Can’t spell ‘transition’ without ‘transit’

After a few years of hardly any work-related travel (with
occasional bursts of driving activity down the Taconic), I’m suddenly a
bag-dragging road warrior. Except I hate the road and my cars are both above
the magic 100,000 mile mark (my first ever to make it that far with severe
electrical or psychological crises), so in fact I’ve become more of a rail
warrior. All of a sudden, I’m once again all about the public transit.

The new job, as close as it is, is still a longer commute
than my home office was. It requires me to shave every day, too, which is much
more of a sacrifice than the short commute to downtown. However, having left
the State system for a number of years, a parking spot downtown is not in the
cards. Pending layoffs won’t do it – people would have to die in droves before
I could move up the parking queue, and I’m out of town so much that I probably
wouldn’t pay for parking if I could get it. So that puts me back on the bus.

I got around by city bus for years in Syracuse, and kept that
up when I moved to Albany. Even across the river, our house is two blocks from
a bus stop. But the first time I had to stand around downtown Albany with a
vomiting baby, waiting for a rare mid-day bus to carry me back to Rensselaer
County, that was pretty much the end of public transit for my commute Between
that and a job that knew no regular hours, the bus just didn’t work.

Now it does. And so does the train to Wilmington. And the
Wilmington Trolley. And the train to Philadelphia. And the subway, and the Norristown
High Speed Line. And hotel shuttles. And good old-fashioned walking. Yes, I’m
beholden to the vagaries of Amtrak and the likelihood of hot track action, but
the delays are a lot less frequent than they are driving the Thruway or I-95.

And when you’re not driving, you really get to see things. People, buildings, architectural details, the splendor of the Hudson river, the
surprising persistence of the Meadowlands, the awful ass-end of industrial New
Jersey and Delaware. Everything from unspeakable beauty to razor wire and
graffiti.

I want to add the bike to my commuting habits, but the need
to drag my laptop and clothes and lunch and everything else is proving to be a
drag on my initiative, as desperately as I need the miles. All this traveling
is cutting seriously into wheel time, and something must be done, but I need
big depanniers and the will to haul them up the hills at a modest pace that won’t
leave me arriving at work bathed in sweat. (My last job had both a secure bike
lockup AND showers. I was spoiled.)

So about the only way I’m not getting around these days, at
least for work purposes, is by car. I’m pretty pleased with that. (Of course,
as I write that, the train is coming to a slow crawl that will give me plenty
of time to ponder the mightiness of the Hudson and how long it would take me to
paddle up it from here to home.)