Taking Transit To Work

I'm pretty happy about it.

I moved about 6 weeks ago to the other side of town (another suburb) and while I did a test commute one morning to see how LONG the commute was (about 15-20 minutes) it didn't occur to me that even though I was driving less TIME i was driving nearly twice the DISTANCE because it's all freeway time now. Muh. Left me feeling pretty dumb and guilty.

To try and resolve some of this I decided that I was going to try and use our lightrail system (I'm in Sacramento, CA). When I had tried this before it took me like 2 hours each way to get to work instead of a 25 minute drive. I decided yesterday that I was going to make today the first transit day....and woke up this AM to rain. I thought about chickening out and driving anyways but i put some boots on and pulled out an umbrella. Took about an hour including the wait at the train station near my house and the walk from the train station near my work to my work. I think I'm going to try and do this more. Right now I'm setting it as a goal to take the train Mondays and Tuesdays and only drive in Wednesdays and Thursdays (furloughs on Fridays).

Here's the breakdown.

Transit Days:
2.6 miles to the train station (drive) x 2 (each way) = 5.2 miles driving.

Driving Days:
16.5 miles from to work (drive) x 2 (each way) = 33 miles driving.

Riding transit to work means 55.6 miles of driving saved per week. When I keep this up for a year I'll have saved 2891.2 miles. Holy crap. That's 96.4 gallons of gas.