After six and a half years of remote work, my employer has decided that we should all return to the office. Feelings about that aside, I have to solve the problem of transportation.
We downsized a bit during my time working at home, to a single car. My wife’s piano studio schedule has her working from 3 - 7 pm most weekdays. With parking on campus at the University a bit of a nightmare, any kind of drop off and pick up scheme won’t work most days. So I need transportation.
Either a car or an eScooter or a motorcycle. While a scooter or motorcycle is attractive, riding to work introduces weather as a concern.
Enter AI. I asked Claude for a count of work days in the past 12 months, that were above freezing and had no rain at 7 am or 4 pm. Claude wasn’t able to directly provide an answer, but it did produce a Python script that queries a public database of historical weather data.
Python is a mess, between python and python3 and the associated pip installers. So I asked for a Bash version. The Bash script worked the first time.
Out of 262 week days checked over the past 12 months, there were 180 eScooter friendly days. Roughly 68%. Not too bad all things considered.
More Claude queries gave me a list of eScooters with both the roundtrip range, and hill climbing abilities. My commute would have a 400 foot elevation drop plus a 200 foot climb going to work, and the reverse of that coming home. My next project will be to research eScooters.