I'm writing this in English to see if anyone living in S.F. Bay Area may have comments/suggestions. I screwed blog entry, English page was published first, but overrided with Japanese. Hence, I reposting this.

I do business trip to US/San Francisco Bay Area at least once a year those days. And always rented car without thinking hard, since I thought without car are quite hard to get around the area. However, I also knew some of Japanese employee did survive without car. Now, today, our company has campaign which something to do with ECO, and I have being thinking about ECO responsibility and global warming myself (but I supposed, I was not thinking hard enough). Also, I do like bicycle riding. Therefore, I decided how I can manage my trip without car as much as possible. I will confess that by end of day, I don't think it was much of ECO, but just tried. Following are what I did or happened after I arrived at SFO airport.

• First, I was carrying this much of the staff,
  
  I never really fill up this suite case on route from Tokyo but I use it to make sure all my souvenir will fit on return (mostly wine and peet's coffee).
• 7:30 Arrived at SFO from Narita.
• 8:30 Got out from custom, getting into the BART
  
  station. Getting into the BART's platform home was easy. I can continue to use cart and elevator up until ticket gate of BART station. Dragging my suite case and going down by escalator was also easy. Buying ticket was also easy enough to figure out.
  
  However, I wasn't able to figure out which platform I should awaiting for the train. I was looking up at first platform I was in, especially electric board, but was not able to find direction of the train. Moving around, and finally I saw the writing on pillar said "Millbrae" and I still had about 15 minutes to wait.
  
  
• 8:45 Arrived at Millbrae BART station, and moving into CalTrain
  
  station. BART and CalTrain station are almost like within same station, you go up on escalator, and move to next platform/escalator and that it. I have to think while to see how to buy a ticket (it was zone based pricing), and again, I had little trouble figuring out which platform to wait, and almost missed train. Since this was weekend (Sunday), missing one train mean wait for one hour. I ran (was not easy with my heavy suite case). This was about an one hour ride to Mountain View station.
• 10:15 Arrived at Mountain View CalTrain station, and moving to the Lightrail station. I was bit confused to find the LightRail station. Mountain View was edge/start of one of Lightrail track, I thought it should be easy to find. Waisted few minutes, go back and force, found out it was at north end of CalTrain station. Straggling with ticket (did not accept bill, have to use other machine), I was able to hop into the Lightrail train just in time (this is why I did not/forgot to take picture from outside of train).
• 11:30 Arrived at Gish LightRail station. From here, it was walking distance to the hotel.

After check in to the hotel and settled in, I was planned to go back ride the train, and goes to the bicycle rental shop at Palo Alto. However, my colleague who traveled on same airplane did not had much of plan for afternoon, they gave me ride to bicycle rental shop. Since I has wish to buy wine shipping box which bit hard to do without car, I was grad to accept their offer (but hey what happened to the ECO?). After eating lunch, and finish buying shipping box, I was at Bike connection. Since this time around was off season for them, I did not made reservation. Sure enough quite few road bike was available, I have got Felt 75

(not sure which year, specification was looks similar) which was better than I was expected. I road about half hour around the Palo Alto area, then head back to hotel which I believe took me little less than one and half hour. I brought my GPS with me, but I have not yet analyze the track data. With this bike, I went office for all weekday including two day at Menlo Park. Going to Santa Clara office from hotel was easy, something like 15 minutes, but going to Menlo Park was bit tough, it took me about one and half hour (I was really grad that we have shower at our US offices). Worst was return at night (past 17:30). Direction wasn't problem since I had GPS, but some part of the road was not lit at all. And my bike's light wasn't bright enough to see the road clearly. Fortunately, I was able to back at hotel safely each day I'll write another one more focused on bicycle alone later (after I was able to analyze track data from GPS, well, this is first time I used GPS).

Taking about ECO. I was successful at not using rental car for most of the my transportation needs. However, I cheated for dinner (and weekend which I went Napa with rental car). Again, my colleague had rental car, they gave me ride to go restaurant for dinner each day. I guess, I could survive without those ride with colleague, but I would have to give up going to my favorite restaurant in this area (such as fish market and/or Birk's). In the end, I may show how to do ECO trip in spirit, but wasn't that much good I did (since in theory, I could ride colleague's car all along).

All of picture for this topic:

November_2007_SFBay_ECO_trip