>- What's your general fitness level? A 5 mile (8 km) ride for someone moderately fit should be only 20 minutes or so, assuming it's not a mountain road < g > , without working up much of a sweat (unless it's really hot). It's not really enough to improve your general fitness level, but it's certainly better than nothing

#define fitness_level ?

Back home I pedaled everywhere, anytime. The distance to work was about 5km at most, usually 2-3, but then the work often took me to various places around town, and of course I didn't take the car if I didn't have to. Specially with the river meandering through town, a few pedestrian bridges in some places made it a dilemma of 10 minutes on bicycle vs 20 minutes in a car.

So my fitness level wasn't anywhere - I probably couldn't run 100m at all, I'd be short of breath by climbing three flights of stairs, but OTOH I could shovel gravel all day with just short breaks (all of this was tried and established in practice ;).

>With such a short distance, and presumably mostly nice weather in LA I'd look real hard at biking it. Bias disclosure - I'm a long-time roadie.

Did you ride on snow and ice? Seeing that Vancouver is only four degrees more north than my hometown, compensated with the vicinity of the coast, you should be getting about the same amount of the white. Sometimes I'd ride back from school staff meetings as late as 22:30 in January, and I was the king of the road. Not a car in sight :).