Carbaby- n. a person who has become so accustomed to driving everywhere that they never even consider walking, biking, or taking public transportation. 

The previous post is an example of how my fellow writer works with a lot of very nice carbabies. However, carbaby can also be used by exsasperated transportation activists in a derogatory way. “She’s such a carbaby that she drives to the gym to ride the stationary bike!”. 

Ever since cbink introduced this term in conversation to me, I’ve found it useful. It seems that it fills a void in our language, so I’m putting it up here for the general public. 

Every first Monday of the month my job hosts a board meeting. These meetings usually last from 6:30pm - 8:30pmish. Since I’m part of my job’s executive team (Development Director), I have to stay late, chat with volunteer board members, and clean up a little.

After each meeting people always ask, “Need a ride?” I usually decline the offer by saying, “No thanks, I’m going to walk, I need some fresh air.”

People always seem to freak out when I tell them I’m walking home from work. I don’t know if it’s because of the physical act of walking or the fact that I’m not getting into a car after a long day and commuting home. Who wants to commute when you’re sleepy? Hell, who wants to drive when you’re tired?

My walk begins at Fillmore and Geary, right next to the Safeway in the Western Addition. I live on Post and Hyde so I can usually catch a 38 on Geary or a 3 on Sutter and it’ll take me downtown in 5 minutes.

OR, I can just walk, that takes about 15 minutes.

It’s not that far of a walk, just up one hill to Gough (where cars are racing by) and the rest is downhill from there. I’d rather step outside and see what’s happening anyways, you should too. Life’s too short to be looking for parking.

It was a weekend full of Bike Culture.

Friday night we put on our party clothes to ride in the lovely “Heels on Wheels” ride.  You might not be able to walk in heels, but you certainly can bike in them. Also on the ride from Vancouver, BC, were the folks behind Momentum Magazine. Momentum discusses the culture of bicycling, not the gear. You can read the whole thing online, find it in some SF bike shops, or subscribe to it. 

Saturday we went to the Maker Faire. I’m pleased to report there was much more bike culture was going on at the Maker Faire this year.   They published the biking directions from BART, and had valet bike parking (which was really popular). There were several places were one could ride crazy bikes, including the Cyclicide fleet, the Buscycle, and the wooden bike collection. But also striking this year was the amount of bicycle imagery in the craft section: purses with embroidered bikes, prints, t-shirts. We bought a POV light that creates patterns as it rotates for our spokes. Oh, and Momentum had a booth there. 

I will certainly never win a bike race - not only because I will never enter one, but I’m just too mellow, too slow, too happy looking at everything that I’m cycling by.  On Market Street on my morning commute I’m the cyclist getting dropped off the clump of bikes pulling away from a red light. Sure, I usually catch up to them all at the next light where they are all stopped again, and then I get dropped again.  But I’m happy pedaling along, seeing the sights from the seat of my bike.

I don’t drive much, but last week I had decided that it would help me in my work to attend a lecture in Santa Clara. So I got a car share and drove. It was a little more than an hour each way. 

Here are the notes I made to myself for next time (if there is one…)

1. Don’t rely on a passenger who has never had a driver’s license to be a navigator. My “navigator” (a colleague and fellow cyclist) clearly wasn’t used to paying attention to freeway signs and we got lost.
2. Time goes really fast with a conversation partner and the radio, so it’s only later when you realize that 2.5 hours of your life just vanished and all that happened was you got really tired. 
3. Pay attention to the speedometer. I was approaching the city and realized I was only going 50 mph on 101. Hey, it sure felt fast!  My passenger said “yeah, you’ve been doing that most of the trip, it’s kind of cute”.
4. The nice thing about having a passenger without a driver’s license is they don’t do any back-seat driving!

They said a torch was coming by.  It didn’t.  Those of us on bikes and on foot who enjoyed the quiet car free Embarcadero didn’t seem to care much.  A taste of things to come when we decide that cars don’t get every street for every hour of every day?

Here’s one of the things we do with the money we don’t spend on a car - we have a boat.  It cost about the same as buying an older used car (from nothing to $5k).  Marina fees are less than parking in the city ($140/month).  Fuel costs are negligible (it’s a sail boat) - $4 gas doesn’t seem like a big deal when you only buy two gallons of the stuff every six months.  Of course there’s maintenance costs (a boat is not an investment), but looked after a boat will last decades.

And then you can take your visiting friends out on the bay, partake in the many races, or just enjoy the beautiful experience of being alone on a boat surrounded by the amazing area we call home.  If you live here and have never been out on the bay, you really should.

We keep ours on Treasure Island (never been?  Jump on the 108 and experience some great city views), so getting there on transit is actually pretty easy - we jump on an N-Judah downtown and take the 108 to the Island.  From where we live it’s probably faster than driving much of the time, given the permanent jam that is the 80-101 interchange.  And when we need to lug heavy stuff out there, we take a City Carshare.

So a strange thing happens to you after awhile of being car free and not driving.  Most car-dependent people assume that you must be psyched to get into a car and drive for awhile instead of “having” to bike, walk, or take transit, but Au Contraire, Mon Frere….you start to just get a bit freaked out in cars; kinda like a cat being walked through a dog show.   Cars seem so silly and inefficient and inevitably you wish you were back on your bike.  They also feel dangerous.  Really dangerous.

This feeling applies to work too, so unless you’re lucky enough to have found a job that incorporated bike riding and work, you sometimes may be forced into a car.

I’m an engineering consultant and often have to travel all around the Bay Area for meetings, site visits, and to schmooze with clients.  And amazingly enough I can do a lot of this on my bike despite a complete lack of facilities and culture at my current office.  The key comes down to this one point: WHO ELSE IS GOING?  If it’s a solo effort, then I can almost always take my bike and/transit, but throw in my boss or a few colleagues and things usually revert to an automobile.  It’s rare to find someone else as used to getting around without a car as you.  You are a still a freak and rebel, in case you forgot.  And sometimes transit is just too slow for most people.  Sure, you could refuse to drive anywhere, and that would be cool, but it takes grand cahones and a lack of ambition in my profession.  Across town in the same amount of time is fine, but you’d be seen as pretty antisocial to leave the office an hour earlier to get to a meeting in San Jose when two of you coworkers are already taking a car there. 

But people will surprise you too.  After a few meetings with a new client on the Peninsula that involved cars and my boss, I was taking over the client and decided that I’d bike to San Mateo City hall via Caltrain for our next meeting.  I’ve mastered the nice and practical cycling work clothes that don’t give a hint of my mode of transport, but was still a bit skidish at telling the 60+ year old, apparently conservative developer client that I didn’t need a ride in his BMW to Caltrain as “I’d rode my bike”…..well, so it turns out he has 3 road bikes, still rides, and has a son that is a semi-pro racer at a college in the Georgia.  People surprise you and he still thinks I’m a bit out there(”wow, you really are a cyclist”) as he only rides for recreation, but I can also sense a bit of envy and respect in his tone now. 

Plus, when you do incorporate biking, walking, or even a peaceful ride on transit into a necessary work trip, you can’t help but feel that you cheated a bit…got away with something….your health, sanity, and a better way to live.  So go for it and be proud to show up on a bike.  I promise I will too. -R

After years of taking public transit in San Francisco, I’ve developed a highly specialized skill: the ability to identify buses at a thousand paces.

Some of the distinctions are simple enough. If I see overhead poles, I know it isn’t a route that uses a diesel bus. On Market Street, I know which lines stop at major intersections and which stop mid-block. And it goes without saying that at night, I need to see MUNI’s distinct pattern of yellow lights on the front before I waste any time on some pretender bus headed to a casino in Reno. After that, though, evidence becomes more scant and busspotting experience takes over.

I lived near Mission and 16th Street for more than a dozen years, which is where I honed my busspotting expertise. I learned to recognize the difference between the 14 and 49 based solely on the vague outlines of the numbers. As a busspotting authority, I can tell which direction a bus is heading just by the twang of the overhead lines (and therefore whether or not to run to catch it).

The biggest busspotting test in that neighborhood, though, comes with the #22 and #33 as they travel on 16th Street from Potrero Hill. Both run on overhead lines. Each route has two digits—repeating digits with similar contours and angles, for that extra challenge. And now that the buses have been upgraded to digital displays, neither uses the old black-and-white roller sign on the front. Thanks to my years of training, though, I’ve mastered the ability to read the subtle indications of a possible left turn, which comes a mere two blocks before Mission. If I see it inching over, I know it’s the 33. If it chugs along undeterred, we’ve got a 22.

Now that the NextBus displays are finally spreading their way across the city, my elite busspotting skills are becoming obsolete. I don’t really mind, though—relinquishing that small sense of triumph is a small price to pay for knowing I can grab coffee before my bus shows up.