Casual Fridays: How to reduce your commute by 89% - 20% of the time

November 2, 7:54 AMLA Traffic and Transportation ExaminerDavid Salper

Previous

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the LA Traffic and Transportation Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Last Friday I traveled from my apartment in Santa Monica to my job in Burbank. It took me 5 minutes. That's right. I could have rollerbladed.

A little background: I work for an Internet-industry company with offices in Burbank and Santa Monica, among other cities.  But these two offices represent two separate divisions: The work I have done in the Valley office for 7 years is unrelated to the work they do just down the block from my living room. It's been a dilemma, a quandary, and a tough nut to crack: How do I bring work and life together more holistically, across 24 miles and one serious mountain range? 

I've tried carpooling and vanpooling to reduce my carbon footprint and reducing my stress, and they've served those purposes...serviceably.  But both missed the mark on one point: I want the city I live in and the city I work in to meet for drinks, to connect.  And driving 48 miles round trip on freeways -- whether in a hybrid, or in a carpool or vanpool -- does nothing to serve my need for locality.    The way I GET to work is more important than how far it is in calculating how well "job fits world".

Becoming a Communter

The way to tie home and work together is to bring to life the space between the two.  This requires becoming a communter -- using my trip to and from office to commune with the urban environment and feed my need for city, door to door.   I want to walk to the bus or the train, or straight to the damn office, all the while interacting with the people and streetscapes and architecture and infrastructure that are the city's heartbeat.  Then, my commute can become an offering: "Here, David, here's the city you live in -- bounce off its atoms for a little while."  For me, a morning communte is a civic cup of coffee; the trip back a glass of wine.

So how do I travel to Burbank in 5 minutes? Lacking a reasonable bus or train route from Santa Monica to Burbank, my only choice was to use the Santa Monca office as a proxy for Burbank -- an option available on Fridays, when many employees in the SM office work from home (oddly, my techy Internet company, like many companies, generally discourages work-from-home and work-from-satellite office).  Now, Fridays are a day for me to work globally and locally, riding my bike to the office, or hopping on the Big Blue Bus, and bringing my city with me to my desk.