Finding Ann Arbor’s informal neighborhood workplaces

I've been taking a mid-day trip from my downtown office to work for a while in one of the many places in our neighborhoods where you can sit down with a laptop and a cup of coffee and get on the network.

The strategy is to find a destination that's a short enough walk or bus trip that I don't take too much out of the day traveling, and far enough away that it feels like another neighborhood and not just a corner of downtown. Armed with only a laptop computer, a power cord, and a phone, I'm looking at informal working places in our neighborhoods.

Bus rides in the very middle of the day are much less crowded than rush hour commutes. Some routes make frequent stops to drop off and pick up one person at a time on neighborhood corners, but others on more express routes zoom across town without needing to stop much.

It's tremendously convenient to have a bus system at my disposal only a block from the office with a bus heading out to all corners of town at my usual outbound time of 11:48 a.m. Nearly every route will bring you to a new lunch spot within 15 or 20 minutes, but getting back can be trickier and it helps to pay very close attention to online bus arrival times, especially for routes that only go once an hour.

The tremendous number of students in town who are always on the lookout for study space generates both demand and supply for the spot where you can sit with a cup of coffee and a laptop for an hour or two and be quietly and industriously busy. When I first got involved in the commercialization of the Internet at a small company called MSEN back in the early 1990s, I had no idea that coffee and computer networks went so closely together; had I known then what I know now, I would have installed cafe tables in the room next to the modems.

So far my journeys have taken me to coffee shops, branch libraries, laptop-friendly restaurants, and the Ann Arbor Municipal Airport. You might not think of the airport as a free WiFi zone, but it is, with wireless Internet services available from airport services operator Solo Aviation. I elected not to touch the aviation-grade coffee, but instead spent 2 hours there listening to a pilot talk about his solo trans-Atlantic flights and watching the runway — all of which brought back memories of sitting in airports waiting for a plane. The airport is just far enough away from the nearest city bus route to make it impractical for a casual telecommute; it's a Â½-mile hike along Airport Boulevard from State Street to the nearest bus stop.

The goal, so much as any project needs a goal, is to take every bus in the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority and University of Michigan systems and to stop along the route to spend time in 1 of the neighborhood places where laptops are a typical sight. Let me know if there's a favorite study spot in your neighborhood and I'll make a point to stop in.

Edward Vielmetti rides the bus for AnnArbor.com. Contact him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com and look for his reports at AnnArbor.com/vielmetti