I used to commute to Victoria (about 8 or 9 miles) and after a few years of continuous route refinement managed to get a pretty good (and fairly safe) route (it was not at all obvious to find). Agree that everyone benefits if more people commute to work by bike, but there are still lots of safety concerns (mostly involving lorries), and some require political will to change.

One of the things I used to find annoying was carrying my bike down the stairs in the morning. Lewisham council is doing something about the difficulties of storing bikes securely now - see this link for more details.