I'm a longtime NYer who recently moved to SF. for the past 10 years I've commuted by running each way, ~3-5 miles each way. plenty of experience with bikes and cars in urban areas.

Biking on the sidewalk is WAY more common in SF than in NYC, especially in manhattan. In SF, there seems to be a few main reasons:

1 - Biking on the street would clearly be unsafe. An example here is 3rd st between portrero and soma.

2 - Biking on the sidewalk on the block where you are stopping. These are people that usually bike on the street, but pull onto the sidewalk when they are leaving/entering a building. I understand this, but wish it wasn't so common.

3 - ignorance of, or just not caring about, biking rules and conventions.

It's easy to assume that #3 is always the case and get angry about it, but it's frequently #1 or #2 and I do think some empathy is called for.

I'm curious to hear more about your commute. I live ~3 miles from work, and would love to run there, but there isn't a good way for me to store my towel, a change of clothing, etc at work, and it doesn't seem feasible to carry all of this in a backpack. We do have showers, but they don't have overnight storage.

Sure. The basic answer is that I use a good running backpack and it's easy for me to carry all that stuff. When I first started, I was sparring (boxing) in the morning before work, so I used a eagle creek overnight hiking pack. it was bulky but not too bad for a 3 mile run.

Once I stopped sparring in the morning, I switched to a Black Diamond Dart. Easy to run with, and ample room for all the stuff you mentioned.

I now use a super light pack, and only pack my lunch, pants/shirt/socks/underwear. I live in SF, and generally don't shower unless I get really sweaty. Some people find this gross in theory but I don't, people in NYC get sweaty as hell walking from the subway to work in the summer in their regular clothes, so I've never really seen the difference.

Two big things I do come to mind: I never take my laptop to/from work everyday. I also keep dress shoes at work under my desk.

I do #2 every day because my apartment building doesn't have a curb cut anywhere near its front entrance. Simple fixes like this would improve lives not just for cyclists but also for the handicapped.

When I'm on the sidewalk, however, I'm only going at a brisk walking pace when pedestrians are present.

> I'm a longtime NYer who recently moved to SF.

on HN is there seriously only two places to live in the US?

I don't know about HN, but, I moved to NYC after college because I'm a jazz musician, and NYC is that jazz capital of the world. I've also always worked a day job as a software engineer.

moved to SF last year for work.

Both NYC and SF have a relatively high concentration of tech folks, which is probably a lot of the HN readership.

> Where do you live? I'm in Manhattan, and people rarely cycle on the sidewalk here.

NYPD ticket like crazy for sidewalk biking. Bay Area cops in the cities don’t really ticket for ‘quality of life’ crimes (or even blatant things like busting out car windows and such).

My understanding is that NYPD stopped going after frivolous violations after the Eric Garner incident a few years ago. I myself was ticketed ($40) once for wearing headphones on both ears, but I haven't seen cops enforcing such rules recently.