Public Transportation
Christian Perrier blogs about how he uses public transportation to go to work, how that works well, and how that has positively affected his Debian productivity. Personally, I couldn't agree more. I've graduated from school in 2001; and the only time when I commuted to work by car was when I worked at template, where I had a company car because I had to make customer visits.
Today, as an entrepreneur, I do everything by public transportation. It is my intention to, eventually, make sure I have a car because doing customer visits by public transportation isn't easy; but it's not impossible, either; you just need to make sure you're prepared.
If I have an appointment at a customer, what I usually do is to go to the de lijn website, of the flemish public transportation company that handles buses and trams; they have a schedule online, and a route planner that allows me to do much of what Google Maps does for cars, but then for public transportation—including trains. If I do that on time (that is, earlier than half an hour or so before the appointment), I hardly ever have problems reaching my destination in time.
Of course there are days when the system fails, and I'm stuck in a train station for longer than I'd like; but these are the exception, not the rule, especially outside rush hour. And like Christian mentions, the absense of having to pay attention to the road while commuting is a real bonus, in that it allows you to actually get some work done. Or sleep, if it's been a short night. Or look outside the window, if you have nothing better to do. Or hack.
In fact, at DebConf7 in Edinburgh, I had a little discussion with Ian Jackson about how the train provides the perfect environment for hacking: nobody around to disturb you (except, occasionally, people to check your tickets, but you can just put your ticket in plain view all the time and they'll be happy without you getting out of deep hack mode), and the view out the window is just perfect to stay concentrated: no still image to get distracted by, but nothing boring either. We theorized that it'd be nice if you could just go to the train station and state "I need a ticket. The destination isn't important, but I want to be waiting as little as possible and end up here again in about 2 hours". The only problem with that, of course, is that train rides aren't free, and that office rent is much more affordable...
I hate public transportation. It makes me feel depressed. It makes me lose precious time, getting to the station or the bus stop, waiting for the train or bus... It makes me nervous, I hate wasting time like that.
Another reason I hate public transportation is the way older people seem to think the bus belongs to them. They'll start whispering behind your back if you even think about sitting down... even if the bus is empty or you're walking on crutches.
If the company can't provide a car, It will have to do without my skills.
If you need a car, then you don't necessarily need to own one. We use commercial car sharing trough Cambio.be (they have cars in major Belgian and German cities), and if you don't use them often, it's very cheap.
Actually, it's a kind of car renting, but it's way more practical than the usual renting agency.
When I wrote the last hundred pages of my Master's thesis back in 1999, I didn't have a laptop yet (at least not one with a decent battery), and I had my days divided by two: In the morning, I rode the train to anywhere, and dictated new text on tape, and in the afternoon, I typed the text.
Worked just fine, for the reasons you stated in the blog entry.