I have spent most of the past four months biking to and from work.\u00a0 I’ve loved it; it’s a great way to kick off the morning; a little fresh air, a vigorous workout, a few existential threats to focus the mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But since the kids have been to school, it’s been more of a twice a week pleasure that I snatch if everything goes well with getting kids up and to school; if it’s warm enough for Bun to bike, and Zam actually gets out the door and walking or skateboarding on time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When I can’t bike, I usually take the bus.\u00a0 But that stinks during the school year, since there are exactly three options for the bus that runs down my street; one that I can catch and get to work half an hour early, if everyone <\/em>is out the door and moving five minutes ahead of normal, which I make about 10% of the time; one that gets me to work in plenty of time (even to stop at the coffee shop), if everything goes well, which is about 80%; one that gets me there 10 minutes late.\u00a0 Or I drive, and pay for parking.<\/p>\n This isn’t really intended to be a trip through my domestic life; there’s a point here.\u00a0 Whenever I hear urban transit activists extol the virtues of biking to work or mass transit as viable options, I try to find out; do they have kids<\/em>?\u00a0<\/p>\n Anecdotally, most seem not to.\u00a0 And it shows.\u00a0<\/p>\n On a regional politics discussion forum, one of the contributors frequently posts reviews of the various bus rides and routes she takes, taking some pride in her ability to get to places in (relatively) little time.\u00a0 Which makes for interesting reading, and even more <\/em>interesting speculation; if she took an hour and forty minutes to get from her house to a job, using three transfers, how would get get a kid to a doctor appointment?\u00a0 How would she pick her kid up if he\/she got sick at school?\u00a0 How does she get home in time to help out with homework?<\/p>\n Simple.\u00a0 She doesn’t.\u00a0 No kids in the picture.<\/p>\n I’m not saying that none of the New Urban utopianists don’t have <\/em>any answers.\u00a0 I’m just completely bumfuzzled to think of what they’d be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have spent most of the past four months biking to and from work.\u00a0 I’ve loved it; it’s a great way to kick off the morning; a little fresh air, a vigorous workout, a few existential threats to focus the mind.\u00a0 But since the kids have been to school, it’s been more of a twice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}