windows down.

[Rhenzanite]

Unfortunately, the city I work in is too expensive for me to live in, so I commute from about 15 miles away. If I DID live there, I would certainly ride or bike to work and back! I do ride my bike to the store and to do errands in my little town though....

[CaliDude1]

Originally Posted by buckeyenative01

I lived five minutes from work, driving over the freeway en-route to my place of business, laughing at everyone else stuck in traffic.

Similar situation for me. I am about ten minutes away. I kind of lucked out. It is one of the main reasons I wouldn't even consider one those far flung suburbs. I don't care how "nice" the neighborhoods are or how cheap (relatively speaking) the homes are.

I have thought about riding a bike to work. But honestly, I am not comfortable being on the road with cars. It would be great if we had more designated bike lanes. I just don't feel safe sharing the road with cars. I KNOW how crazy L.A. drivers are.

[Snort]

I'm commuting to work in my mind. My boss doesn't like it, but I'm there, man. Mentally, I'm there.

[Steve97415]

Originally Posted by JetJockey

Unfortunately, the city I work in is too expensive for me to live in, so I commute from about 15 miles away. If I DID live there, I would certainly ride or bike to work and back! I do ride my bike to the store and to do errands in my little town though....

Since your commute by bicycle would be less than an hour, why not ride? I rode a 22-mile each-way commute 4 days out of 5 for seven years.

Doesn't it seem a bit embarrassing that a city like Portland, OR that has 120 precipitation days a year has a bicycle mode share that is more than TEN TIMES what paradise-climate San Diego has, for example? Is it that physical laziness is such an ingrained attribute of California culture, or is it just the lemming effect -- California apparently having the smallest percentage of free thinkers of any state in the nation? What's particularly ironic is that many people could actually get to work faster if they rode a bike as opposed to crawling through stop-and-go gridlock in their beloved cars.

[EscapeCalifornia]

Who wants to ride a bike to work, risk death at the the hand of p***ed off drivers, and get to work all hot and sweaty?

I used a car because its the only practical way to accomplish what I need to do.

[sonarrat]

I certainly want to buy close to the light-rail. Kind of hard though, if you insist on a single family house. (Pianos don't belong in apartments!) There's only a very narrow band of real estate that could possibly be attainable for a first-timer like me.