*That* part doesn't bother/surprise me at all; I know lots of people who do that. The Bay Area is a big area geographically (about 60 miles east -west, about 120 miles north-south), but most people who live here don't go everywhere all the time. They go to the places they already know. I've lived less than 10 miles from Orinda for my entire life, and I know how to drive east to get there both on the freeway and on surface roads; but I routinely get lost when trying to return over the exact same surface roads. But I could navigate around north Alameda County blind if you stuck knitting needles in my eyes.
Berkeley is a city of 110,000 in a 3x3 mile square. San Francisco is 750,000 in a 7x7 mile square. We've got a lot of people in not a lot of space; most of the places a parent might want to take their kids are pretty close, and are generally bike+public transit-accessible. San Francisco has a few steep places, but most of them have convenient access points (such as the famous "Wiggle" running through Duboce Triangle, providing a near-level access route from the Mission District to the Haight-Ashbury). Berkeley has a steep rise on the eastern edge of town, with the fancy-schmancy houses with nice bay views up on the hillsides. But there's no business up there, and fairly few people; houses in that area now start at $1.5M for fairly small lots. Most of us live down here in the flats, where the businesses/schools/public buildings are. Biking around here is easy; that's one of the reasons you see so many Xtracycles, *bakfietsen* and Big Dummys here. Just last night, I nearly collided at the bike racks at Berkeley Bowl West (sort of a localized Whole Foods) with a hipster dad (neckbeard, Buddy Holly glasses, porkpie hat) who had mounted a kid-holding thingy holding a nonplussed pacifier-sucking kid on the stem of his fixie-fied Pinarello. Fortunately, the infink had a helmet on his melon, although his dad (the human stereotype!) didn't. At the beginning of the year, BART (the commuter light rail system masquerading as a subway) liberalized the bike rules; you can now bring a bike onto a train at any time, even during commute hours, as long as you stay out of the first car. I haven't driven to San Francisco in three years, although I've gone to the far corners of the City (GG Bridge, Cow Palace, Ocean Beach, the zoo); the combination of BART and bike has gotten me there pretty effectively. My trip to the RBW picnic last week consisted of: 1) A 30-minute ride from my house in West Berkeley to West Oakland BART (the closest East Bay station to SF, and one with direct SF service on Sundays, unlike the Berkeley stations) 2) ten minutes on the train under the bay 3) a 30-minute ride along the Embarcadero and Marina waterfronts from Embarcadero BART to Fort Point (longer than it should have been, due to weekend tourist traffic + a craft beer festival on Marina Green) And then the same in return. Two hours, 20 minutes transit time; when considering the tollbooth on the bridge and parking at Crissy Field, the time's probably a wash. Cash outlay was $6.20 for the BART ticket; not too bad, considering the bridge toll is $5 weekends and gas is currently slumping at $2.80/gal. Plus, the 24 miles on the bike meant I could eat whatever I wanted that day. What I think of as the central Bay Area, the area around the bridges (east side of San Francisco, downtown/North Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley/Albany) is mostly flat. It has most of the primary federal/state government offices, most of the museums, several of the universities. Similar setups exist in the South Bay and on the Peninsula; most of the people/businesses/destinations are in the flats, so it's fairly easy to bike between them. For moments when a bike won't cut it, there's always Uber and ZipCar, which are as common on our streets as raccoons and deer. And of course, just because you don't have a car doesn't mean you don't know anybody else who owns a car. Peter Adler normally about 6-8K miles a year on bikes, less than 1K in the car Berkeley, CA/USA On Sunday, September 27, 2015 at 12:40:40 PM UTC-7, Patrick Moore wrote: > > I'm very curious how you manage to get 2 children to school and to > extra-curricular events sans auto. I know Kent Peterson (of blog and Great > Divide and long distance fixed gear riding) did so.So, how do you get your > children around and about? > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
