If you're lucky enough to still have work, why are you still driving there and back every day?
I've been bike commuting since Feb. 2007 -- year round, in Anchorage, Alaska. Not every single day but probably at least 80% of the time. It is by far the best life improvement I ever made. It is a breeze, it is always interesting, invigorating and it allows an intimate connection to sights and sounds of which I used to be oblivious. The ancillary benefits to health, energy, cutting unnecessary expenses and peace of mind are too numerous to list.
I found that every single belief I used to have about why I thought bike commuting wasn't viable was false. There's an embarrassing wealth of resources on the net and in print offering advice and assistance on gear, approaches, techniques, safety tips and the like. There is an incredible community of other riders.
If bicycling continues its groundswell of gaining popularity, it will result in tangible benefit for all -- as we give up our road building fever and turn all of our cities and towns into much nicer places to live.
Call it a utopian fantasy if you wish, but do so from an informed perspective. If you are sitting on the fence on this one, try to eliminate your excuses for not bike commuting one by one. Are you using one of the top ten excuses?
Try bike commuting for a month. Extend it to the rest of the summer and you'll never sit in a car in rush hour traffic again, I'll guarantee it. Keep going into the fall and you can become as smug and self-assured as the rest of us two wheeled dirty hippies.
Update: Thanks for all of your kind suggestions. The comments and poll were fascinating. More or less what I expected, but not with such open hostility. My fault, though, right?
Here's the conculusion I draw. We say we want positive change, even spend a lot of time in a place like this strategizing how to galvanize and force these changes. But how much are we willing to do personally? Not much. Oil imports have gone from a 20-80% import-domestic mix to 70-30, as we burned up the domestic supply since the 1970s. You want to help 'end our dependence on foreign supplies', as our president has identified as a key national security and climate change issue? I think you know what to do.
Update 2: Looking at the poll results one more time. Five people out of 175 checked 'No valid reasons! I'm going to try it'. I know this isn't a representative national sample. But if it were -- and all five actually follow through -- we would be doubling bike commuting, from 2% to 4% of all work commutes, amongst those polled. That's huge!