Here’s another post from Washtenaw County employee Stacy Ebron about the Commuter Challenge:

Thank goodness for the Commuter Challenge. I started biking to work last summer and continued through the fall.  I’ll admit the winter months were challenging and I finally decided in early December that winter biking in Michigan was too much for me.

The Commuter Challenge gave me the motivation I needed to dust off my bike again and resume biking to work.  On days when the weather is not cooperative, I decided to catch the bus.

This month, I even learned how to put my bike on the bus for days when biking to work was not practical/convenient, but biking from work was.  What I learned from this experience is that taking the bus is more convenient than I thought.  Even on days when I have to travel from work to visit a client site, I have found that for some locations, I can catch the bus with my bike and then bike home the client site.

I still wish the bus came more frequently, but I realized that the bus ride really only adds about 10 minutes to my regular commute to work.  The savings on gas, the benefit to my personal health and to the health of the environment are definitely worth the 10 extra minutes.

Thanks for the challenge I needed to discover that there are even more alternatives to driving to work than I had considered.