[cayblood]

There is an easy solution to this that has been around for a long time. What most people do is park on the outskirts of town, where there tend to be lots of park and ride lots, then take public transit downtown.

So, in your case, you drive your car until you get to the outskirts of whatever large metropolitan area you are visiting, then take public transit.

When we lived in the UK, we frequently drove to a car park near the Hammersmith Station and then took the tube from there to central London.

[benatkin]

In the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a dearth of reserved parking at the BART Park n Rides. You can show up to the Park n Ride super early and pay the daily rate for a spot, and you can get on a long waiting list (sometimes more than a year long) to purchase monthly parking (still expensive, but not as bad as daily parking). There is also likelihood of getting stuck in traffic on the way to parking lots. There's no great option, just a choice between different last-mile options with pros and cons, including driving a car, driving a motorcycle, bicycles (electric and otherwise), electric scooters and skateboards, Uber/Lyft, and shuttles (I used Emery Go Round a fair bit). All have to deal with traffic to get to the park-n-rides. The cars and busses have to go single-file in their lanes, but others can go past them. Unlike most other states, California allows motorcycles to split lanes. http://lanesplittingislegal.com/

My favorites were taking the Emery-Go-Round while I was living in Emeryville, and walking two miles each way every single day while I was living in Redwood City while listening to podcasts/audiobooks.

[Karrot_Kream]

It's not hard to find parking in BART stations at the ends of the line. The problem is, people want to use as little public transportation as possible, so parking lots fill up in a spoke like fashion from the downtown SF area.

[benatkin]

If you live in the suburbs but don't live at the end of the line, it's going to be unpalatable to drive all the way to the end of the line. The gap between stations near the end of the line can be big, too. It's about 10 miles from Orinda to Concord. Orinda seemed like it would be hard to find parking. Walnut Creek wasn't bad though. Point taken though. The tone of the article seemed to be about the lifestyle of some place like Liverpool or Vallejo, which might have a decent park and ride situation (I think it would be a supercommute and traffic would be bad, so that wouldn't be a pleasant commute overall).

By the way some of the hardest commuting problems to solve are couples or people who otherwise really want to live together who have jobs at different parts of the Bay Area. They could be making a combined $400K but no amount of money will make their commute reasonable. I'm surprised telepresence robots like AnyBots haven't gained more traction.