By Reed Parsell
CT News editor
I work for Caltrans and I do not like to drive. Can you relate? We do, after all, work for a state agency that touts sustainability. There is no reason to hide your fondness for walking, biking or taking public transportation. In fact, CT News would like to share some of your work-related intermodal wanderings. Please email your leave-the-car-at-home-or-in-the-lot tales to Reed.Parsell@dot.ca.gov. Here’s an example:
At 5 p.m. on a recent weekday, I had to get from Point A (the District 12 Traffic Management Center in Irvine) to Point B (a hotel in Santa Ana). Driving between the two sites, which are 11 miles apart, at that rush-hour time would have taken about 25 minutes.
I didn’t have a car, didn’t want to bum a ride with colleagues, and don’t fraternize with the kids (Uber and Lyft) or their grandpa (taxis). After giving it more thought than most people would consider sane, I scrapped the idea of walking the whole way. Instead, I opted for public transportation.
The view from the back of Bus No. 86 between Irvine and Santa Ana is nothing special, but it’s probably more interesting than what you would see from behind the wheel of a private car.
In Orange County, as far as I can tell, that means riding a bus. The mass-transit directions given by Apple Maps and Google Maps apps, perhaps, would help me find my way.
As impressive as those smartphone apps are, however, neither one was quick-witted enough to tell me that the quickest suggested route – a walk to a bus to a second bus to a third bus and then more walking, for a total of 1 hour and 20 minutes – was not viable that evening. The second bus either had arrived too early (which seems unlikely) or was incredibly late (I waited for 30 minutes at the stop and saw no sign of it and gave up). It was after 6 p.m. and I was still 10 miles from the hotel.
This time, the maps apps came through by pointing me toward Bus 86, operated (as were the earlier suggested buses) by the Orange County Transportation Authority. I walked 15 minutes to its stop at Irvine Center Drive and Alton Parkway, waited another half-hour and boarded. Forty-five minutes later – it would have been 40 minutes had the bus driver not veered off the route and been forced to make a U-turn on a side street, which was a unique and weird moment in my long history of riding public buses – I disembarked near the corner of Main Street and Sunflower Avenue.
From there, it was a mere 13-minute walk to the hotel. I keyed into my room at 7:35 p.m. Total cost: $4.
I repeated the walk-Bus 86-walk route three more times between the two sites. Each trip entailed about 50 minutes of walking, and the commute was about an hour and a half one-way. Not horrible, but not for the hurried nor for the faint of foot.
A few weeks later, I had to get from Caltrans headquarters in downtown Sacramento to the construction field office in Hayward. Again, car travel (three hours and 30 minutes round trip) did not interest me. So I walked (12 minutes) to Sacramento Regional Transit District Bus 30; rode it (17 minutes) to the train station; walked (10 minutes) to the train platform; boarded (five minutes before departure) Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor; rode (86 minutes) to Richmond; walked to the BART station entrance, bought a ticket and waited (10 minutes all together) to board the Warm Springs/South Fremont line and ride (49 minutes) to the Hayward BART station; then walked (35 minutes) to the field office. I conducted an interview, then repeated the commute in reverse.
For those of you keeping score, that’s a round-trip commute of seven hours and 18 minutes. Total cost: $68. And I was able to get work done on Amtrak and the train.
Although at this rate I’ll soon need to invest in another pair of shoes.