Cycling
By the time I had been riding to the train and from the train to work for about a month, I already felt like I had enough thought material to last a good while, and after doing a lot more cycling over the last two years, I've learned some new things, but the chief feelings are still the same.
Cycling around here isn't awful in terms of motorists and traffic, and is great in many other ways, but it has certain significant lacks.
People are pretty courteous most of the time, and I feel like most people are aware that cyclists have a right to the road and are patient about allowing me to ride where I need to ride. However, there are always the few that prove that they don't understand this. Taxi drivers who enter the bike lane without warning and people yelling at me to get off the road, for example. Plenty more are just oblivious, chatting on cell phones, mostly, or just plain not paying attention.
Bikes on Caltrain
Taking my bike on Caltrain is both good and bad. On the one hand, it saves me about 45 minutes a day and flexes my schedule by making more trains accessible to me. I ride to and from the Mountain View station, which is a little farther, but has many more trains stopping at it. (My route is recorded on Bikely.com, if that sort of thing interests you.) I get more heart-rate raising exercise, although it's shorter in duration. And it's a nice ride mostly.
On the other hand, the trains are really crowded with bikes. Loading can be a huge hassle and your bike will get scratched. And I've a few times seen people not allowed on because of a full car. This is not that frequent except on certain trains at certain stations, but it does happen and can be a pain. I wish they had another bike car per train, but I understand that they have to deal with capacity issues for normal passengers too. I was on the Technical Advisory Group for the Caltrain Bike Master Plan that should be publicly presented fairly soon and there was lots of discussion about the challenges and ways to handle them. Some of it is about choices, too -- secure ways to leave bikes at stations, or alternate onward transit arrangements. I have a choice about whether to bring my bike on board, and I have to decide if the occasional hassle is worth it.
Physically, manhandling a bike up onto the train can be a challenge. Then I have to muck around with finding a place to attach it. Caltrain uses a fairly space-efficient but annoying system of stacking four bikes together, attached to a frame by bungee cord, with eight of these attachments per old-style gallery car (only four per new Bombardier car -- one reason I'm not a fan of those, even though they're much easier to board). This necessitates having the last-off bikes on the outside, which is impossible to achieve since people are always getting on and off at different points. So a lot of shuffling has to occur, which eats into my sitting time. And the train ride home is really short since it's the bullet that goes direct to Menlo Park, no stops at San Antonio, Cal Ave, or Palo Alto. So I never get much done on the train anymore.
Sometimes I do a pure riding commute instead. It's taken me a while to compass routinely riding my 9.5-mile route, but it's fundamentally a pleasant route (half of it down the Palo Alto Bryant Bike Boulevard, a paradise for cyclists) and is a great way to get a proper workout.
Bikes and Cars
Rare is the day when I don't see someone acting like an idiot on the street -- both cyclists and motorists, I'm sad to say.
The most common mistake I see drivers make is not executing the right-turn maneuver correctly when there's a bike lane. Bike lanes are helpfully striped with dotted lines at intersections to indicate that you can, and in fact MUST, merge into them to turn. Do people pay the slightest bit of attiontion to this? Not usually. So I have to be very vigilant about people potentially turning right as I try to go straight. Do me a favor: don't do this. Check the bike lane and merge carefully into it before turning right.
The most frequent mistake I see from cyclists is riding on sidewalks and in crosswalks. Riding on the sidewalk is illegal in both San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, for the good reason that it's dangerous to both cyclists and pedestrians. Pedestrians are slow and unpredictable, especially children. And there is a great deal of potential for right-of-way conflict in intersections. Drivers aren't looking for cyclists on the sidewalk.
These dangers can be mitigated by riding slowly and only on wide sidewalks, passing carefully and notifying people before you pass, yielding right-of-way to pedestrians, and stopping to look before entering intersections. But they rarely are mitigated, so I remain opposed to this behavior. You are a vehicle according to California law. Please, take a cycle-safety course and learn to ride safely in accordance with the law.
On a related subject, something else I see nearly every day: cyclists riding on the Caltrain platform, which is NOT PERMITTED. Frankly, I would prefer not to either experience or see what would happen if you fell or hit someone at the wrong time. Every argument for not riding on the sidewalk goes 50 times more. A train may not be able to stop for HALF A MILE after seeing an obstacle. This usually means you can't even see the train coming before it's too dangerous to be on the tracks. Plus, there is no point. The platform is 100 feet long. Put your lazy feet on the ground and WALK THE BIKE.
Other things that make me shake my head and sigh include: cycling with headphones, cycling the wrong way in the bike lane, pedestrians walking in the bike lane where alternatives are available, people honking at me from behind, people passing too close (three feet, please), and, the biggie, cyclists running stop signs and red lights. Why is it not obvious to people that the world will not work properly if they insist on using roads without following very basic laws like going the right way and obeying traffic signs and signals?
Lately I've been doing some of my riding on Central Expressway, where there is only a paved shoulder frequently interrupted by merge lanes, no curb lane or bike lane, and there's no way you can ride in the traffic lanes as the speed is just too high (50 mph). I've had one case where I didn't feel safe, due to a combination of my own not quite seeing, and a person driving too fast and recklessly. But it's been okay. I'm still learning to manage the merge lanes. My advice for others trying it would be to always, always look carefully. On out-merges, move across to just outside the outer continuing lane as soon as it's safe to do so. On in-merges, move out to the new shoulder as soon as it's safe. Merging for left turns is often possible, but it's good to reserve the possibility of dismounting and using the crosswalk or making a hook turn (cyclist's left) by going across the intersection, stopping and turning 90 degrees to wait for the other light. I've gotten more comfortable with traffic cycling over time. It does take a while.
As with transit, despite any hassles I do love to ride my bike. I like going a little fast (safely, of course) on it, I like the breeze, I like the smooth feeling of gliding over the road. The bike is a wonderful machine for converting human energy into transit, and one that any person can basically understand (much less complicated than a car). So wonderful that I've been doing a lot of recreational cycling.