REVENGE OF THE SUPERCOMMUTERS : It’s a bicycle. It’s a pair of roller-blades. It’s an electric car. For some, transportation to work is anything but a gas-guzzling auto.

Joe Baker was hurrying in to work one morning when a flat tire brought him to a standstill. He fixed it, only to get another flat a mile later. He fixed that one, too. Four miles later came his third flat tire.

That was the same morning he had to deal with loose brakes, a wobbly wheel and a dog that wouldn’t quit chasing him.

Then there was the goofball who drove by while Baker was bent over by the curb fixing flat No. 2.

“He leaned out of the window and yelled, ‘Oh, you crashed! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” said Baker, doing an impression of the guy’s cackle.

And you thought you had a lousy commute. Try it on a bicycle.

For Baker, a researcher at the Rockwell Science Center in Thousand Oaks, going to work is work. He pedals from his private park-and-ride spot in Agoura Hills every morning, a distance of about 10 miles.

In return for putting up with flats and flakes, Baker gets an $85 quarterly bonus from Rockwell plus free fruit and juice at the company canteen.

Ventura County firms love employees like Baker, who help them meet tough clean-air mandates imposed by the county Air Pollution Control District. Any firm that has at least 50 employees in one location must promote alternatives to the one-person, one-car routine that is a major contributor to the county’s poor air.

Most companies are happy just to get their workers into car- and van-pools. The city of Thousand Oaks--and soon Ventura County government--has opted for a four-day work week to, among other things, reduce the number of commutes made by employees.

But for a handful of other workers like Baker, commuting isn’t a commonplace event anymore. It’s an adventure.

Here are three of them, all working for different employers and strangers to each other, for whom the drive-time grind is no longer just a job. What ties them together, though, is that each has adopted a peculiar and pollution-free way of beating the traffic. Call them the supercommuters.

Last summer Baker was so gung-ho that he bicycled all 20 miles from his home in Canoga Park, in the west San Fernando Valley, to work--or back. He would do one leg by bike and the return leg by car, into which he would load the bicycle. He would reverse the pattern the following day. The bicycling part took an hour and forty-five minutes.

“I thought I’d get in pretty good shape,” he said. But his time never seemed to get shorter, and he never seemed to arrive any less tired.

So Baker struck a compromise with himself. Now he drives to Agoura Hills, leaves his car in a safe spot and cycles the rest of the way in.

It’s a little more than halfway in, so he now spends only 80 minutes a day on his bike, 40 minutes before and 40 minutes after work.

Still, the ride is taxing. When he pulled into the parking lot of the Science Center a little before 8 a.m. one recent day, Baker clipped on his security badge with a photo in which he looked serious and dignified in dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. In the flesh he was pullover-clad, sweat-drenched and breathing hard.

He had just winged past high school students on Thousand Oaks Boulevard, cut through the early morning mail call at the Thousand Oaks Post Office, bobbed across the rolling terrain of Hillcrest Drive and finally cut onto the Science Center’s hilly campus in Lynn Ranch.

He had no flats and encountered no hostile dogs. The only annoyance was a woman in a Ford Fiesta who refused to let a mere bicycle keep her from turning right on red and squeezed perilously close to Baker before swinging around him.

Later, Baker shrugged off the encounter, which looked fairly close to a reporter following him. “I forget how polite people are around here,” he said. “It’s a lot tougher riding downtown.”

Downtown was West Los Angeles, where Baker used to cycle to his office.

As he spoke, the bicycle rack began to fill as other commuters arrived. They call themselves the SCyclists, after the initials for the Science Center. About half a dozen of them are hard-core bicyclists who soldier on in the worst of the winter weather. Another dozen are sunshine pedalers.

Patent lawyer Jay Deinken, one of the hard-core riders, said he learned a valuable lesson about carrying his work clothes on his bike. He folds them into a pair of panniers that he flops over a rack.

“After the first hard rain, I found out they weren’t waterproof.” Deinken said, waving the panniers. He spent the day working in damp clothes. Now he wraps his clothes in plastic bags that he gets from the supermarket.

Some of the SCyclists arrive on flashy new mountain bikes. Others, like Emilio Sovero, are more modest. He rides a woman’s 10-speed, the kind with a dropped center bar.

“I bought it for my wife, but she never uses it,” Sovero said. “I started riding to lose a little bit of weight. I don’t do it so much for the money but because it’s a goal to reach.”

The SCyclists filed off to the locker room, a cubbyhole in the basement, to shower and change. When he was done, Baker looked more like the picture on his badge.

“It keeps me healthy,” he said. “If I don’t exercise, I go stir-crazy.”

*

Tom Williams never has to worry about flat tires. He has his own rapid transit system that gets him to his office at GTE California headquarters in Thousand Oaks: a pair of roller-blades.

One moment Williams was kissing his wife goodby at their apartment in Oak Park. The next moment he was crouched over, elbows on thighs, going full-tilt boogie down Lindero Canyon Road.

A few cars zipped by with their headlights on, but the bicycle lane that Williams rides in is wide enough to give him a sense of security.

A good thing, because he doesn’t wear pads for his knees or elbows. He does wear a helmet and a pair of thick gloves.

It’s a goose-pimply morning, mist putting the oaks into soft focus. But Williams is in shorts because he knows he will start getting hot about halfway to work.

It takes him 17 minutes to go the four miles to GTE, where he programs computer data bases. He arrives as the sun rises. If he had left 90 minutes later, he might have joined Joe Baker, zooming down a section of Thousand Oaks Boulevard. Forget preferential parking spaces; Williams skates right in through the executive entrance. He showers in what used to be the executive washroom, which GTE turned over to its commuters. Then he takes a relaxing walk across the street to another GTE building for a cup of coffee before he reports to work.

Skating is a recent passion for Williams, who put on his first pair of roller-blades 2 1/2 years ago. Riding seemed easy enough on the parking lot, but the skates were trickier after he brought them home.

“I took them out on a graded slope,” Williams said. “I didn’t know how to stop, so I had to take a dive. I walked home, threw my skates on the floor and said, ‘I’ll never skate again.’ ”

Now he coaches a roller hockey team and is a certified instructor. He can move--his wife once clocked him at 40 m.p.h. And the family--Williams, his wife and three children--skates together. They sold their second car last year when they moved to Oak Park to be near Williams’ office. For milk or a movie, they skate to Ralph’s or Blockbuster Video two blocks away.

Williams said he has tried spreading the gospel of roller-blading at work, but without much success.

“One lady tried them,” he said. “But her husband said, ‘No way. You’re too old.’ ”

The only drawback to Williams’ routine is that the after-work commute is always uphill. What’s worse, he said, “there always seems to be a wind going against me when I go home.”

But even a crummy day at the office doesn’t discourage him.

“After I put the blades on and skate, I’m usually in a better mood when I get home.”

*

While Baker and Williams are elevating their heart rates, Joe Gannatal is trying to elevate his speed as he drives Las Posas Road to the Point Mugu Naval Air Station.

Gannatal, an electronics engineer who drives an old Volkswagen Rabbit, looks for all the world like another solitary commuter on his gas-guzzling, air-fouling way to work.

A curious motorist might wonder where he got that little yellow car-pool sticker on his rear window that lets him choose the best parking places.

Gannatal earned his sticker the newfangled way. He went electric. The Rabbit runs on juice, not gasoline, and produces zero emissions.

Gannatal became interested in electric cars after attending a solar-powered car race in Northern California. He found the car for $300, cheap because its diesel engine was kaput. The electronic innards cost him $6,000, but the state gave him $1,000 back as a tax credit.

After a year’s work, Gannatal transformed the rattling diesel into what is essentially a long-range golf cart.

His car will win no design prizes. The skin of the 15-year-old Rabbit is pitted, and instead of a back seat there is a white box secured by two seat belts. Inside are 12 golf cart batteries.

Under the hood are four more batteries and a grime-free motor.

“There’s no carburetor, no air cleaner, no fuel filter, no oil filter you ever have to worry about,” Gannatal said. For maintenance, he adds water to the batteries every couple of months.

Another trademark of Gannatal’s car is the engine noise. It doesn’t make any. There is no roar when he turns the ignition key. The only sound the car makes is the hiss of tires against the road and the rattle of the gear lever.

Gannatal said the silence is sometimes unnerving to bystanders.

“There’s a startled look when I start the car. There’s no start-up engine noise. They wonder, ‘Why is this car moving? What’s wrong with this picture?’ ”

The cost between the electric Rabbit and his former commuting car, a Toyota pickup truck, is a trade-off, Gannatal said.

He spends as much on electricity as he used to spend on gasoline for his commuting car--about $30 a month.

His cruising distance between charges is 30 miles, just enough to get from his home in Camarillo to Point Mugu and back, plus a side trip to his health club. Then he has to plug it in for 10 hours.

Gannatal has coaxed his car up to 65 m.p.h. It takes 34 seconds to go from zero to 60.

And his car lacks more than a few amenities.

Holes exist where the radio and speakers used to be. The heater doesn’t work, so Gannatal has installed a portable hair dryer under the dash.

He uses it to defrost the windshield. On especially chilly mornings, he will sometimes use it to defrost himself.

“It’s a junker,” Gannatal acknowledged. “But it’s a demonstration.”

Besides, no one ever promised Gannatal--or Joe Baker and Tom Williams--that supercommuting would be glamorous. But they will settle for the fact that it’s satisfying.