So today I tried commuting
via Harrison and dang if it wasn't extremely easy both ways. It's pretty much flat (it manages to miss all the hills entirely). The way to work took 20 minutes (even though I missed the turn onto Division and had to loop in an extra couple of blocks), and the way home took around 25-30 (I forgot to check my start time but I think I left work around 6:50 and I got home at 7:15... there is a gentle incline pretty much the whole way that accounts for the 5-10-minute difference).
A really nice thing about Harrison is that there's a bike path for pretty much the whole distance there, and Division and Townsend are both wide and have bike-friendly affordances. Plus, Mission and 24th are both pretty slow-moving so I have no trouble keeping up with traffic. Harrison does have a lot of stop signs, though, and most bicyclists just breeze through them (on the way down this morning I stopped which turned out to be even more confusing and dangerous due to other cyclists in the bike lane and drivers who didn't know what to do about different cyclists doing things differently), so on the way home I took the middle (if illegal) ground of slowing down on my approach and only stopping if someone else (car, pedestrian, or other cyclist) was ready to cross. That way worked out pretty well.
Also, strictly speaking a lot of the stop signs on the way to work don't quite apply to the bike lane, since they're three-way stops and there's no way for traffic to cross the bike lane's path, and in those cases the bike lane's marker extends through the whole intersection (but I hadn't encountered this situation before so I was a bit confused). Although when going by the Best Buy it's a bit strange because it's legally a 3-way intersection but then the driveway to Best Buy's parking lot makes for a fourth way, but the bike lane marker extends past the driveway too. That's one of those weird legal gray areas which I really have no idea what's the appropriate response, especially since there is the potential for cross traffic but it's not onto a street.
Oh, and no arguments or stressy bits today, even when I almost hit a dog which darted out into the crosswalk in front of me this morning. ("Fortunately" the owner was completely clueless and she didn't see me coming or nearly hit her either, as she was messing with her phone...)
Oh, also, at the end of the day, when I did get home, hauling my bike up the stairs wasn't a problem at all. Whee! And i didn't even need my inhaler today!