Places: My Apartment

I live on the edge of Downtown Silver Spring, at Colesville Road and Spring Street. I just signed the lease for a third year at Colesville Towers with my roommate, a friend from high school who works in PG County. The location works well for us: she has a 20-25 minute commute east, and I have a 20-30 minute commute west. There are few other places I think we could live together and still have manageable commute times.

While I don't think it was ever her intention to use public transit to get to work, it definitely was for me. For the first week or so I took the bus, the Q2, from the Silver Spring Metro to the Rockville Metro. Shortly thereafter however, the bus stops were relocated all over Downtown Silver Spring (OK - they were moved to Dixon, Bonifant, and Wayne - but to someone who had lived in Silver Spring for all of 10 days, it left me slightly disoriented) to allow for construction to begin on the Silver Spring Transit Center. That was enough for me to get in my car and tolerate the gauntlet of red lights down Viers Mill, until I figured out that, despite my assumption to the contrary, it was actually quicker to take the Beltway to 270 to get to Rockville.

Living in Silver Spring, I have several options for getting to Rockville Town Center where my office is located. I have the recently-improved Q line if I want to use Metro Bus, at a cost of $1.50 (one way) and a door-to-door travel time of 55 minutes, give or take. Other than driving, I see this as the quickest way to work.

Another (laughable) option is taking the Red Line. This trip, door-to-door, has a travel time of 70 minutes, give or take, and an unbelievable cost of $5.20. It sounds ridiculous to imagine a daily commute costing $10.40 - and obviously the Red Line was not designed for east-west travel across Montgomery County. East-west travel across MoCo? That's a line of a different color (hopefully).

Probably the most likely option for me, which requires a much longer commute time but has other benefits as well, is using RideOn. RideOn does not have a route that travels all the way from Silver Spring to Rockville - the best I can do is Silver Spring to Twinbrook Metro. I could easily run to fill in the missing piece of this route - it's a distance of 2.4 miles. Since running is a part of my (almost) daily routine anyway, it makes sense to me to incorporate it into my commute to work. The best part of this option? While it's got a travel time of 85 minutes, approximately, the cost is $0 - County employees are fortunate enough to enjoy free RideOn service. Opportunities for dollar savings are a major motivating factor for me in taking on this endeavor, and I'll have more on that, as well as the logistical considerations like showering at work, in later posts.