Commuting

I'm still working on a story about our recent vacation. Meanwhile, here is something to fill the gap.

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When I was commuting every weekday to my office in San Francisco, I seldom drove, preferring to ride either the train or the bus. In the early years it was the train. It was a smoother, more stable ride. Reading was possible, as was the ability to grab a few extra winks if necessary. (This last bit was true going in to the city, but risky on the homeward trip, as missing your station while asleep was a real possibility.)

The disadvantage of the train was that the terminus lay many city blocks from where my office was. I either walked, as did many other train passengers, when the weather was fine, or took the crowded city buses when it was rainy.

Later a bus service was inaugurated in the suburbs which could deliver me close to the building where I worked, and so I switched from the train to the bus. Some mornings I had to stand up in the bus all the way, because where I got on was the final pick-up point before the bus entered the freeway, and so the bus would often be quite full by then. (No dozing while standing for me, though I saw some other guys doing it.) Later on the bus company put more buses on the route, as the ridership grew, and from that point on we were no longer packed in like sardines.

Whether I took the train or the bus, I still had to drive from my house to the respective stations. The local train station had a metered city parking lot adjacent to it, which allowed for long-term parking for the commuter. Street parking in the immediate vicinity had a one-hour limit, but if you were prepared to walk a few blocks, there you could park all day for free.

Nowadays, free downtown parking in our suburb is getting harder to find, and parking meters are sprouting all along the sidewalks. Ten years ago, you could park at a meter for an hour for a dime. Not any more. It's a quarter for thirty minutes. But still we're not so bad out here. In San Francisco, the meters take only quarters, and you get only ten minutes per quarter. I suppose we can soon expect to see suburban meters that will accept paper money, ore even credit cards, rather than metal.

It's getting to be as bad as New York City.