When I got to Chapel Hill, here’s what I knew about commuting:  if you wanted to get somewhere, you went outside, got in your own car by yourself, and drove to where you needed to be.  At one job, we could walk to lunch places in the Strip District in Pittsburgh but it was pretty impossible to walk 10 miles to work, uphill both ways, in a town that only sees the sun 3 months of the year.  I had not taken a public bus since middle school when we would take the 55M from school to the mall.  Thankfully, my friend Dave taught me how to ride the bus during our first week of work last summer.  Although I learned how to ride a bike when I was younger, I could count the number of times on one hand that I had been on one in the past 10 years and had most certainly never used a bike for transportation instead of recreation. Continue reading →