Cars Suck's topics - tribe.net

Complete Streets

2009-11-24T23:44:05Z

With Transportation for America's lobbying and having ordinary people sending in emails the Obama Administration is starting to wake up about our streets being too dangerous for bicyclists and pedestrians. I encourage people to sign up for their newsletters and sign petitions for safer streets and a better mass transit system. Their website is www.t4america.org.

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

New federal policy would fund more bike projects around transit stops

2009-11-22T21:42:16Z

http://bikeportland.org/2009/11/16/new-fed-policy-would-fund-more-bike-projects-around-transit-stops/

I find this to be exciting news. This would make transit use more possible for many, and would reduce the number of car trips to park and ride lots.

Not a final solution, but a good step.

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

Street Closures

2009-11-22T21:26:29Z

I happen to take the bus downtown this morning to watch the area's holiday parade. This usually means that at least 2 streets are closed to vehicular traffic and in this case 3 were closed. After it was over I watched a few parking garages and about all I heard were people honking their horns and yelling. My thought was I am appreciative of what public transportation we do have in this area and I take advantage of it. Well, I'll keep advocating for a improved system where I can. Someday the benefits of it will be good.

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

"Americans Less Nomadic," Claims Demographer

2009-11-22T17:38:51Z

Please check out the link below.

Demographer Joel Kotkin finds that Americans are becoming increasingly less nomadic. I think our national and individual economic situation has a lot to do with it, as our standard of living continues to decrease, but he brings up some interesting and cogent points, particularly those relating to the increased interest in rebuilding downtown districts and older neighborhoods and the whole notion of "placeness". If you are unable to play the link, there is a written portion, as well.

http://www.pri.org/politics-society/1700.html

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Let's move somewhere else. Shall we?

2009-11-18T17:49:44Z

Hi,
I used to participate here. But now tribe is basically dead. It is sad. Besides, tribe has some many ads now!
I wonder if you would be willing to move somewhere else. Ning? My Opera (no ads), perhaps?

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

In the Last 15 years: 76,000 Pedestrian Deaths!

2009-11-15T21:58:55Z

Please check out this new study released by "Transportation for America". Here's the link: http://t4america.org/resources/dangerousbydesign/

And Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, where I live, is ranked No.3 on the "Danger Index" scale. Yikes! However, I'm not surprised, what with many neighborhoods without side walks and the very wide thoroughfares that we have to navigate everyday as pedestrians. I'm not truly not surprised. In fact, the top five on the "Danger Index" includes three large Florida cities/regions. Wow!

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

HEY! Get Rudy to ride a uni upstairs, before some kind of hearse gets it on, again!

2009-11-13T00:14:10Z

"Educated women shoot back."

Jews are from Ethiopia, so get your educated GF to show your armless, legless head, how right between your asscheeks is where you have been observing, so pull OUT, and notice KENYA, where Obama-Daddy, DARFUR and SOMALIA, where are trouble, related to your fantasy-life for the ten, wayward tribes, of HABIRUS, including riotous creep ABRAHAM, a bastard mercenary, from Ur, who stoned Moses.

Shoot GIULIANI, before he whores a limp blimp full of nukes, into Yankee Stadium, airhead and GFs.

Isaiah 20:5 also implies KILL BILLS, of attainder, since the riot of Abraham taints all US transactions, for purge, by trial, OR YOU CONTINUE ILLEGALLY, IN ALL NATIONS.

Shoot Jon bon Jovi, for sucking. Shoot Lauer, for having him on and jerking about how many unemployed football goons he knows, gayly.

Shoot Jenna Bush and any producer who had her on NBC, once, but back, for bon Jovi, suck champion, of the corporate music fire-island mafia?

But wait, if you suck, really sick, you are too stupid to know how the illegal secret treaty with Victoria spawned the US coups in Hawaii, 1893, when the Victorian Crusade petered out in 1882, with the invasion of Palestine, in the null year, between the Boer Wars, to establish an illegitimate Habiru Pirate Republic.

Hey, Oahu! Heads up! They steal all the music and overproduce, per Nixon's taps, blown at us, for forty years of nasty W.E.S., at RICO profiteering, AC-ZZ at 'art.'

Look, STUPID! Bin Laden knows Valerie has a BIG BUTT, ok, stupid?

Jews happen to be from Ethiopia, so don't get the big C, over it, and get David Lee Roth all upset, again, asshat punks! Heard of the VAN ALLEN BELT?

Bin Laden knows astronomy, is that allright with you, big-butt fetish creeps and geeks? AC-ZZ is ripped.

So why do you think you get to let Giuliani hold up communications, killing New Yorkers, while the NSA and CIA and Mueller prevent the FBI from due notice to superiors and all agencies, when they discovered and KNEW THE 9/11 HIJACKERS WERE IN THE USA, ready to attack?

What riot have you reported, or sought to chill? NOT THIS RIOT, asshats. You marginalized uneven enforcement of the law, to standing armies, at illegal quarter, profiteering.

All RIOT, or blow David Bowie, since you miss Roth so much, you riotous, crudbag fans of standing armies and quarter-whores.

When you move pepper games, for General Bob CONE, notice you blew off jerking Giuliani back, while cooking the 9/11 Commission.

You busted Bonds for uttering, "ISAIAH," when he bumped 756 into the Cove, in September 2005, three years ago~since JEWS ARE ALL OF ETHIOPIAN ORIGIN, you let Bonds and his trainer be victimized by,false process, which may not convict, with all kinds of other victims of US pig steroid rage, from the fatasses in the Senate, 50 too many of those, to violate the commerce clauses and US Code, in detail.

The female shooter got over, to shoot the incited Major Hasan, where she has been touted by Latin-Russian gangs, and by stupid Catholics and Brits, all aroused by their Purple Gang-type success, into two and three-quarters WORLD WARS, dummies about to burn!

You GITS have the word, 'SHIT' because the Crusading BRITS got the TITS all twisted, by Saladin, in 1187, and they surmised they would need to invade Beijing, through the Shiites in Iran, to keep Jerusalem, by the time of Napoleon and Victoria, when the British Empire invaded darn near everybody and the US took a little hike from the Constitution, in 1814, and stayed away, ever since, to treaty with Victoria.

HEARD OF THE ROYAL FAVORS EXCLUSION CLAUSE? The riotous administrations injure all Latin, Arab, African, Asian, and sundry royalty and citizens, for illegal favors, for royal Windsor, Saud, Vatican, David, ALL BASTARDS! You may not so violate commerce, US.

You waved your asses in the window, between the Rabin Assassination Anniversary, November 3, and the execution of John Muhammed, tonight, November 10, 2009.

You had Jon bon Jovi and Jenna Bush to masturbate at, on your day of death, and YOU TRIED TO FART, TOO HARD, Gits waving asses. SHIT HAPPENED.

So keep farting, asshats. Practice makes perfect. Shoot your asses harder, and blow out your birthday candles.

Don't mistake 'education' in a woman for what she does, when she is stuck getting shot at, since YOU ARE A PROXIMATE HAZARD, INCITING RIOT, FOR NOTICE TO DESIST.

Chill your stupid comments, pigs. You are trying to incite MAYHEM, having abetted riot. You are a danger to yourself and others, and to minor persons, and to property and to animals, by your remarks and your usual actions, unrestrained, PUNKS. Make my day.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN, chill and disband, OR FACE LAWFUL ORDER, FROM A COURT, FOR CAUSE. Fort Hood may not suppress, in order to obstruct justice, and to incite more mayhem, where it restrains no incitement by blogging Zionists, at profiteering.

LOOK AT YOU SCUM, STANDING ARMY CRUD, VIOLENT GEEKS, COMING AROUND HERE, AFTER HIDING AMY ROBACH AT NBC HAS CAUSED ANNA NICOLE SMITH TO COMMIT SUICIDE, AND EVADE THE REVIEW SUFFERED BY HER FORMER BOSS, DON IMUS.

Any wonder why Major Hasan shot bin Laden-hater Amy Krueger to death? HE JUDGED EACH VICTIM, AS HE SHOT HIM. Beat that!

What do you think would beat THAT? Try Led Zep, in the days of your yank-and-crank youth, you were told all about beating the meatles. Now you've seen that day, you pounded all the panda-grain out of that can! No matter how you're fried, you stink, if Giuliani is on hand . . .

Good times, bad times, Joe Torre dodged back then, but Giuliani sticks like crap on a shoe, so pull that popper to YOU, and ONE!!

Seen BLACK SUNDAY? Got a jerk, at the Yankees games, who obstructed justice all sweet and Catholic and corrupt, to keep Jerry Brown and the CAL and Catholic schools and USC and Stanford gangs, all causing media distortion, forcing illegal media into public forums, by creepy hostaging, of all young people, then to induce them into illegal, riotous circulation.

ALL RIOT. Desist, chill, disband. RUDY! Get your damn Gargamellon-headed self and your cat and SCAT, now, now, NOW. You hung around too long, after cooking the firefighters, in buildings which collapsed, accompanied by the sort of demise in Building 7, which may ruthlessly take the house, Ruth did NOT build, without even one fine bitchout by recently retired football Hall of Fame ginger, John Madden.

Got it, Mr.Manager? Joe Girardi inherited a job, with front office duties not yet completed, and then everybody ducked, until Fart Hard Day came. Are you satisfied with the SHIT, which HAPPENED? Somebody let the bogus continue, to bogard, and soon, another BOOM!

Safety first, even for Smurfs, G-Mellon pig-superstar, Rudy Giuliani! Drag your gal upstairs!

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

Young Adults Less Attracted to Car Onwership

2009-11-08T20:03:55Z

I came across this interesting article in the Los Angeles Times. Please read it by clicking on this link:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-rebel9-2009oct09,0,6635086.story

The premise of the article is based on a J.D.Powers' study which revealed that youth of today are not as interested in automobiles as, say, their parents were.

They assert that the advent of online networking sites and socially-involved video games have brought on less of a need to actually leave the house to visit friends or for other forms of enjoyment, which - inadvertently - affects the need for car ownership.

This could true, but I think the state of our economy has a lot to do with it too. Graduating from high school/college and quickly realizing that the costs associated with car ownership and having to reconcile it with credit card payments and student loans can be quite daunting and enough to hold off on that bloated expense.

What do you all think about this?

posted in Cars Suck - 6 replies

A Guide for the Would-be Car-free Citizen?

2009-10-27T14:52:22Z

What if you were approached by someone who is completely "clueless" about using public transportation, or more deeply and significantly, living the car-free lifestyle. What would we tell this person?

Humor me for a moment and let us, then, compile a sort of guide for the would-be car-free citizen. Of course, there are all sorts of books out there, but we'd like this one to be gleaned from our own experiences, as well as those very books that we've read. I'll begin with one "to-do" for our car-free-living guide.

1) If you live in an area where going car-free is not popular or is frowned-upon, be prepared to develop a "don't-care" attitude.

Next?

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Public Transit Filling the Gap in Failing Economy

2009-10-22T00:17:37Z

On my way to work today on the 83, this lady and I struck up a conversation. She opened up to me about how she lost her job nine months ago, which lead to her losing her car and her home. Today, she claimed, was the second week that she was using public transportation, and she found its relative ease and reliability to be a pleasant surprise. She finally found a part-time job very close to her apartment, where she only needs to take one bus to get there. She went on to say that she may never get a car again because she finds that everything she now needs to do is either within walking distance of her new, much smaller dwelling or on a bus line.

About a month earlier, one of my coworkers' wives got laid off, and she ended up divorcing him and running off with another and wealthier man. He had to sell his car for a quick infusion of cash to off-set his income to take care of some pressing financial obligations, which meant he had to bike and bus to work. Turns out, he actually loves it. He said after, his wife's betrayal, he started to look at life differently and he had begun a life of reflection and soul-searching, if you will. According to him, biking and busing around town to get to work and such, help him to do just that.

It is interesting how public transportation, which is often derided as being insufficient -- though in many cases it is -- has come through for people when they need it most. Could you just imagine those who live in towns, villages and cities all across this country where public transportation is non-existent? If they are faced with similar situations as my friends above, what will be their recourse? I shudder to think of it.

posted in Cars Suck - 10 replies

Ca$h for clunkers..

2009-10-18T19:13:37Z

I'm pissed. For decades,I have been constantly been bombarded with the old 'Why should I have to pay for bikelanes/sidewalks,etc" as if peds and cyclists somehow don't pay for the minimal facilities we do have.. and now they have given away in the period of a week as much money as they have put into bike facilities in 20 years, with more to come in the pipeline,because cash for clunkers was so successful!??
This is about the same as an alcoholic celebrating a year of sobriety by going out and getting trashed. Maybe not the bes analogy,but if we have issues with oil dependency, climate change, worn out roads, we should solve this by going and buying new cars? And this little gift to carmakers and their customers is added to the already over the top Federal defeceit. As if our military adventures in the past 50 years , maintaining empire and access to oil havent been enough?

Just getting this off my chest.. It won't stop till that last drop of oil.... Mad Max was so prophetic..

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Economic Downturn Means More Broken-Down Cars on Our Streets

2009-09-02T12:02:50Z

I don't know about you guys, but here in South Florida, the economic cool down is affecting many car owners. I'm seeing more and more cars breaking down on the sides of roads and highways here. Though this has always been the case, nowadays, the types of cars are getting fancier. Just the other day, I saw a woman on the side of the road trying her best to attend to smoke that was bellowing out from under the hood of a very late-model Cadillac Escalade. Thankfully, other motorists pulled over to help her. I couldn't because I was passing by on a bus. Also, I saw a Porsche Cayenne on the side of the road with the hood up about a week ago, and about two weeks prior to that, I saw a man and a little girl walking back to a late-model Lexus. The man was carrying one of those red, gasoline containers, so I guess that example doesn't count because it doesn't necessarily mean that the car wasn't working properly due to poor maintenance; he simply ran out of gas. At any rate, I think what's happening is that people have less funds to allocate for automobile maintenance, so they're simply going longer and longer before getting that oil change or that scheduled maintenance check up. Or, maybe I'm reading too much in this.

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

Sussex & Lancy

2009-07-24T12:57:07Z

Cars aren't so bad. It's the sociopathic drivers who are the real problem. That's the main reason why I came up with the web comic "Sussex & Lancy." If you can't get drivers to behave responsibly in real life, at least you can do it in the comics.
http://www.comicspace.com/timelike01/comics.php?action=gallery&comic_id=25872

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Twenty Reasons Cars Suck...What's Your Reason?

2009-07-21T02:56:03Z

I know that most of us are familiar with the ridiculous chain e-mails that we receive occasionally from anonymous -- and not so anonymous -- senders, admonishing us to send this or that e-mail to ten friends... or else!

It is in that spirit that I wanted to try a chain post. This one is more exciting, however. I admonish each of you to post a reason cars suck. Try not to repeat what someone else has posted, but expanding on a post is fine, as long as you post another reason separately. How fun, right? I'll start off with the first two, and it would be nice if we could come up with, at least, 20 reasons.

1) THEY ARE EXPENSIVE: when adjusted for gas-mileage, insurance and license tag fees, maintenance and repair, and parking the personal automobile can become a tremendous financial burden for most American families, especially if the owner is making monthly payments which would imply that interest rates have been computed into the final price.

2) THEY USE UP SPACE: Cars, even those as small as a Nissan Versa, take up lots of room compared with, say, a bicycle or motorcycle, both when they are parked and in motion. This precious space, particularly in built-up and/or downtown areas can drive up costs for everybody else. Condominium developers in downtown areas, such as Miami, have to set aside millions of dollars to build parking garages and parking lots. If you were to visit Downtown, Miami, you will witness parking structures that are sometimes as tall as the condominium, hotel or commercial tower they're attached to. It's obscene! And, just how do developers mitigate these costs? They pass them on to the buyer/owner, EVEN IF, he/she DOESN'T own a vehicle.

posted in Cars Suck - 20 replies

Bye Bye General Motors!

2009-06-15T17:48:41Z

General Motors bankruptcy is imminent,likely to happen within the next week as it's Market Shares plummeted from 80 dollars a share to just 30 cents.
Lets all take a moment to reflect on this once-glorious leader of the Automotive World.
General Motors got it's start around 1905 as other companies saw an incredible way to make the Big Bucks Ford was making when a few years earlier,Henry Ford designed the first "car for everyone" the venerable Model-T and put America on four gas powered wheels!.
A few of GM's early models were quite noteworthy!
It's "Gangsta Cars" of the 1930's were legendary like the one Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow got riddled with bulletholes in!
It's 1950's "Muscle Cars" like the 57 Chevrolet were the cars EVERY American Boy wanted!
It's Corvette looked like a car of the future and Cadillac became the Platinum Standard in Luxury Cars!
It's 67 Camaro was the envy of every High School Boy as was the 67 Pontiac GTO!
Then came the 1970's and powerful United Autoworker Unions,BIG Pensions for employee's and the quality of GM's vehicles began slipping down the long ladder to extinction.
The 1970 Chevrolet Corvair earned the reputation as the most unsafe car on the road with it's rear-engine design and several of them exploded in rear end collisions.
The 1975 Chevrolet Chevette earned the "smallest most useless car" award complete with it's tilted (crooked!) steering column so "bigger" people could actually FIT behind the wheel. and by 1981,got "escorted out of the marketplace" by the roomy Ford Escort
The 1981 Chevrolet Citation,GM's venture into the compact 5 door front drive Market was famous for chewing up CV Axels and was plauged with "other issues" resulting in it's being dropped quickly.
When Ford introduced it's ALL NEW Ford Explorer in 1984,GM was desperate to compete so it just re-sheet metaled and shortened the chassis on it's decades old "Chevy K-5 Blazer" into a "New" model and called it the GMC Yukon Denali,complete with ALL of the Blazer's engine and drivetrain Issues.
This Regurgitating of "old models as NEW" by putting a flashy new skin on them would plauge GM right to the present-day.
What followed after 1985 was nearly 20 years of some of the CRAPPIEST built Cars to ever roll off an American assembly line.
GM made a desperate stab in 2005 to "produce quality vehicles" and actually had two models that made it to the top of JD Power and Associates "best cars list" but by now the mere mention of General Motors conjured up the image of "rolling junk" to about 70% of the American public,the HIGH quality vehicles made by Toyota,Nissan,Honda and three Korean Companies were "America's Cars of choice" and GM's good name was forever tainted,associated with a legacy of failed designs,poor fit and finish(remember their PAINT JOBS?) engines that blew head gaskets at 120,000 miles trunks that LEAKED,and no one wanted what GM was making anymore.
Personally,I hope GM files for Bankruptcy and perhaps emerges as a Quality Car Company,it's never too late to start over from scratch. any "thoughts"?

posted in Cars Suck - 4 replies

Walking Power

2009-06-06T20:47:41Z

I recently tried as an experiment (initially) to walk from my job to the connecting point for my bus ride home. I have a 35 minute timeframe and it takes me about 20 minutes (15 minutes if I keep to just walking). It takes the bus about that long to get there. On top of the enviromental and anti-traffic benefits, I get to see some beautiful scenery and to laugh at car and SUV drivers who are inconvenienced and
stressed out over the traffic problems wich can be prevented. Last, my knees don't hurt as much but that is up to me and my doctor to decide on how to deal with that.

posted in Cars Suck - 11 replies

What's Next?

2009-05-31T04:17:50Z

Ok so America's "Luv Affair" with those big hulking Gasoline-Sucking SUV's is just about over as thousands of them fill America's Used Car Lots
GM and Chysler are about to go bankrupt(Good riddance you build CRAP anyway!) Ford is "struggling along" barely keeping it's head above the the water line in the drowning pool and inexpensive Korean car companies like Hiundai and Kia are having "banner sales" despite a crumbling economy so the question remains..."what's next"?
is it Electric Cars?
Alternative fuels?
Gas/Electric Hybrids,and NOT the SUV version of these becuase they still get SHIT for gas mileage!
Will we see the end of the Internal Combustion Engine and something better in it's place?
Perhaps "Fusion Generators"?
Hydrogen powered Cars?
what do you think the next evolution in Cars will be?

posted in Cars Suck - 7 replies

The Automotive Picture

2009-02-20T01:20:52Z

The global slowdown in personal automobile sales is truly deeper and farther reaching than most think.

Take a look at this picture tour, taken from the Guardain (UK), here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/gallery/2009/jan/16/unsold-cars?picture=341883558

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Motorists Asking for Directions

2009-01-03T06:05:38Z

Okay, follow car-haters, lol, here I go with my rants and raves again...

This, once again, is a rant.

I know my community very well because I walk and bike alot, so I am aware of new businesses that have opened up in my neighborhood. I'm even aware of many homes that have been placed on the market. Because of seeing things on a human scale, I have an uncanny knowlegdge of distance between places and so on, but yesterday, I got so fed up with motorists stopping and asking me for directions that I actually told one driver that I didn't know even though I did.

Of course, I felt absolutely awful after I did that. I wish I could press a "rewind" button and do things differently, but just in the past week about eight motorists on separate occasions stopped and asked for directions. The motorist in question pulled over and rudely honked his horn to get my attention even though I didn't have my ipod on or wasn't on my phone. What was that about? Therefore, after he asked me for directions based on some address he had written down, I was so annoyed that I told him I did not know. I did know, however, and it was obvious to me that the reason he was getting lost over and over again was because he had the house numbers backward because based on how the houses are numbered in Suburban Miami, the combination he had written down couldn't have existed, but instead of going into all of that with him (I had groceries in my hand, and I just wanted to get home) and the fact that he rudely honked at me, I simply told him, "Sorry, I dont' know".

Obviously, I lied, and I truly feel guitly about doing that, but how would you guys have handled a similar situation? Geez, I seem to be seeking lots of advice on this tribe lately. : ) Sorry about that, guys.

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

To Take the Ride or not to Take the Ride...That is the Question

2008-12-31T15:26:55Z

I had posted a similar discussion about a year ago, but I can't quite remember whether or not it was in this tribe. At any rate, the issue came up for me again. I was waiting for my connecting bus, and an acquaintance, pulled up and offered me a ride, Here's how the conversation went...
ACQUAINTANCE: "Hey, headed east?"
ME: "Yes, why?"
ACQUAINTANCE: "Need a ride?"
ME: "No, thank you."
ACQUAINTNACE: "Why not, don't you live in the apartment building next to mine?"
ME: "Yeah, you live in building 17, right?"
ACQUAINTANCE: "Yeah, yeah. Come on, it's chilly out here."
ME: "Nah, I'm fine. Thanks, though, I appreciate it."
ACQUAINTANCE: "Alright, suit yourself."

He, then, took off, tires screaching. He was clearly offended by my not taking the ride. I'm pretty sure he felt as though (1) I didn't trust him or (2) I was a complete idiot.

But, I have a deep aversion to jumping in cars with just anyone, not only because I think that motorists believe that because I use my legs, my bike or public transportation to get around that my life is some how inferior to theirs, but mostly because I do not know their driving record. I'm not even sure if their vehicle is insured. It is in that way that I don't trust them. At the very least, I know that when I board a bus, the operator has had hours of training and the transit authorities' properties and assets must -- by law -- be insured.

So, be honest, guys, and let me know what your thoughts on the issue are. Was I being ridiculous for not accepting the ride? My bus came about eight minutes after he left (it was about six minutes late), and I'm sure he got home before I did, but I'm not the kind to necessarily rush home on my days off unless I have some place else to go. What do you think?

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

The bottom line

2008-12-16T16:18:58Z

I HATE fucking cars !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

posted in Cars Suck - 4 replies

The Big Three American Automaker's Bailout.

2008-12-15T23:41:14Z

On CNBC this morning was the news that the Big Three(Ford,General Motors and Chrysler are in "desperate shape" and are looking for a Government bailout ammounting to more than one trillion dollars!
Let's take a look back at why we should just allow them to fail:
Since 1982 The Big Three have known about the impending shortage of available Oil wich makes the Gasoline for their cars.Refinery Records on the rate of Oil Consumption had proven this for more than a Decade.
In 1984 a Bill was put before Congress that would have mandated that by 1990 ALL US carmaker's would have to produce cars that get at least 25 miles per gallon,The Big Three responded with: "this would prove a Hardship for Us"
That same year Ford introduced to America the current "SUV Craze" with it's poorly built 17 mpg behemoth the "Ford Explorer" GM responded by re-tooling it's ancient Chevrolet "Blazer" into a more attractive package to compete with Ford's Explorer,it was equally as poorly built as the Explorer with equally dismal MPG.
This ushered-in a 28 year period where BIG Hulking SUV's and 2 ton Trucks were "The King of the American Highway". The Big Three's Non-SUV production (their "Automobiles")sank to new LOWS in poor quality control and were basically pieces of high-priced Crap that couldn't even hold their Paint job never mind their internals falling apart!. Cadillac fell from Grace with it's poor quality. The Lincoln Mk 5 followed suit and the Chrysler 5th Avenue became a Gussied-Up K-Car,equally dismal in its "Quality". These Companies lower priced cars were just "rolling Junk" and simply were "No Competition" for the quality in Honda,Toyota,Nissan and Mazda,add to that a new flood of Korean -Made Cars that were not only affordable,but *some* were also quality-made and BETTER than anything the Big-3 could put out. To see wich cars stacked up and wich did not,check Consumer Reports for the last 20 years and you will see that the "Big Three Automakers" consistently came out at "The bottom rung of the quality ladder".
It's no surprise that the top ten most fuel efficiant cars in the World are made in Japan and Korea,Even the Japanese and Korean SUV's fare better in higher fuel mileage.
So why cant Detriot get it's act together and make a DECENT Car? becuase they make more PROFIT selling cheaply-made SUV's who's beauty and appeal is definatly only "Skin-Deep" the Chassis and Engines in these Vehicles are CRAP.
I have bought many American-made Cars trying to "do my part as an American and BUY AMERICAN-Made Products" over the decades but the sad fact of the matter is,Detroit's "Big Three" cannot MAKE Quality Vehicles!
I have owned Buicks,Olsmobiles,Fords and Chryslers and EVERY ONE of them "blew up" at 110 thousand miles(blown engines and/or transmissions) their quality was simply "not there". For the last 20 years I have owned only Japanese-Made Cars(Honda,Toyota,Nissan and Subaru) NONE of these Vehicles racked up the Repair Bills that my Big Three Cars did! and ALL of them lasted well over 200 thousand miles.
I say if you can't make a QUALITY Car,then you deserve to go bankrupt
what say You?

posted in Cars Suck - 5 replies

Despite Falling Gas Prices, Many Still Turning to Public Transit

2008-12-15T21:14:50Z

Well, it seems that many Americans are still sticking to public transportation despite falling gas prices, but I suspect that because rent, groceries and other services are still so expensive, falling gas prices will have little effect on most people's budgets. Also, the direct, monetary costs of car ownership are still so high, too. Just the other day, my next-door neighbor was complaining that she had to park her car and catch the bus because the transmission is shot, and it's going to cost her close to $700 to repair it. Yikes! That's almost as much as she pays in rent for her 2-bedroom apartment!

Read more about this trend here in this Washington Post article by Lena Sun:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/01/AR2008120102720.html

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

Vilify the petroleum industry

2008-11-26T18:00:44Z

I heard that author Antonia Juhasz suggests that the petroleum industry be vilified like the tobacco industry is. I can definite agree with that since I've vilifying them for years. And vilifying them just might encourge more people to stop driving.

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

Maw of the beast; mother of Hell...

2008-11-26T17:37:09Z

This past year has been one of trying to become adjusted to a new/old place here in Bellingham, WA almost 700 miles from my home in Eureka, CA after a hostile take-over early in '07 of the apartment I'd had in Eureka, CA since the fall of '99-due to my radical lefist strident enough political stances.(the previous owner got divorced from her husband thus forced to sell, obviously in cahoots w/the new owner; whose family my space has been in since '54) I lived here in Bellingham in '73 with a summer 90 day student temp job as a USPS clerk/carrier, another summer in '79 associated with ANTAHKARANA CIRCLE OF HEALERS; and was here in '06 & '07 to listen to THE TIPTONS women's saxophone quartet w/drummer.( <http://www.tiptonssaxquartet.com> )

During the year('07) of the new owner of my Eureka place, enduring threats of beatings and all sorts of psychological abuse from the two harley riding thugs there most days in a vast disruptive renovation of the 1880s former livery stable, carriage house & hay barn(the carpenter who is a ex-con pauper somehow owning a brand new yellow Buell racing model H-D motorcycle; with his boss' middle name I'd noticed on one legal document "harley" who sported a SCWHARTZENEGGER sticker on the passenger side dashboard of his fancy ton & half diesel work truck) I'd had a dream one morning; with two or more Gypsy vardos that came into my neighborhood there the apartment is in I'd been the ground floor occupant of the two units; and in the dream there was a first tiny Gypsy vardo, drawn by two tiny horses and with no decoration and just plain unfinished wood that had passed by the front of the apartment building and turned up the alley next to my place where the stalls of the livery stable had originally been(built to service the tiny brewery that now also is a two unit apartment on the same large lot) and then at least one more vardo exactly like the first had driven up to my place with one pulling up right in front and stopping; with all over the sidewalk, street and up the alley, hay straw spread out about two yards from the building, all fresh and clean yellow to the sun.(I'm Rromani; which I'd finally figured out in a "need to know" reality, reading 19th century composer Franz Liszt's THE GIPSIES IN MUSIC about eleven years ago and thanks to an oral history done with my mother in '73 with an emphasis on her "Bohemian" ancestry; also involved since '00 with Voice of Roma <http://www.voiceofroma.com> to raise money for Kosovoan and other Roma)

The link below is one which is to a thread I started about an experience in Seattle a couple weeks ago now; after a performance of experimental music @ Gallery 1412( <http://www.gallery1412.org> ) that evening with a music improvisation workshop in the afternoon I'd taken part in on alto saxophone, the same day demonstrations in support of same gender marriages were taking place all over the country that I'd been on the periphery enjoying during bus transfers in downtown Seattle, between the noon workshop and the evening performance.

In the following thread at a website for people who drive the ultra-sturdy and reliable Ford Festiva; which I'd gotten one of after spending the winter of '98-'99 living off of the back of my '73 Windor Carrera Sport ten-speed homeless after an unsuccessful if also affectionate romance with a woman my age whose sister and beloved only sibling was killed in a car wreck as we'd been breaking up after our five month love fest.

In this thread is an account of an odd surrealist moment; like so many I seem to experience, where the unconventional occurs as a normal facet of existence in resistance to the dominant culture and society.<http://www.fordfestiva.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17993>

I go back bicycling to days as a student at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA when there the second year they'd been allowing students on campus the fall of '73. Prior to THE SIMPSONS the place was so unpopular and reviled there were serious attempts in the state legislature to turn Evergreen into a prison.* At that time being on the pavement on a bicycle as even a young adult was an open invitation to being ridden down by any redneck with a motor vehicle, which happened occasionally if thankfully rare; but, where often they'd come within inches passing by as harassment trying to see how close they could get to actually clipping a person while they rode, as some sort of local sporting pastime when not home conceiving more irresponsible idiots to elect the regressives to office who run this state; like arch reactionary Republican moron Slade Gorton for instance finally retired from his career of piloting the inanely dangerous policies which have helped create the vile monstrosity which has corrupted hopelessly most lives on the planet today.

During the "energy crisis" of '79 that May I'd ridden the exact same model Windsor Carrera Sport ten-speed as I have a second one of now; from Dallas, TX via San Diego, CA to Bonners Ferry, ID for that year's spring healer's gathering of an indigent's communal yoga study group called ANTAHKARANA CIRCLE OF HEALERS I'd gotten associated with after Evergreen while trying to support myself as a transient agricultural worker doing orchard work in the tiny grapes of wrath orchard town of Manson, WA soon to be pimped and spanked during the Reagonmics era of psychic & psychological pollution.

May of '79 as I'd pedaled across west Texas on the interstate with only interstate freight trucks, Winnebegos and the occasional Greyhound bus on the road, with many a trucker just like when I was in Olympia; liking to see how close they could pass to my left shoulder as they'd sped by me at over 70 mph.

The cattle carrying tandems were always the biggest thrill as I'd hear the loud drone of their motors like all the rest of the trucks which passed right next to me sometimes a foot and a half away, so that instinctively I'd grab extra hard on my handle bars an instant then release, when with those cattle trucks I'd be relaxed a second as the second big whosh of air from the second trailer would hit and momentarily shake me and my bike like a rag-doll, which had been loaded with front and rear panniers and heavy enough I'd never been in danger of losing control was what I'd soon enough figured out, while the truckers had tested this set-up as casually as if I'd been any sort of potential road-kill posturing as an adornment to grace their grills, front bumpers or windshields somehow.

I've also lived out of a small '66 VW square-back sedan a dozen years more or less, from '82-'94 after working nineteen long months as an elementary school custodian in Ojai, CA to be able to afford that car; and the years we were together after I'd gotten onto social security disability/SSI(due to ramifications of congenital and juvenile spinal diseases) I'd had a great Raleigh Colt 3-speed kept bungeied inside against the car's ceiling, I'd gotten for $15 and fixed up which had been at the little thrift store in Snohomish, WA(where I'd graduated from high school in '69) next to the even smaller little food co-op there whose manager had talked me into applying for disability/SSI when I'd been the regular volunteer Friday afternoon custodian every week when forced from poverty to live with my parents for the first time since I'd been in high school who then were well initiated in the cycles of heavy drinking which would pursue each into their graves a decade or two later in a drawn out agony of rejection and indignity I'd had to endure I'm sure my four sisters more able to be responsive also found defeating and difficult too, with their four young daughters all living close by while this occurred, who I avoid even more now than then since all Christian and using psychiatric medications heavily in a couple of instances and/or reactionaries I feel physically threatened by since one is a member of the medical professional community and I've a rich uncle in Eugene, OR who is an alcoholic conservative easily intimidated by the ultra-right, etc.**

*Quite likely supported by an uncle of my father's with our same last name who'd been the chief opponent in the state house of representatives whose district Evergreen is in, who'd been a pharmacist from the remote mountain town of Morton near Mount St Helens as a conservative Democrat; when then liberal Republican Dan Evans was governor who'd helped found Evergreen.(and ended up a president of the school a short while before his single term as a US senator)

Though now uncle Elmer(long deceased) is considered one of Evergreen's founding father's even if the name identification I'd had to suffer my five years in town created an adverse experience which still haunts me over thirty years later.

**The one sister Jessica I occasionally am able to have tolerably sane moments with is an insecure academic who if she has finally gotten a doctorate has taken about two or three decades to do so; years ago now married to a man nine years younger when she'd worked out of the US embassy building in Damascus she'd moved with to Maryland for a teaching job @UM when he'd emigrated with her and divorced her four years later, who though I'd never met him I'd intuitively enjoyed and liked and had a few minutes phone conversation with once who is an artist named Husam whose amazing brass work I was able to see once who'd given my father a large round engraving adorned tray he'd made; himself with comic sounding parents who'd owned a second hand store when they divorced who continued that place's operation with the same single front door though dividing the place with a line down the middle inside and separate cash registers, etc.

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

even worse than that!(to bury cars, not to praise them...)

2008-11-25T20:43:42Z

I'd left out an adventure October of '86 when I'd spent the month alone camped at the Twin Forks Campsite in the Los Padres National Forest just west of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary; on Piedra Blanca Creek at the confluence there, while each day climbing up and down the streambed of the west fork that climbs up the side of Pine Mountain miles and miles over tumbled rounded rocks and often house sized boulders fallen over millions of years from the mountain side during the torrential seasonal winter rains when the common enough draught years are sometimes forgone.

This had been what convinces me my problems from congenital and juvenile spinal diseases can be cured and overcome; and I'd previously in '73 had nine class lessons with Selverajan Yesudian's student Mady Sharma both of whom have over come problems from spinal disease similar to mine; Yesudian as a youth of fourteen who'd run away from home a couple of years with a teacher/guru after being inspired by the books on yoga he'd read in his western trained native physician father's library in India, and Mady who continued her correspondence with me into the last part of '90, who'd only begun yoga study after a spinal fusion at the age of 42 who at 52 in '73 looked like a 23 year old coed when I was twenty-one at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA where I'd been a work/study student which allowed me to take the leisure education workshop class for free when my first lover then Tina Blade had been encouraging me to study yoga.

Unfortunately after spending the month there overcoming the atrophy of musculature due to spinal disease; I'd taken a three day forty two mile hike with a full pack I'd been forced into; and the third day I'd planned to rest I'd hiked seventeen miles instead due to a "chance" companion who'd paced me all but a little over seven miles that day.(there is a sort of feral culture more or less indigenous or certainly indigent there, of ner' do well locals unable or unwilling to access government assistance how all coordinate to prey upon anyone found vulnerable in their environs; greatly now reminiscent of a national culture that I'm sure is all related, but then a novelty I'd just begun to experience after getting approved to receive social security disability/SSI assistance early in '85 after seventeen years spent trying to support myself in over forty different energy draining menial labor jobs at minimum wage or lower, doing janitor work, washing dishes, agricultural labor or whatever else chanced to come my way usually a relief from my other three main means of trying to gain a toehold on the bootstrap existence that is all this most vile capitalistic state allows a person to try to better themselves by, despite a BA degree from what US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT consistently names one of the nation's best small state liberal arts colleges, etc.)

This forced march had entirely undone the still fragile results of my month's endeavors; so that I'd tried again October of '92 to repeat my experience hoping for a better result.

That had not been near as dramatically successful since I'd been enough distracted from my just prior life upon my arrival, to not be able to reach the same sort of a rhythm with my surroundings till near the month's end; when my new fancier North Face one day only sale in Berkeley tent had proven inadequate for the first rains of the winter which had flooded me out at the beginning of November after another four week's attempt.(both in '86 & '92 a follow through all November had been on my mind which would've consolidated all my gains in overcoming musculature atrophy now impinging much more heavily on my general mobility since the muscle groups used to taking up an unnatural load to compensate are themselves becoming less able through aging and their overburdened always efforts...making as easily imagined the handle bars of my bikes fond friends I'm able to always gain some much needed support from whenever we are together and about my only regular means of exercise; though climbing is really similar for just the same reasons!)

The one result perhaps encouraging in October '92 was a dream I'd had during the middle of one of that month's nights; where I'd been with Tina in the silo scene from the movie WITNESS with Harrison Ford I'd seen when a new release in the movie theater in her home town of Mount Vernon, WA just thirty or so miles south of Bellingham here, where I'd lived in '85 & '86 to study with and assist macrobiotic nutritionist Bruce Berkowsky, phd. just after beginning to receive disability/SSI.(Tina's Dad Walter owns the local Chevy dealership BLADE CHEVROLET whose electronic reader board beside the freeway on a recent drive to Seattle flashed "BLADE TIME" a couple minutes faster than my wristwatch-already as much ahead of the general on-going consensus about such things)

In the dream we'd been in that silo(a movie I'd not thought of then since I'd first seen it) and I'd reached out to draw Tina to me in an embrace; who'd stiffened in resistance laughing joyously at me, when I'd awakened realizing I loved her as deeply as possible to love anyone: And found the black dark reality inside the tent less vivid and compelling by far than the dream I'd just had.(I remember in '92 I'd pitched my tent aways from the creek, where in '86 I'd been right at the foot of the acre or so's confluence of four different channels all rushing to a head with mine just a few feet away from that loud cacophony of water; which then had occasioned amazing aural visions of four incredible deep voices far beyond anything imaginably human yet compelling and wonderful also, singing intertwining bop improvisations with the stream as orchestral accompaniment and so real I'd get up the next day after a night's amazing entertainment to try to find where people had been singing from I'd imagined then perhaps an undiscovered remnant of the indigenous Chumash tribe feasibly enhanced by intrepid visitors.(since a woman friend there Irashea is so deeply involved in reggae music and culture and a talented jazz bass clarinetist herself once presenting Tracy Chapman singing with a band so loud the sound crackled inside my ears in the old Ventura Theater with about thirty people there and a dozen or so dancing with great abandon and especially Margo McCrary and her girlfriend she'd picked up along the way and the gallon of red wine also as she'd driven us to the event, they'd consumed during the night dancing together twirling madly as if twin gyroscopes unstoppable the whole evening together on the area once seating in front of the movie screen's stage the band played from) A few years later I'd chanced to find the November '83 issue of EAST/WEST JOURNAL in an abandoned cabin in the coast range west of Merlin, OR on Silver Creek aways from the small Galice Creek community; where the previous inhabitants had invited me to try to spend a winter to help preserve their home of fifteen years they'd had to leave when their son became school age who are THE HAT PEOPLE who make and sell Elizabethan head garb at the Ashland Shakespearian Festivals. I'd been interested in the magazine because of an article about a samurai warrior who around 1850 and also then fifty years old, who'd vanquished a dozen combatants in a famous sword fight only to die himself of stomach cancer a few months later. But, once I'd taken this one of several other different issues of that same publication from a pile(in what had been an art studio built adjacent to the old miner's cabin the husband alone had initially occupied as a squatter a year before the owners found him and liked him well enough to let him stay) I'd been much more intrigued by an article about an ancient style of singing called "Hoomi Singing" which a contemporary group doing their own interpretations of was written about; that was said to've been originated 3,000 years ago by a Mongolian religious disciple trying to imitate the sound of a waterfall with his voice.

A little while after leaving that wilderness again in '92 I'd been in the VW "on the Av" in Ventura and visited MONZA MOTORS where I'd a few years earlier sold the '73 Sprint model Italian Aermacchi single cylinder 350cc motorcycle Harley-Davidson used to import and stencil their name on the vinyl on the back of the seats of until they sold out of that venture in '74 the same year the 250cc two-cycle twins had won the World Formula Motorcycle Racing Championships; that was about as exciting to H-D as the next long beer fart being anticipated in the bowels of that anachronistic muddled concern; now existent only thanks to financial bail-out during bankruptcy under the ultra right-wing Reagan administration's pimping of the nation.(aka Ray-Gun-Omics)(does rhyme with comics; though hardly any cause for humor)

While at Monza Motors(where I'd been a little earlier contemplating a nice old Suzuki 500cc two-cycle twin said to be a good bike on the road) a couple of the type of fellows one encounters there,(whose owner specializes in older well-used yet well cared for, mostly European and sometimes Asian cars and motorcycles iconic elsewhere usually not imported or at least ignored here; attracting hard core often pauper aficionados of these various models, makes and marques) that had noticed the VW parked at the trail head when I'd been camped at the Twin Forks campsite, and told me they'd seen the foot print beside my tent, of what was supposed to be a 250 pound male mountain lion which was there at home around the place.

I'd interestingly remembered after once being approached by a bobcat or lynx while laying on my back on a rock far upstream from the campsite, next to a deep pool especially nice to dive into from the rocks above and swim in the chilly waters feed from deep inside the mountain; that I'd been inside my tent and had awakened to the thought of wondering what that bobcat/lynx had smelled like; who'd been only a few feet from me when I'd turned to see what in my peripheral vision I'd thought perhaps a feral cat somehow so far up into the wilds I felt had I not looked then in the eyes of would've licked the side of my face, instead turning aside and walking without breaking stride ever so calmly across the creek beside me and up into the woods beyond as if in a neighborhood production of OUR TOWN taking to exit stage "up a ladder" so to speak.(I'd later there in the ensuing nights sometimes hear a loud "meow" as if my long lost best friend were so lonely from heart break, had been perhaps that feline's nocturnal lament!)

And just as I'd been awakened to wonder about the bobcat/lynx' smell, I'd been amazingly enveloped in a wonderfully carnivorous pungent cleanest scent, which even then I'd realized was a huge powerfully sleek mountain lion just outside my tent in the night.

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

"The only thing worse than having a car...

2008-11-25T20:42:15Z

is not having a car..."(?!)

This is what a woman in Eureka, CA told me one day as I'd stopped to chat; who lived down the block and acting as an agent for a friend of hers had rented me a room in a rooming house her friend owned and lived in, I'd moved into on the first of June of '99 after a winter spent living homeless and relying upon my '73 Windsor Carrera Sport ten-speed I still ride I'd got for $20 at the Eureka Flea Market, inoperable and repaired; when a Ballis ten-speed I'd gotten the frame for at Berkeley's Urban Ore for $2 and fixed up was stolen in Eureka.(after breaking down there in a '75 $600 Chevy van I'd been fixing up to live out of suffered terminal engine failure very unexpectedly late one night after a five minute stop to stretch my legs coming up from the east bay to check a post office box in Wenatchee, WA and perhaps attend a 25 year reunion of the Olympia, WA band OBRADOR; <http://www.obrador.org> )

When I'd been a child growing up in Eugene, OR I remember I'd gotten my first bicycle at about the same time I'd started to be also interested in cars intensely; and the two forms of transportation have always been intertwined importantly in my life, in part due to disability from congenital and juvenile spinal diseases which though ambulatory have made me more dependent on having wheeled conveyance to substantially empower me over what walking allows.(though with the attendant dependance and limitations; and since October of '86 the distinct knowledge that the atrophy of musculature in my back due to the diseases could be cured and overcome, from having done just that living a month alone climbing on my hands and knees up and down a wilderness stream bed west of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary though at the end of the month suffering the ruin of my still fragile experiment when on the third day of a three day 42 mile hike with a full pack when I'd planned to rest instead going seventeen miles thanks to a chance companion on the trail I'd become involved with I'd let pace me far beyond the thresholds of pain I'd endured as everything I'd accomplished was destroyed that afternoon and just after dark as I'd gotten back to my campsite my tent there found trashed evidently by a bear seeking a head of lettuce someone had left inside after I'd gone)

I'd chanced to notice my soon to be car the same day I'd rented the room; a '91 Ford Festiva sitting with a for sale sign on the parking lot of a LONGS DRUGS store near the $25/month dirt floored garage I'd been renting a couple of years to store the Chevy van in and where since February of '99 I'd been sleeping on the floor on sheets of cardboard with all my possessions crowded into the van; after a shelter made of a tarp and sheets of plastic in the woods at the shore of the Pacific Ocean had been taken from me by another homeless man he'd wanted to use for his girlfriend who'd been just released from the county jail.(a embattled person named Leon then in his late 20s though looking older who calls himself "Shadow" and gets his necessary materials for living out of dumpsters while spending his county relief money on methamphetamines and marijuana who eats at the Eureka Mission yet avoids spending nights there in some unusual arrangement circumventing their normal rules; who himself also has some severe problems from spinal disease or injury though unable as of that time at least, to be able to get any better government assistance, typical of many living hard bitten lives, quite willing to try to victimize anyone perceived as vulnerable with greater resources that is a "triage" the reactionary elements in society encourage and promote out of their mania to control and manipulate every situation to their own advantage by exploitation and suppression of anyone not involved in the specific hierarchies they find most beneficial to their own interests and endeavors...which on Shadow's level includes the sort of people that have continued the influences of the Ku Klux Klan in northern Humboldt county; a legacy of when the whole state of Oregon just to the north was said to've been run by the Klan in the '20s, and which the veneer of a liberal establishment over the local conservative foundations of the society there, so conveniently is always in denial about even when there is such an obvious connection...quite embellished by the huge influence of the Humboldt illegal commercial marijuana growing industry, the largest such in the country that nationwide in 2006 was the biggest cash crop that brought in more revenue than corn and wheat combined; that long ago has yielded to right-wing influence there which promotes both illegal and medical marijuana as a means of diffusing resistance on the left that also has gained for Eureka the reputation of being "the most corrupt town on the west coast," with I'd say quite a few running a close second!)

In my youth my bicycle was an active dynamic vestige carried over from childhood that remains so even now, a never forgotten often used tool which has become a virtuous interest and close companion rarely if ever abandoned and then only when one is stolen I suffer over until replaced somehow.(my current Windsor is an identical one to the only bicycle I've gotten new other than my very first bike which was a Christmas present black three-speed Schwinn racer 24" model I'd been given by my parents in guise of Santa Claus when I was eleven years old.(they'd had to replace the 26" Columbia with that had been beside the tree in our living room the morning of December 25th that year, since I was too small for the larger bike; riding the Schwinn all through high school yet whose ultimate end now I've long forgotten which likely was disposed of surreptitiously by my father when I'd been at North Texas State University the '70-'71 school year as a music student when they'd bought another house with less storage they'd moved to then) If I think I can probably recall every bicycle since the Schwinn I've had; the first Windsor Carrera Sport I'd gotten as a college student I'd earned the money for($150) working a summer here in Bellingham, WA(the first time I'd ever been here) as a ninety day student temporary for the USPS in '73 after my first year at Evergreen College in Olympia, WA; then after that had been driven over and destroyed by someone in a 4x4 pick-up in Ojai, CA who'd not liked the friend of a friend of a friend I'd left the bike with when forced to live out of my car in the mid '80s, I'd gotten a Raleigh Colt three-speed for $15 at a thrift store in Snohomish, WA early in '85 I had about $100 into eventually which I'd had to recover from the Colville Nation of Confederated Tribes at a ranch there owned by a former college professor at Evergreen I'd been chased away from the year before the fall of '89 after reading in the January 6th, 1991 issue of THE WENATCHEE WORLD of the murder of the man who I'd drank a fifth of Lemon Hart 151 proof rum with named Wovoca who the next day had been increasingly belligerant as we'd sobered until I'd finally had to leave with just the pants and shirt I'd had on and an Eb clarinet I'd had on my bicycle I'd been traveling from Spokane with along with a backpack lashed to the rear carrier and on top of that a single burner Coleman white gas stove which had been one my grandfather used for hunting.* After then I'd given the Raleigh to Spokane street musician and friend Matt Kelly, wanting to somehow perhaps temper or diffuse the energy of the return of the bicycle after such an event; though Matt always foregoing reasonable maintenance and riding with only one speed functional and the brakes usually non-existent had managed to dump and break his jaw somehow and for awhile had been in the same condition at nearly the same time as the bassist for an all male band there in town called THE RIGHTEOUS MOTHERS(when a women's group of the same name were popular in Puget Sound) who had also gotten his jaw broken while playing at recently reopened club called THE BIG DIPPER when he'd tried to step between two toughs at the bar in an argument who'd then turned up him instead.(I'd been there one night when Tim Leary had stopped by to address the gathered after a more formal speaking engagement elsewhere in town, who then had seemed exactly as he was, a withered near death bore...I guess I'd been dosed, from memories I have eating from two rows of strawberries with my mother's submarine-like '49 or '50 olive green Studebaker sedan there close by as a child of three or four; before Leary'd ever dropped LSD-from legally obtained at least Sandoz my father decades later mentioned having had some of on the shelf behind the counter of his JASTAD DRUG store in Kalama, WA in the earliest '50s which had been a business on the market as he'd finished pharmacy school after the second world war on the G. I. bill at Washington State; because the previous owner and a local M. D. had been busted for selling morphine to prostitutes from Portland, OR who'd ride the GREYHOUND the hundred miles or so north to score)

After the Raleigh Colt was gone, that used to hang from the ceiling inside my '66 VW square-back sedan I'd lived out of more or less the dozen years from '82-'94 I'd had the car(eventually sold in Spokane to Todd Molyneux then about nineteen or twenty, son of the criminal couple in the events depicted by the book and movie THE FRENCH CONNECTION born subsequently) I'd ended up January of '93 in Berkeley, CA from a mild case of frostbite on my toes sleeping in Spokane's Peaceful Valley neighborhood in the VW not far from where I'd rented an apartment nineteen months in '89 & '90 when the car had been using a quart of oil every 50 miles due to an insidious scratch on the saddle of the bearing just next to the flywheel and clutch I finally figured out during a third overhaul at 85,000 miles after the second of that motor I'd done some years previously where the negatively recommended WEST COAST motors that was a machine shop in Ventura, CA had apparently sabotaged me as their reactionary abuse from insidiously contrived opinion about my disability/SSI derived income; which fortunately I'd discovered a $25 can of SLICK-50 could stanch about ten thousand miles each application though decreasing in effectiveness as the motor aged and/or their formulae had been changed?(PONDS cold cream used to be the lubricant of choice of trombonists for their slides until this was discovered well enough the manufacturer was moved to change the cold cream's formula enough that musicians had to spend up dearly for products specific to their muse's pursuits)

In Berkeley I discovered Kevin Quillinan's hole in the wall BERKELEY BICYCLE DOCTORS tiny shop; and soon became an unpaid intern, which ultimately led to my fashioning from the $2 URBAN ORE Ballis frame a functional orange ten-speed as per usual I'd had about $100 into once dialed in as I like all my bikes, with a generator light, front and rear racks and fenders. The ten-speed just previous to the one I have now.(the bottom bracket was "ovalated" and had to be tightened very tight to prevent the unit from becoming loose again while ridden, and likely the reason the frame had cost only $2)

If anyone is interested in reading about my involvements with automobiles of the gasoline propelled sort; there is a thread I started and titled "My great sticker idea...SOMNAMBULANCE for safety!" which one person there commented was the "weirdest most amusing" they'd ever seen at FordFestiva.com. <http://www.fordfestiva.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4696>

Right now and as I have been since college in the mid '70s, I'm desperate to try to transition away from fossil fuel dependancy and into a culture and society given to carless, more carfree pusuits.(I was in Seattle recently during the demonstrations in support of same gender marriages; at a music workshop and performance there given at the Gallery 1412 collective; [ <http://www.gallery1412.org> ] and was again immersed in the gentle friendliness of urban bus riding amongst many for whom this was their primary or sole non-ambulatory way of getting around; enjoying both that and the times spent with the many other downtown bus riders and others right at the demonstration site, while awaiting our transfers or just hanging around...I had my alto saxophone in one of the several cases we use like our wardrobe which always is alluring, and I'm habitually in communication with those ariel denizens of the sidewalks whose avian habits include occasional struts up and down along the streets, which I'd never before noticed got me attention packing my alto I'd guess due to Charlie Parker's fame and prowess with my horn)

*I'd walked from just at sunset in my bare feet five miles southeast on the road from Owhi Lake until my feet were too sore to go further, when I'd made a tiny nest of dried straw and grass from beside the road to sleep in to stay warm.(in the middle of October at about five thousand feet elevation just fifty miles or so below the Canadian border in the central part of the state east of the Cascade range of mountains) That night I'd awakened four times during my sleep, from little holes I'd had to repair in the thatch that kept me warm, which had opened up and let me feel the cold night against me that the next day someone who'd given me a ride said got down to twenty-five above zero just after dawn when the temperature gets the coldest and when I'd had to start walking again to keep myself warm.(fortunately my feet had somehow toughened enough this was a pleasant experience in the still air under a clear sky as I'd sought always to find or stay in the beams of the rising sun)

The first time I woke up was the oddest, hearing what sounded like an indigenous tribal dancer coming slowly down the single lane nearly paved road towards me from Owhi Lake direction, the type of dancer with tiny bells in rows around their knees and ankles which the dancer's movements carefully articulated cause to sound with each step, "chink-chink, chink-chink, chink-chink"; as I'd listened until this person approaching me in the middle of the night was nearly upon me so that I'd rolled over from where I'd been facing a barbed wire fence my knees were nearly touching to face the road, doing so noticing the sound I'd thought had been a dancer was the wind causing a single strand telephone line and wires of the barbed wire fence to oscillate beside and above me, a tiny puff of wind somehow working along the road towards me gentle yet sensitive and strong enough to encourage such an effect.(if you read Jessie Stearn's YOGA, YOUTH AND REINCARNATION there is a passage about the woman yoga teacher Marica Moore's husband's being able to exercise a meteorological effect from his use of yoga, manipulating clouds through a conscious use of will)

Each time throughout the rest of the night when I'd awakened again with a chilly spot at my shoulder, hip or an arm; there'd been an animal beside me quietly attendant, the first either a badger or wolverine sitting with its back to me looking over one shoulder while up on their haunches, with a nearby metal culvert to flee to though as if wondering were I warm enough and seeking company?(Wovoka who in the newspaper report about his murder's sentencing for manslaughter because of the other man's post Viet Nam war traumatic stress syndrome who'd been a neighbor and friend whose fourteen year old son rumor had spread Wovoka had molested, had also been referred to as "Joel Dodson Largo" said to be from a Riverside, CA tribe whose sister I'd contacted had said he'd been a beloved brother, the male lover of my former male college professor; had mentioned having sex with both young boys and animals in what was the first and still rare discussion of the type in my experience, giving a highly reasonable, rational enough criteria to practice often discouraged and particularly maligned in the dominant society's mores...a woman friend, wife and mother who I know told me Wovoka had been bragging of his conquest of the youth in local bars for some time before his death)

The next time I'd awakened had been to see a horse standing just on the other side of the barbed wire fence next to me, though whether asleep or not I couldn't be sure. And later still that night as I'd come awake the last time before going to sleep again, in the rare "false dawn" which can sometimes occur, there'd been a tiny hawk the size of a sparrow which had circled inches above my head a couple times before flying away as quickly and silently as they'd come.

After the farmer who'd given me a lift in his red Ford half ton pick-up had left me off I'd walked awhile until I got to the east end junction of the Owhi Lake loop road and the cut-off road from the Republic-Keller Ferry highway to Nespelum I'd just a few days before pedaled over from one end to the other to get my former professor's brother in Nespelum to give me and the bike a lift in his pale blue Chevy LUV 4by to the ranch by Owhi Lake where Wovoka's cabin was I'd been told I could winter at I'd decided to at least investigate as I'd left the fall Republic Barter Faire and some friends at Frosty Creek I'd spent a week visiting after the barter faire that October of '89.(where another friend's wife was strip searched naked with a speculum in front of a crowd of people at the main faire entrance; by the DEA, the Colville tribal police and either the state patrol or county mounties, as harassment for both the set of music just finished by the local reggae band HERBIVORES now house band of the Seattle Hemp Fest which had satirically depicted the first George Bush as a crack-head running the White House and the country due to the Iran-contra scandal then, as well as the pending court case this woman's husband was involved in for allegedly growing commercial illegal marijuana who I'd been sitting with along with two of HERBIVORES members when she'd fled to us just following her ordeal)

At the junction of the east end of the Owhi Lake loop road and the Republic-Keller Ferry to Nespelum cut-off highway, I'd hitched a ride with an older native American couple driving a large '70s brown Ford country sedan station wagon; whose wife had been a friendly talkative woman who over the front seat back facing me from the passenger's side "shotgun" seat had told me they'd stopped to pick me up thinking I was "Indian Stickman" which then had made no impression of any sort on me, but later I'd figured out was because of my clarinet.(there is an interesting post about that instrument's history and how morphed into a hand's breadth long, conical bore single reed horn; which is at the current end of a thread called FERAL FAUN DISCUSSES RADICAL FEMINISM at the radical activist mental health website THE ICARUS PROJECT <http://theicarusproject.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11100&start=15> ) As I'd then been as taciturn as her husband driving their Ford along early after sunrise that morning, she'd commented on the fact we were on the first day of hunting season which had been how she'd credited the mutual near silence of the two men she was riding with then, I think with the same sort of an awareness I've had myself of the unnatural energy this legalized slaughter of the denizens of the wild imparts to their lives, so different from more traditional hunting practices is my guess?(perhaps a general sort of terror at experiencing such pursuit, that is only magnified a thousand fold as human predators converge, often with technological devices just for killing far in excess of any reasonable taker of wild game's needs)

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Mini Vans Feeling the Pinch, Too

2008-10-02T00:10:26Z

As if the automobile industry couldn't be hit any worse, mini van sales have slipped tremendously, for some brands, more than 30%. Could this be the beginning of the end for the quintessential soccer mom?

Here's the link to the story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25046105

posted in Cars Suck - 7 replies

Guerilla postering at filling stations

2008-09-23T23:54:00Z

enjoy the work of some creative guerilla artists:

http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?swf=http%3A//s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/cps-vfl56220.swf&video_id=s5RVRbLgGo0&rel=1&eurl=&iurl=http%3A//i4.ytimg.com/vi/s5RVRbLgGo0/default.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskLmJZ0GdZSR5YGIOz6cBib9&use_get_video_info=1&load_modules=1&fs=1&hl=en

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

the electric car fantasy?

2008-09-16T01:28:46Z

Electric Cars Are the Key to Energy Independence
By David Morris, AlterNet
Posted on August 2, 2008, Printed on August 2, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/93609/

Al Gore's heroic speech challenging us to make our electrical system 100 percent renewable promised it would simultaneously address three major crises: the weak economy, catastrophic climate change and the dire national security problems inherent in our dependence on imported oil.

He got two out of three right. A crash renewable electricity initiative would provide an immediate boost to our economy and could slow climate change, since electricity accounts for about a third of our overall greenhouse gas emissions.

But it would do little to enhance our national security.

Oil generates only 3 percent of our electricity. Therefore a 100 percent renewable electricity system does little to reduce our oil dependency -- unless that electricity is used to substitute for oil in our transportation system.

Al Gore knows this. In other venues he has mentioned electrified vehicles. But he needs to make electrifying our transportation the central element in his 10-year plan, for at least two reasons.

One is that it is an initiative that would prove far more compelling to the vast majority of Americans. Climate change is abstract, and the strategies to resolve it are remote. Our relationship to our vehicles, on the other hand, is both concrete and visceral. We desperately want to get off oil, especially when gasoline prices rise to $4 per gallon.

But it is more than a pocketbook issue for many of us; it is a moral issue. Americans hate being dependent for our mobility, and therefore for our livelihoods, on countries often hostile to our way of life. Electric cars promise to end that dependency.

And as a bonus, with rooftop solar cells, we can become independent not only from OPEC but from remote and often unresponsive utility companies. We can become energy producers as well as energy consumers.

And then there is the plain fact that once significant numbers of electric vehicles are on the roads, word of mouth will be a powerful marketing tool. The reason? As Marc Geller, a longtime advocate of electric vehicles, told me a year ago as we were traveling up Route 1 in Northern California in his all-electric small SUV, "Anyone who drives an electric car falls in love with an electric car." That love affair will be aided and abetted by a population eager to embrace a homegrown fuel and vehicles that offer quicker propulsion, a quiet drive and zero tailpipe emissions.

There is another persuasive reason for Gore to focus on an electrified transportation system: It is simply physically impossible to convert our entire electricity system to renewables in 10 years, but it is possible to convert our entire ground transportation system to renewable electricity within a similar time frame. That would require a national mobilization, to be sure, but it can be done.

Converting our electric system fully to renewables would require us to shut down about 80 percent of our current electricity-generating capacity, much of it low-cost, already paid off and capable of generating electricity for another 25 years or more. Moreover, to reach very high penetration rates of renewable electricity would require that we overcome the principal shortcoming of wind and sunlight: intermittency.

To electrify our transportation system, on the other hand, we could displace rather than shut down the existing system, and we would be replacing a physical stock with a relatively short life expectancy. Given the average seven-year life expectancy of existing vehicles and the high probability that we would offer an incentive for owners of older gasoline-powered vehicles to trade them in, new electric vehicles could constitute the entire fleet within a decade, and that doesn't take into account the potential for conversions of existing vehicles.

Powering 100 percent of our transportation system would require about 30 percent of the electricity generated in 2006. With a massive effort, using a combination of solar and wind power, we could generate about that much electricity by 2020.

The fact that we can even contemplate the rapid electrification of transportation is a testament to 20 years of grassroots activism at the local and state level. The enactment by Congress of a renewable electricity tax incentive in 1992 was important, but the wind energy industry did not take off until states began to mandate renewable electricity. Today more than 25 states boast such mandates. A recent report put together by a task force of California leaders urges the state to double its renewable electricity mandate to 50 percent by 2020.

We have done a great deal, from the bottom up, to increase the supply of renewable electricity. Less well known is how much we have done on the demand side of the equation, that is, the use of electricity in transportation.

A brief historical review might be in order here. The first electric utilities were born largely to serve the transportation sector, which in the late 19th century meant urban streetcars. Until 1920, transportation remained the nation's utilities' single largest customer. And as the birth of the automobile age began, electric vehicles were by far the most popular. In the late 1890s electric vehicles (EVs) outsold gasoline cars 10 to 1. Many of the first car dealerships were exclusively for EVs.

The future of transportation abruptly changed in the 1910s. Mass production of gasoline-powered cars dramatically lowered their price. The introduction of automatic ignition removed the difficult and dangerous task of cranking to start the gasoline engine. Meanwhile the infrastructure for electricity was almost nonexistent outside city boundaries, limiting the utility of electric vehicles.

For the next 70 years, electric transportation all but disappeared.

Then, in 1990, two events occurred to revive the prospects of electrified vehicles. One was a private sector initiative; the other a public sector initiative. One was technology driven; the other politically driven.

In 1990, Sony introduced the lithium ion battery. Its higher energy density quickly made it the battery of choice for electronic equipment. Over the next 10 years, as portable electronic equipment demanded more powerful and longer-lasting batteries, the lithium ion battery industry saw many technological advances. In the last five years, many variations of that battery have begun to vie for supremacy as the foundation for a new generation of electric vehicles.

The public initiative was California's Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate. Enacted in 1990, the mandate required that 2 percent of all new vehicles sold by major car manufacturers in that state be all-electric by 1998, and 10 percent by 2003. By 1994, 12 additional states had adopted its mandate.

If that mandate had remained in place, more than 10 million EVs might be traveling our roads today. But as the marvelous documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" reveals in depressing detail, the ZEV mandate was weakened in the 1990s and finally killed in 2003.

Notwithstanding its demise, the mandate did result in several important and positive outcomes. One was the hybrid vehicle, whose development was in part an outgrowth of the vigorous developments in electrical and electronic vehicle systems spurred by the ZEV mandate. Another was the advance in large-format battery technology after many decades of stagnation. The new Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery replaced the lead acid battery for ZEVs sold in California, and by the late 1990s, a second-generation NiMH promised to last the life of the car, almost halving the capital cost of an electric vehicle. (Tragically, patent disputes have stifled NiMH development.)

Perhaps the most important enduring legacy of the ZEV mandate was the creation of tens of thousands of Californians who experienced the pleasure of driving or being driven in full-size electric vehicles capable of high-speed, long-distance highway driving. "Who Killed the Electric Car?" portrays what seemed to be a futile grassroots effort to stop car companies from taking back their EVs and crushing them.

Yet even as the movie ends, the uprising began to gain traction. GM proved incorrigible. But creative and extensive protests here and abroad persuaded Ford and then Toyota to cease crushing their vehicles and begin offering them for sale. Reportedly, Chris Paine, the director of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" is making a new movie titled "Who Saved the Electric Car?" It promises to be a very uplifting sequel.

At its peak, the ZEV mandate brought some 5,500 electric vehicles onto California roads, ranging from Ford's small Think Car to Toyota's small SUV, the RAV4, to Ford's light pickup truck, the Ranger.

After the protests ended and the dust cleared, more than 800 electric vehicles were saved, most of them RAV4s. Some have now traveled more than 110,000 miles, validating both the durability of the batteries and the vehicles' remarkably low maintenance costs.

The EV movement was aided and abetted by the introduction, in 2004, of the second iteration of the Toyota Prius. The best-selling car sported a mysterious blank button on the dashboard. Via the Internet, Americans were told that in Japan the button was operational. Pushing it allowed the car to travel solely by electricity for a mile or so. Engineers in Texas and California quickly learned how to convert the Prius to drive solely on electricity, and they added sufficient battery capacity to travel 10 and then 20 and then 30 miles before recharging was needed.

Several start-ups began to offer plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) conversions. Felix Kramer, the Paul Revere of the movement, spent the next two years trying to convince national reporters, members of Congress, Silicon Valley businesses and even EV advocates, many of whom believed a car with a gas engine was a sacrilege, that a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle could become the foundation for a transition to an electrified transportation sector. Kramer convinced a leading car industry reporter based in Michigan to run a story, which quickly translated into dozens of stories in the national media. In the spring of 2006, he spent $15,000 to transport his own converted Prius PHEV to DC and allow several senators and leading policymakers and opinion leaders to literally kick the tires and drive in it.

At the time fewer than a dozen Prius conversions existed in the entire country. But the work of organizations like Plug-In America and Plug-In Partners and Kramer's own CalCars began to seize the popular imagination.

In just the last 12 months, the dam against electrified vehicles seems to have broken. For the first time since 1910, an oil-free transportation system is on the table.

New announcements by businesses large and small have become almost a weekly occurrence. Hymotion, a small company affiliated with Internet giant Google and the MIT spin-off, battery maker A123, has begun to roll out a nationwide network of certified plug-in hybrid converters.

Toyota, which for the first six years of Prius sales used the advertising tag line, "You Never Have to Plug It In," announced in 2007 an abrupt change of mind. In 2010, Toyota will begin leasing plug-in Priuses in Japan. GM, which had originally loudly and sarcastically dismissed the concept of hybrids, announced it will offer a plug-in hybrid with a 40-mile driving range in 2010. Nissan, VW, Renault and other car manufacturers have all announced their intention to introduce electric vehicles in the same time frame.

In July 2008, San Jose announced the beginning of a network of easily accessible and useable EV-charging stations in parking garages around the city. San Francisco followed with its own request for proposals for a similar citywide network.

On the political front, the current energy bill stalled in Congress because of Republican opposition: The bill contains a tax incentive for plug-ins sufficient to make the first cost of such vehicles nearly competitive with conventional vehicles.

The energy bill signed into law just before Christmas in 2007 includes a little-noticed but very powerful incentive for all-electric vehicles. For purposes of meeting the new higher fuel efficiency standards, all-electric vehicles will be awarded an efficiency rating based largely on the amount of gasoline displaced, which translates into an overall fuel efficiency rating for a typical mid-size EV of about 350 miles per gallon.

And on the customer level, gasoline prices of $4 per gallon have generated a palpable hunger for alternatives and changed the comparative economics of EVs and gasoline-powered vehicles. Driving a mile on electricity today costs about 3 cents while traveling a mile on gasoline costs about 15 cents. This can translate into annual fuel savings of more than $1,000.

The advent of EVs may change not only the contours of our transportation system but also the structure of our electricity system. The unique characteristic of the electricity system is that the product must be instantaneously transmitted and no storage capacity is available. This is the reason Enron and others were able to manipulate the system in deregulated California 10 years ago, a manipulation that led to the near bankruptcy of the state and continues to burden the state budget.

The prospect of a large battery capacity contained in tens of millions of electrified vehicles could be, in the words of one utility executive, "a game changer." Utilities, eager to nurture a potentially large new customer, are also vigorously assessing how this new electric capacity can be integrated into the existing distribution and subtransmission parts of the grid system.

Some studies have estimated that utilities could pay an EV owner several thousand dollars a year to tap into the car's batteries when needed for energy used to keep the local grid stable. The vehicle would be available for such tapping a considerable percentage of the time. A typical vehicle sits idle some 23 of 24 hours a day. Millions sit in commuter parking lots for eight hours a day.

A large storage capacity could also ameliorate the intermittency problem of renewable energy, which in turn could allow a much higher proportion of renewable electricity on the grid. One study of the Sacramento, Calif., electricity network concluded that a significant penetration of battery-powered vehicles could boost the potential wind energy contribution to about 50 percent of total electricity generation.

EVs might spur a profound relocalization of our electricity system. I discovered the intimate link between electric vehicles and decentralized electricity in the spring of 2007, when I spent a week in California driving or being driven in a variety of electrified vehicles, from glorified golf carts to PHEVs to the "0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds" Tesla. I was invited by a national travel magazine to investigate the future of the car based on my 2003 report on the subject, "A Better Way." Everyone I met who had an EV or a PHEV also had solar cells on their roofs. And why not? Not only does it make them more energy self-reliant, but the value of the electricity generated by the solar array is far higher when it displaces gasoline than when it displaces conventional electricity.

Indeed, a symbiotic relationship between car and house may be emerging. California has time-of-day tariffs under which electricity consumed at peak hours, say, midday on a hot summer's day, can be several times more expensive than electricity consumed during nighttime odd-peak hours. If EV owners must use electricity at peak times, they can tap into the stored electricity in their vehicles. The EV serves as a source of backup power for the house. More than one EV owner boasted about how his was the only house with lights on when the neighborhood suffered a blackout.

If Congress enacts its electrified vehicle incentive, we should see an immediate surge in conversions and new PHEV and EV sales. In 2010 several EV and PHEV models should be available from major car companies, albeit in small quantities, and these should allow us to gauge the costs of an all-electric transportation system.

If I were Al Gore, I would ask Congress not only to pass the EV incentive but also to phase in a mandate for an all-renewable-fueled transportation fleet, perhaps beginning with 5 percent of all new vehicles by 2012 and moving toward 100 percent by 2020. A call to arms would resonate with the American public. And as both consumers and citizens, Americans could quickly translate their support into a mass movement to finally eliminate our addiction to oil.

David Morris is vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. His report on the future of transportation, Driving Our Way to Energy Independence, was published in April 2008. He is also the author of Self-Reliant Cities (Sierra Club Books, 1982).

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/93609/

Electric Cars Are the Key to Energy Independence
By David Morris, AlterNet
Posted on August 2, 2008, Printed on August 2, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/93609/

Al Gore's heroic speech challenging us to make our electrical system 100 percent renewable promised it would simultaneously address three major crises: the weak economy, catastrophic climate change and the dire national security problems inherent in our dependence on imported oil.

He got two out of three right. A crash renewable electricity initiative would provide an immediate boost to our economy and could slow climate change, since electricity accounts for about a third of our overall greenhouse gas emissions.

But it would do little to enhance our national security.

Oil generates only 3 percent of our electricity. Therefore a 100 percent renewable electricity system does little to reduce our oil dependency -- unless that electricity is used to substitute for oil in our transportation system.

Al Gore knows this. In other venues he has mentioned electrified vehicles. But he needs to make electrifying our transportation the central element in his 10-year plan, for at least two reasons.

One is that it is an initiative that would prove far more compelling to the vast majority of Americans. Climate change is abstract, and the strategies to resolve it are remote. Our relationship to our vehicles, on the other hand, is both concrete and visceral. We desperately want to get off oil, especially when gasoline prices rise to $4 per gallon.

But it is more than a pocketbook issue for many of us; it is a moral issue. Americans hate being dependent for our mobility, and therefore for our livelihoods, on countries often hostile to our way of life. Electric cars promise to end that dependency.

And as a bonus, with rooftop solar cells, we can become independent not only from OPEC but from remote and often unresponsive utility companies. We can become energy producers as well as energy consumers.

And then there is the plain fact that once significant numbers of electric vehicles are on the roads, word of mouth will be a powerful marketing tool. The reason? As Marc Geller, a longtime advocate of electric vehicles, told me a year ago as we were traveling up Route 1 in Northern California in his all-electric small SUV, "Anyone who drives an electric car falls in love with an electric car." That love affair will be aided and abetted by a population eager to embrace a homegrown fuel and vehicles that offer quicker propulsion, a quiet drive and zero tailpipe emissions.

There is another persuasive reason for Gore to focus on an electrified transportation system: It is simply physically impossible to convert our entire electricity system to renewables in 10 years, but it is possible to convert our entire ground transportation system to renewable electricity within a similar time frame. That would require a national mobilization, to be sure, but it can be done.

Converting our electric system fully to renewables would require us to shut down about 80 percent of our current electricity-generating capacity, much of it low-cost, already paid off and capable of generating electricity for another 25 years or more. Moreover, to reach very high penetration rates of renewable electricity would require that we overcome the principal shortcoming of wind and sunlight: intermittency.

To electrify our transportation system, on the other hand, we could displace rather than shut down the existing system, and we would be replacing a physical stock with a relatively short life expectancy. Given the average seven-year life expectancy of existing vehicles and the high probability that we would offer an incentive for owners of older gasoline-powered vehicles to trade them in, new electric vehicles could constitute the entire fleet within a decade, and that doesn't take into account the potential for conversions of existing vehicles.

Powering 100 percent of our transportation system would require about 30 percent of the electricity generated in 2006. With a massive effort, using a combination of solar and wind power, we could generate about that much electricity by 2020.

The fact that we can even contemplate the rapid electrification of transportation is a testament to 20 years of grassroots activism at the local and state level. The enactment by Congress of a renewable electricity tax incentive in 1992 was important, but the wind energy industry did not take off until states began to mandate renewable electricity. Today more than 25 states boast such mandates. A recent report put together by a task force of California leaders urges the state to double its renewable electricity mandate to 50 percent by 2020.

We have done a great deal, from the bottom up, to increase the supply of renewable electricity. Less well known is how much we have done on the demand side of the equation, that is, the use of electricity in transportation.

A brief historical review might be in order here. The first electric utilities were born largely to serve the transportation sector, which in the late 19th century meant urban streetcars. Until 1920, transportation remained the nation's utilities' single largest customer. And as the birth of the automobile age began, electric vehicles were by far the most popular. In the late 1890s electric vehicles (EVs) outsold gasoline cars 10 to 1. Many of the first car dealerships were exclusively for EVs.

The future of transportation abruptly changed in the 1910s. Mass production of gasoline-powered cars dramatically lowered their price. The introduction of automatic ignition removed the difficult and dangerous task of cranking to start the gasoline engine. Meanwhile the infrastructure for electricity was almost nonexistent outside city boundaries, limiting the utility of electric vehicles.

For the next 70 years, electric transportation all but disappeared.

Then, in 1990, two events occurred to revive the prospects of electrified vehicles. One was a private sector initiative; the other a public sector initiative. One was technology driven; the other politically driven.

In 1990, Sony introduced the lithium ion battery. Its higher energy density quickly made it the battery of choice for electronic equipment. Over the next 10 years, as portable electronic equipment demanded more powerful and longer-lasting batteries, the lithium ion battery industry saw many technological advances. In the last five years, many variations of that battery have begun to vie for supremacy as the foundation for a new generation of electric vehicles.

The public initiative was California's Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate. Enacted in 1990, the mandate required that 2 percent of all new vehicles sold by major car manufacturers in that state be all-electric by 1998, and 10 percent by 2003. By 1994, 12 additional states had adopted its mandate.

If that mandate had remained in place, more than 10 million EVs might be traveling our roads today. But as the marvelous documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" reveals in depressing detail, the ZEV mandate was weakened in the 1990s and finally killed in 2003.

Notwithstanding its demise, the mandate did result in several important and positive outcomes. One was the hybrid vehicle, whose development was in part an outgrowth of the vigorous developments in electrical and electronic vehicle systems spurred by the ZEV mandate. Another was the advance in large-format battery technology after many decades of stagnation. The new Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery replaced the lead acid battery for ZEVs sold in California, and by the late 1990s, a second-generation NiMH promised to last the life of the car, almost halving the capital cost of an electric vehicle. (Tragically, patent disputes have stifled NiMH development.)

Perhaps the most important enduring legacy of the ZEV mandate was the creation of tens of thousands of Californians who experienced the pleasure of driving or being driven in full-size electric vehicles capable of high-speed, long-distance highway driving. "Who Killed the Electric Car?" portrays what seemed to be a futile grassroots effort to stop car companies from taking back their EVs and crushing them.

Yet even as the movie ends, the uprising began to gain traction. GM proved incorrigible. But creative and extensive protests here and abroad persuaded Ford and then Toyota to cease crushing their vehicles and begin offering them for sale. Reportedly, Chris Paine, the director of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" is making a new movie titled "Who Saved the Electric Car?" It promises to be a very uplifting sequel.

At its peak, the ZEV mandate brought some 5,500 electric vehicles onto California roads, ranging from Ford's small Think Car to Toyota's small SUV, the RAV4, to Ford's light pickup truck, the Ranger.

After the protests ended and the dust cleared, more than 800 electric vehicles were saved, most of them RAV4s. Some have now traveled more than 110,000 miles, validating both the durability of the batteries and the vehicles' remarkably low maintenance costs.

The EV movement was aided and abetted by the introduction, in 2004, of the second iteration of the Toyota Prius. The best-selling car sported a mysterious blank button on the dashboard. Via the Internet, Americans were told that in Japan the button was operational. Pushing it allowed the car to travel solely by electricity for a mile or so. Engineers in Texas and California quickly learned how to convert the Prius to drive solely on electricity, and they added sufficient battery capacity to travel 10 and then 20 and then 30 miles before recharging was needed.

Several start-ups began to offer plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) conversions. Felix Kramer, the Paul Revere of the movement, spent the next two years trying to convince national reporters, members of Congress, Silicon Valley businesses and even EV advocates, many of whom believed a car with a gas engine was a sacrilege, that a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle could become the foundation for a transition to an electrified transportation sector. Kramer convinced a leading car industry reporter based in Michigan to run a story, which quickly translated into dozens of stories in the national media. In the spring of 2006, he spent $15,000 to transport his own converted Prius PHEV to DC and allow several senators and leading policymakers and opinion leaders to literally kick the tires and drive in it.

At the time fewer than a dozen Prius conversions existed in the entire country. But the work of organizations like Plug-In America and Plug-In Partners and Kramer's own CalCars began to seize the popular imagination.

In just the last 12 months, the dam against electrified vehicles seems to have broken. For the first time since 1910, an oil-free transportation system is on the table.

New announcements by businesses large and small have become almost a weekly occurrence. Hymotion, a small company affiliated with Internet giant Google and the MIT spin-off, battery maker A123, has begun to roll out a nationwide network of certified plug-in hybrid converters.

Toyota, which for the first six years of Prius sales used the advertising tag line, "You Never Have to Plug It In," announced in 2007 an abrupt change of mind. In 2010, Toyota will begin leasing plug-in Priuses in Japan. GM, which had originally loudly and sarcastically dismissed the concept of hybrids, announced it will offer a plug-in hybrid with a 40-mile driving range in 2010. Nissan, VW, Renault and other car manufacturers have all announced their intention to introduce electric vehicles in the same time frame.

In July 2008, San Jose announced the beginning of a network of easily accessible and useable EV-charging stations in parking garages around the city. San Francisco followed with its own request for proposals for a similar citywide network.

On the political front, the current energy bill stalled in Congress because of Republican opposition: The bill contains a tax incentive for plug-ins sufficient to make the first cost of such vehicles nearly competitive with conventional vehicles.

The energy bill signed into law just before Christmas in 2007 includes a little-noticed but very powerful incentive for all-electric vehicles. For purposes of meeting the new higher fuel efficiency standards, all-electric vehicles will be awarded an efficiency rating based largely on the amount of gasoline displaced, which translates into an overall fuel efficiency rating for a typical mid-size EV of about 350 miles per gallon.

And on the customer level, gasoline prices of $4 per gallon have generated a palpable hunger for alternatives and changed the comparative economics of EVs and gasoline-powered vehicles. Driving a mile on electricity today costs about 3 cents while traveling a mile on gasoline costs about 15 cents. This can translate into annual fuel savings of more than $1,000.

The advent of EVs may change not only the contours of our transportation system but also the structure of our electricity system. The unique characteristic of the electricity system is that the product must be instantaneously transmitted and no storage capacity is available. This is the reason Enron and others were able to manipulate the system in deregulated California 10 years ago, a manipulation that led to the near bankruptcy of the state and continues to burden the state budget.

The prospect of a large battery capacity contained in tens of millions of electrified vehicles could be, in the words of one utility executive, "a game changer." Utilities, eager to nurture a potentially large new customer, are also vigorously assessing how this new electric capacity can be integrated into the existing distribution and subtransmission parts of the grid system.

Some studies have estimated that utilities could pay an EV owner several thousand dollars a year to tap into the car's batteries when needed for energy used to keep the local grid stable. The vehicle would be available for such tapping a considerable percentage of the time. A typical vehicle sits idle some 23 of 24 hours a day. Millions sit in commuter parking lots for eight hours a day.

A large storage capacity could also ameliorate the intermittency problem of renewable energy, which in turn could allow a much higher proportion of renewable electricity on the grid. One study of the Sacramento, Calif., electricity network concluded that a significant penetration of battery-powered vehicles could boost the potential wind energy contribution to about 50 percent of total electricity generation.

EVs might spur a profound relocalization of our electricity system. I discovered the intimate link between electric vehicles and decentralized electricity in the spring of 2007, when I spent a week in California driving or being driven in a variety of electrified vehicles, from glorified golf carts to PHEVs to the "0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds" Tesla. I was invited by a national travel magazine to investigate the future of the car based on my 2003 report on the subject, "A Better Way." Everyone I met who had an EV or a PHEV also had solar cells on their roofs. And why not? Not only does it make them more energy self-reliant, but the value of the electricity generated by the solar array is far higher when it displaces gasoline than when it displaces conventional electricity.

Indeed, a symbiotic relationship between car and house may be emerging. California has time-of-day tariffs under which electricity consumed at peak hours, say, midday on a hot summer's day, can be several times more expensive than electricity consumed during nighttime odd-peak hours. If EV owners must use electricity at peak times, they can tap into the stored electricity in their vehicles. The EV serves as a source of backup power for the house. More than one EV owner boasted about how his was the only house with lights on when the neighborhood suffered a blackout.

If Congress enacts its electrified vehicle incentive, we should see an immediate surge in conversions and new PHEV and EV sales. In 2010 several EV and PHEV models should be available from major car companies, albeit in small quantities, and these should allow us to gauge the costs of an all-electric transportation system.

If I were Al Gore, I would ask Congress not only to pass the EV incentive but also to phase in a mandate for an all-renewable-fueled transportation fleet, perhaps beginning with 5 percent of all new vehicles by 2012 and moving toward 100 percent by 2020. A call to arms would resonate with the American public. And as both consumers and citizens, Americans could quickly translate their support into a mass movement to finally eliminate our addiction to oil.

David Morris is vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. His report on the future of transportation, Driving Our Way to Energy Independence, was published in April 2008. He is also the author of Self-Reliant Cities (Sierra Club Books, 1982).

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/93609/

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Bad news

2008-09-16T01:12:46Z

I recently heard in the news that the price of gas is going down. Of course that means there may be more drivers on the road who will further pollute the biosphere and kill and injure more innocent people with their cars. Not to memtion the fact that this might discourge the development of alternative energy systems.

posted in Cars Suck - 8 replies

social costs of transportation

2008-09-02T14:03:45Z

A groundbreaking federal study has calculated the "social costs" of operating cars, trucks, planes, trains and boats across Canada at up to $40 billion a year.

The study for the first time attempts to put a national price tag on the unwanted byproducts of transport, that is, accidents, pollution, congestion, noise and greenhouse gases.

The findings, released without fanfare in late August, are the result of a five-year project that drew widely on experts from academia, industry and the provinces.

Using statistics for the year 2000, the task force found that the often-hidden social costs for all modes of transport ranged between $24.4 billion and $39.5 billion — or up to 17 per cent of the total costs of transport that year.

]....[

The study also tried to compare social costs in Canada with other countries. Canadian accident costs, for example, were generally in line with those in Britain and Europe but were less than half the level for the United States.

"The high transportation accident cost in the United States can be explained in part by the higher rate of transportation accident related death observed in that country ... more than 15 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to about 10 per 100,000 for Canada," the report says.

]....[

read more:
http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/09/01/mtl-socialcosttransportstudy0901.html

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Hit-and-run drivers are the suckiest!

2008-06-25T13:41:08Z

http://youtube.com/watch?v=J_E3ldpFbjo

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

This Land is Their Land...

2008-06-15T19:34:40Z

I know this isn't about cars ~ but it hints at some of the other underlying problems, i.e. the inequality of wealth, the gobbling up of beautiful places by the super-wealthy, and the forced migration of the poorer classes thereby exacerbating a commuting problem in many places.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This Land Is Their Land By Barbara Ehrenreich
This article appeared in the June 30, 2008 edition of The Nation.

June 11, 2008

I took a little vacation recently--nine hours in Sun Valley, Idaho, before an evening speaking engagement. The sky was deep blue, the air crystalline, the hills green and not yet on fire. Strolling out of the Sun Valley Lodge, I found a tiny tourist village, complete with Swiss-style bakery, multistar restaurant and "opera house." What luck--the boutiques were displaying outdoor racks of summer clothing on sale! Nature and commerce were conspiring to make this the perfect micro-vacation.

But as I approached the stores things started to get a little sinister--maybe I had wandered into a movie set or Paris Hilton's closet?--because even at a 60 percent discount, I couldn't find a sleeveless cotton shirt for less than $100. These items shouldn't have been outdoors; they should have been in locked glass cases.

Then I remembered the general rule, which has been in effect since sometime in the 1990s: if a place is truly beautiful, you can't afford to be there. All right, I'm sure there are still exceptions--a few scenic spots not yet eaten up by mansions. But they're going fast.

About ten years ago, for example, a friend and I rented a snug, inexpensive one-bedroom house in Driggs, Idaho, just over the Teton Range from wealthy Jackson Hole, Wyoming. At that time, Driggs was where the workers lived, driving over the Teton Pass every day to wait tables and make beds on the stylish side of the mountains. The point is, we low-rent folks got to wake up to the same scenery the rich people enjoyed and hike along the same pine-shadowed trails.

But the money was already starting to pour into Driggs--Paul Allen of Microsoft, August Busch III of Anheuser-Busch, Harrison Ford--transforming family potato farms into vast dynastic estates. I haven't been back, but I understand Driggs has become another unaffordable Jackson Hole. Where the wait staff and bed-makers live today I do not know.

I witnessed this kind of deterioration up close in Key West, Florida, where I first went in 1986, attracted not only by the turquoise waters and frangipani-scented nights but by the fluid, egalitarian social scene. At a typical party you might find literary stars like Alison Lurie, Annie Dillard and Robert Stone, along with commercial fishermen, waitresses and men who risked their lives diving for treasure (once a major blue-collar occupation). Then, at some point in the '90s, the rich started pouring in. You'd see them on the small planes coming down from Miami--taut-skinned, linen-clad and impatient. They drove house prices into the seven-figure range. They encouraged restaurants to charge upward of $30 for an entree. They tore down working-class tiki bars to make room for their waterfront "condotels."

Of all the crimes of the rich, the aesthetic deprivation of the rest of us may seem to be the merest misdemeanor. Many of them owe their wealth to the usual tricks: squeezing their employees, overcharging their customers and polluting any land they're not going to need for their third or fourth homes. Once they've made (or inherited) their fortunes, the rich can bid up the price of goods that ordinary people also need--housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace rural Americans into trailer homes. Similarly, the rich can easily fork over annual tuitions of $50,000 and up, which has helped make college education a privilege of the upper classes.

There are other ways, too, that the rich are robbing the rest of us of beauty and pleasure. As the bleachers in stadiums and arenas are cleared to make way for skybox "suites" costing more than $100,000 for a season, going out to a ballgame has become prohibitively expensive for the average family. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, superrich collectors have driven up the price of artworks, leading museums to charge ever rising prices for admission.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the Pew Research Center finds happiness to be unequally distributed, with 50 percent of people earning more than $150,000 a year describing themselves as "very happy," compared with only 23 percent of those earning less than $20,000. When nations are compared, inequality itself seems to reduce well-being, with some of the most equal nations--Iceland and Norway--ranking highest, according to the UN's Human Development Index. We are used to thinking that poverty is a "social problem" and wealth is only something to celebrate, but extreme wealth is also a social problem, and the superrich have become a burden on everyone else.

If Edward O. Wilson is right about "biophilia"--an innate human need to interact with nature--there may even be serious mental health consequences to letting the rich hog all the good scenery. I know that if I don't get to see vast expanses of water, 360-degree horizons and mountains piercing the sky for at least a week or two of the year, chronic, cumulative claustrophobia sets in. According to evolutionary psychologist Nancy Etcoff, the need for scenery is hard-wired into us. "People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they like somewhere to go where they can not be seen themselves," she told Harvard Magazine last year. "That's a place desirable to a predator who wants to avoid becoming prey." We also like to be able to see water (for drinking), low-canopy trees (for shade) and animals (whose presence signals that a place is habitable).

Ultimately, the plutocratic takeover of rural America has a downside for the wealthy too. The more expensive a resort town gets, the farther its workers have to commute to keep it functioning. And if your heart doesn't bleed for the dishwasher or landscaper who commutes two to four hours a day, at least shed a tear for the wealthy vacationer who gets stuck in the ensuing traffic. It's bumper to bumper westbound out of Telluride, Colorado, every day at 5, or eastbound on Route 1 out of Key West, for the Lexuses as well as the beat-up old pickup trucks.

Or a place may simply run out of workers. Monroe County, which includes Key West, has seen more than 2,000 workers leave since the 2000 Census, a loss the Los Angeles Times calls "a body blow to the service-oriented economy of a county with only 75,000 residents and 2.25 million overnight visitors a year." Among those driven out by rents of more than $1,600 for a one-bedroom apartment are many of Key West's wait staff, hotel housekeepers, gardeners, plumbers and handymen. No matter how much money you have, everything takes longer--from getting a toilet fixed to getting a fish sandwich at Pepe's.

Then there's the elusive element of charm, which quickly drains away in a uniform population of multimillionaires. The Hamptons had their fishermen. Key West still advertises its "characters"--sun-bleached, weather-beaten misfits who drifted down for the weather or to escape some difficult situation on the mainland. But the fishermen are long gone from the Hamptons and disappearing from Cape Cod. As for Key West's characters--with the traditional little conch houses once favored by shrimpers flipped into million-dollar second homes, these human sources of local color have to be prepared to sleep with the scorpions under the highway overpass.

In Telluride even a local developer is complaining about the lack of affordable housing. "To have a real town," he told the Financial Times, "Telluride needs some locals hanging out"--in old-fashioned diners, for example, where you don't have to speak Italian to order a cup of coffee.

When I was a child, I sang "America the Beautiful" and meant it. I was born in the Rocky Mountains and raised, at various times, on the coasts. The Big Sky, the rolling surf, the jagged, snowcapped mountains--all this seemed to be my birthright. But now I flinch when I hear Woody Guthrie's line "This land was made for you and me." Somehow, I don't think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge-fund operators.

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Anti road protest in the Netherlands

2008-06-14T08:14:51Z

Through the environmental movement i have been involved in many actions to stop the building new roads and/or expansion of airports.

The latest protest involves expansion plans of the highway near Amsterdam, the so called
A6 – A9 right through a beautiful area.

Here are some links, they are in dutch but the pictures tell more than a thousand words.

http://vroegevogels.vara.nl/portal?_scr=article_4&id=189675

http://www.milieudefensie.nl/verkeer/activiteiten/fotogalerij/a6a9-2005/photoalbum_photo_view?b_start:int=0

http://www.vechtvoordevecht.nl/

www.tegena6a9.nl

http://www.weesptegena6-a9.nl/

http://www.natuurmonumenten.nl/a6-a9/van_onschatbare_waarde/van_onschatbare_waarde/06070510_ijzersterke_argumenten_voor_natuurbehoud.htm

Is there also an anti road protest in your area? I am interested (language does not matter).

Greetings Harmen

posted in Cars Suck - 13 replies

The Universality of Bicycles

2008-06-09T08:30:13Z

A friend of friend of mine just got married to a young lady from the United Kingdom, and he's decided that he's going to move there permanently to live with her in the early parts of 2009. The problem is, he loves his car, and he wanted to ship it there (I mentioned to the friend that that is completely ridiculous and that the cost to ship it would be ridiculous, as well), but he insists. But, then it hits him: our British friends drive on the left-hand-side of the road. Secondly, he will have to learn to fill-up in liters, as opposed to, gallons and so on. Then it hits ME. I started to think about how universal the bicycle is. If I grew really attached to my bicycle and had to move to another country, the only thing I would have to worry about are local bicycling laws, but that would be it. I would be ready to go. I would not have half the worries and "things to think about" that my friend has. Just another wonderful thing about human-powered vehicles (HPV's). : )

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

Americans are driving less...

2008-06-05T23:15:10Z

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?4232

Passing on Gas—Americans Are Driving Less
June 3, 2008
Reporting by Roddy Scheer

Public transportation ridership was up 2.1 percent in 2007.
With the average price of a gallon of gasoline topping $4 in some parts of the country, Americans have cut back on driving at an unprecedented rate. The U.S. Department of Transportation announced last week that figures from March 2008 show the largest decrease in driving ever recorded, with Americans driving 4.3 percent less—some 11 billion fewer road miles—than during March 2007. The federal government started keeping records in 1942 at the dawn of the highway age.

In an indication that the trend toward less driving continues, the American Automobile Association (AAA) reports that Americans said they were planning to drive less over the Memorial Day holiday weekend than they did the year before.

Less driving also means less gas consumption. The federal Energy Information Administration reported that gas consumption for the first three months of 2008 is estimated to be down about 0.6 percent from the same time period in 2007.

Not surprisingly, public transportation ridership was up some 2.1 percent in 2007, in large part due to rising gas prices, according to the nonprofit American Public Transportation Association. The group added that Americans hadn’t patronized public transportation to such a high degree—some 10.3 billion trips—in half a century.

Source: CNN

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to E/The Environmental Magazine!

posted in Cars Suck - 8 replies

False Perception in Auto -vs- Mass Transit Arguments

2008-05-29T02:17:25Z

On my way home, travelling on the 97 Northbound from Miami-Dade College where I work, I closed the novel I was reading and I began thinking about a conversation that I had with one of my coworkers who said it takes him 8 minutes during non-peak hours to get home via his personal automobile. And, he said, taking the bus cannot beat that by a long shot. A day or so lapsed, and I couldn't help but think that he lived several neighborhoods away, And there is one traffic light at the entrance/exit of the campus that takes at least 1 minute to change, on some days. Upon further prying, however, my coworker broke down and admitted that he drives, on average, 60 miles an hour! This surprised me, as the major thouroughfares that he would take home would have a maximum speed limit of 45.

So, no wonder motorist have this false perception of the time it takes to get from A to B. They speed! So, it is an unfair comparison, then, to use "time" as the only factor in deciding on whether to utilize mass transit. In rush hour where motorists have no choice but to chug along bumper to bumper with the buses, I've observed that buses arrive at their respective destinations practically the same time as personal automobiles, and in some cases before.

Most motorist, especially here in South Florida, do not obey the posted speed limit and -- therefore -- should not use commute time as a factor in deciding to use mass transit because bus operators MUST obey the law and are required to pick up passengers along the way. All things being equal (meaning that both motorists and bus operators utilize the same speed and are going in the same direction), mass transit still wins out on busy thoroughfares, even on short trips.

posted in Cars Suck - 12 replies

gender and automobility

2008-05-28T21:27:31Z

how does car culture interact with male and female stereotypes
like in marketing
or in urban legends?

what kind of cars are femmy or macho?

how do cars suck sexually?

posted in Cars Suck - 10 replies

Climate change and cars

2008-05-23T09:12:08Z

Why are there always ten car and travel commercials after they did admit that human induced climate change is real.

It is caused by cars and airplanes, they should tell the truth!

Is money the reason?

posted in Cars Suck - 22 replies

Bike activists going guerrilla

2008-05-23T05:08:28Z

Bike activists going guerrilla
Cycling `repair squad' takes to the streets over slow expansion of bike lane program
Jun 18, 2007 04:30 AM
Robyn Doolittle
Staff Reporter

Standing beside two parked cars, two men in dark baseball hats wait for the signal.

It's broad daylight and nearly rush hour on Bloor. A woman in paint-stained jeans sprints ahead of the men, scanning the street. Another stations herself across the road, surveying the speeding cars for police. The thumbs-up sign is given.

The painting can begin.

Seconds later, a cardboard bike stencil is thrown on the road and the first of seven cans of hot pink paint is emptied on a stretch of Bloor St. W.

"Putting in a bike lane?" asks a teenage girl cycling by.

Putting in bike lanes is exactly what the Other Urban Repair Squad does. Last week, the group of vigilante cyclists hit a stretch of Bloor between Ossington Ave. and Dufferin St.

The two-hour effort it took to put down the lane is meant to protest how long it has taken the city to expand its bike lane program.

"The city is taking way too long...Why don't they just paint the bike lanes? People are dying." Leader of the Other Urban Repair Squad

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/226454

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

The high gas price fantasy

2008-05-15T23:33:53Z

These days, I like to fantasize that the price of gas gets so high -- $10, $20 or more a gallon -- that American auto use goes down dramatically. So dramitically that you see more bikes and mass transit than you see cars on the road. But I suspect that most Americans are so car-obsessed that they'll still drive even if gas was $100 a gallon.

posted in Cars Suck - 6 replies

Big cities try to ease way for bicyclists

2008-05-14T00:36:35Z

Go baby go!
-----------------------------------------
Big cities try to ease way for bicyclists
By Charisse Jones
USA TODAY

Cities are accelerating their efforts to encourage commuting on two wheels, putting bike racks where cars once parked, adding bike lanes and considering European-style bike-share programs to get residents out of their cars.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino last month named a former national cycling champion to be the city's director of bike planning. The city is identifying the best roads for bicycling in a mapping project that cyclists eventually may be able to access online. It also plans to add 250 bike racks by next fall and this month will hold a summit of cycling experts to determine a long-term bike strategy.

"There's never been so much attention from cities collectively for cycling as a mode of transportation," says Loren Mooney, executive editor of Bicycling magazine. "Cities are recognizing that it is a realistic and inexpensive solution to a lot of different problems — to the traffic issues, to pollution issues, to personal health issues because instead of sitting in cars for an hour you have people out burning calories."

Other cities taking steps:

•New York for the first time is creating a special lane, modeled on those used in European cities such as Copenhagen, Denmark, that will separate bicyclists from motorists. The Ninth Avenue bike lane in Manhattan is being built between a sidewalk and a lane for parked cars.

"We're re-imagining the streets of New York," says Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's transportation commissioner. Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to add 200 miles of bike lanes by 2010 to serve a growing population. "The city is going to add a million new residents over the next 25 years," Sadik-Khan says.

Inspectors recently began focusing specifically on bike lanes, looking for potholes and other problems. "We're going to have to look at greener modes of transportation … and reduce our reliance on cars to get around town," she says.

•Chicago is striving by 2015 to have 5% of all trips shorter than 5 miles to be taken by bicycle. Mayor Richard Daley also is considering launching a bike program he saw in Paris. That effort, begun in July, allows residents and visitors to check out a bike at one location, ride free during the first half-hour and park the bike at another location near their destination.

•San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose city is considered one of the friendliest to cyclists by the League of American Bicyclists, says he wants at least 10% of all trips in the city within three years to be made by bicycle.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will vote next month on a contract with Clear Channel Outdoor Inc. to create a bike-share program like that in Paris in exchange for advertising rights on transit shelters. The city also has given away 2,500 bike lights and 400 children's bike helmets this year.

"This whole movement has taken place in tandem with resurging interest in cities and developing downtowns," says Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group that promotes walking, cycling and public transit in New York City.

Some analysts doubt that these initiatives will have much of an effect on traffic.

"I don't think encouraging cycling is going to reduce congestion or significantly change the transportation makeup of our cities," says Randal O'Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. "There really is very little evidence that any of (these efforts) are reducing the amount of driving. They're just making it more annoying to drivers."

Some city officials and cycling advocates acknowledge that obstacles remain for bicyclists.

New York residents often express worries about safely navigating city traffic on two wheels and finding secure places to park their bikes, Sadik-Khan and Steely White say.

"It's fine to encourage people to ride their bikes to work," Sadik-Khan says, "but what do they do when they get there?"

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-10-07-bicyclists_N.htm

posted in Cars Suck - 6 replies

big car dissin in pdx

2008-05-08T04:16:08Z

hey dju kids know about the big conference comin up in protalandia organ?

http://carfreeportland.org/

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

Ha-ha! Your car is stuck in the snow!

2008-04-30T23:55:41Z

I love the sight of cars stuck in the snow. It exemplies yet another disadvantage of car ownership.

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Happy Earth Day!

2008-04-22T22:49:08Z

Hey Everyone,

Check out this new video from the president of Environmental Defense, Fred Krupp on the achievements that they've worked on the last 38 years since Earth Day started and why we have to start today with energy for changing global warming...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OUmG2bG2BQ

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

America's Epidemic THE SUV'

2008-03-23T22:27:20Z

Has anyone noticed that depite Global Warming,Environmental Issues and the Impact that 8-14 MPG SUV's make on the Earth's fragile footprint,Car Makers are STILL Making and Promoting these Behemoths?
With Peak Oil just around the corner and 3.60 a Gallon Gasoline one would think today's Automotive manufacturers would make "sensible Cars" available to everyone.
Sure we have "Hybrids",but those are as of yet,only available to person's who can afford them. Hybrid's are either Big Behemoths with only 'slightly better MPG" or they are tiny cramped Sedans one cannot fit a family of four inside.
America's highways and roads are still choked with Ford Explorers,Lincoln Navigators,Honda Pilots and other "Hulking SUV's"
Why hasn't the Auto Industry addressed the "SUV Problem"?
NO Vehicle allowed to be Registered in America should get LESS than 30MPG yet lets look at the Most Popular SUV List:
Ford Explorer-14mpg City-21 Highway(if your LUCKY and have a tailwind)
Honda Pilot- 15mpg City-22mpg Highway.(the best of the "Hulks")
Ford Expedition-13mpg City-17mpg Highway.
GMC Yukon Denali- 13mpg City-18mpg Highway.
Caddie Escalade-13mpg City-19mpg Highway.
Dodge "Power Wagon" 12mpg City-16mpg Highway.
Lincoln Navigator-14mpg City-19 mpg Highway.
Lexus-14mpg City-19mpg Highway.
Mercedes-13mpg City-17mpg Highway.
So..why hasn't Our Automaker's answered the need for BETTER MPG?
Any thoughts?

posted in Cars Suck - 6 replies

PSA with a surprise message

2008-03-22T23:34:42Z

reposted from another tribe, this is a PSA from the UK that has a surprising tie-in:

http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

I don't want to give it away, so have a look and tell us what you thought.

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

The EMP fantasy

2008-01-30T03:23:02Z

I often wish that I had some kind of electro-magnetic pulse gun I could use to shoot at murderous drivers so I could incapacitate their four-wheeled weapons of death! If you're not going to use the technology properly, you have no right to use it!

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

The 'Cell Phone Problem'.

2007-12-29T11:18:55Z

in 0'6 Flanneuse began a thread on this topic and only three members responded.
It's time to bring the Cell Phone While Driving Problem up again.
I'm not against Cell Phones,I carry one myself. Cell Phones are invaluable to those of us who MUST DRIVE to make a living becuase help is always a 'speed-dial away' if your vehicle breaks down.
Federal Highway Safety Regulators now state VERY CLEARLY that Using a Cell Phone while Driving is now the #2 Cuase of ALL Fatal Motor Vehicle accidents behind Drunk Drivers(#1) Several States have enacted Laws wich prohibit Cell Phone use while driving a Motor Vehicle Why? lets look at a few reasons why Cell Phones cause Accidents:
let's start with the Phones themselves.
Most Cell Phones are either the clamshell type or a tiny flat-panel type(like my four inch long LG) newer models now 'slide open'. The operational buttons on these Phones are TINY and difficult to operate even while stationary...never mind while zipping down the Highway at 70mph! One MUST avert their eyes from the road ahead of them to both answer these tiny Phones and to place a call on them. I find it nearly impossible to do either with my tiny LG even more so becuase I drive a Standard Shift Car and it's simply not possible to hold that tiny LG to my ear and DRIVE and SHIFT the car! A woman three months ago wiped out a family of four in a Minivan why? becuase she was Downloading RINGTONES on her Cell Phone while driving on a superhighway! She lived..and all four of them died,she now is facing life in Prison with parole in 30 years.
People who 'Text-Message' while driving are similarly distracted as are people enguaged in 'heated' conversations.Using a Cell Phone while Driving takes your mind OFF the road in front of you and your driving...Period!
At the Moment Women are the #1 'Target Audience' for Cell Phone Highway Fatalities mostly becuase more Women than Men 'Chat endlessly' on their cell phones while behind the wheel.
I think ALL States should BAN Cell Phone use while Driving behind the wheel.
What Say...You?

posted in Cars Suck - 13 replies

The World Naked Bike Ride-Documentary

2007-12-25T20:42:43Z

I enjoyed watching this charming little doc about the world naked bike ride in London...

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=highaltitudefilms

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

The Ethics of owning a car (short film)

2007-11-30T05:29:35Z

Here is a short film on my site StreetFilms where we talked with Randy Cohen (NY Times Magazine's "Ethicist") about the ethics of driving and owning a car in Manhattan/NYC. It is inspiring plenty of debate.

www.streetfilms.org/archives/transportation-ethics

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Walk! Cycle! Minister tells French on high oil price

2007-11-04T22:23:34Z

Interesting..
I especially like this statement:
"I'm ready to be an example," Lagarde said.
Which American minister will follow her example??

Walk! Cycle! Minister tells French on high oil price
Sun Nov 4, 2007 10:09am GMT

PARIS (Reuters) - Economy Minister Christine Lagarde urged French people on Sunday to walk more and drive less, given the increase in oil prices.

"From time to time, you should forget your car to the benefit of your two legs and your two wheels," Lagarde told Le Parisien daily in an interview.

"I'm appealing to French people's intelligence," she said, calling on compatriots to drive more slowly and to use public transport. "I'm ready to be an example," Lagarde said.

Oil surged 2.5 percent on Friday, nearing a fresh peak as strong U.S. economic data reignited a rally that has added more than 40 percent to prices since August. Oil prices hit more than $96 per barrel earlier this week.

Lagarde has said speculative moves on the market affecting oil prices had to be reduced.

"We have taken contact with producer countries again to ask them to increase the offer and try to end these speculative movements," Lagarde told Le Parisien.

Lagarde also said she would be attentive that companies in the oil distribution chain did not use the higher oil prices to increase their margins to the detriment of consumers.

"The commitment to moderation taken in the past must be respected: I will not let (companies) make supermargins because of the rise in oil prices," she said.

Lagarde said the French government did not plan to reduce taxes and charges because of the higher oil prices.

No hike in gas prices was planned for the moment, she said.

© Reuters2007All rights reserved.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUKL0437317420071104

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Cars suck space

2007-11-03T01:47:20Z

Found these nice pics..

http://bp0.blogger.com/_k8Y0SWU8PJM/Rym__7u6Z_I/AAAAAAAAACk/55XpSWglWoE/s1600-h/espacio+coches.jpg?

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Tragic...

2007-10-12T23:34:39Z

I learned today that a 19 year old bicyclist was killed yesterday in my city. There will be a memorial ride tonight which I am participating in but the story is here at bikeportland.org

http://bikeportland.org/2007/10/12/bicyclist-in-fatal-crash-identified/#more-5528

Makes me so sad. I think defensive cycling is SO needed since you simply CAN'T count on motorists to be looking for folks on bikes at intersections or anywhere for that matter.

She was in the bike lane and obeying the law.

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Hit and Run!!! I found the WMDs, slammed by a 'Weapon of Mass Destruction'!!! Help!!! Desperately need some advice!!!

2007-10-12T14:51:15Z

They caught the person, against all odds.

I have never had this happen before!
I am trying to figure out all the things to do, I was advised to take pics, so I took pictures, I photographed the broken bones.
I even took pictures of the clothes I wore that night to show I was highly visible, and not wearing 'ninja black'.

I was in the right, I did nothing illegal, but she was guilty of several of infractions.
Things have been on hold for a bit, as things are being examined and witnesses are being interviewed. So far all witnesses I have talked to are in total agreement with what I told police.

I am looking for any advice I can find.
Someone said to place all my gear into a plastic bags...good advice, since later I found the paint from her car on my helmet and tire tracks on my clothes, things that I would have missed, or could have been contaminated otherwise.

I welcome any and all advice, I am working with police and will be hopefully working with the victims advocates.
Any advice that you can give, is of higher value to me than most, obviously, since everyone here has an above average awareness of the difficulties faced by 'vehicle vs cyclist' incidents.

I don't even know where to take my bike to have the damage examined officially.
I love my bike, and know she's got some damage, but I need several good shops to verify my opinions, of course I am biassed.

Thank you.

W.

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

World CarFree Day Sept 22 '07

2007-09-21T16:24:55Z

http://www.worldcarfree.net/wcfd/

Hug a bike...;o)

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

car alarms

2007-09-20T22:03:37Z

one of my neighbor's car alarms keeps going off, you can hear it in my bedroom, aparently it doesn't bother them cause they wait about 5 minutes & then go turn it off, plenty of time for a car thief to take off,... if I hear that f*cken alarm go off one more time , look out the window & see it being stolen, I won't call the police or nothing, just cheer em' on....

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

Flabby Americans

2007-09-18T05:26:38Z

The recents report that mention the increase in the number of overweight Americans seemed to have neglected a major reason why that's the case: Too much car driving. As you know, most Americans these days often go everywhere in their cars, even to places that or only a five-minute walk away. If walking and biking were encourged and driving were less encouraged, then the overweight trend might be reversed. Unfortunately, the auto industry and the petroleum industry probably wouldn't like that since most of their profits come from frequent car drivers.

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Bad drivers love to blame their victims

2007-09-11T13:33:19Z

I've noticed that when bad drivers kill or nearly kill people with their cars, they love to blame the people they kill or nearly kill even though the bad drivers CHOSE to VIOLATE THE TRAFFIC LAWS! Of course a major reason for this is that most drivers define driving as a high form of pleasure. Therefore they'd do anything to maintain their "right" to drive since they see it as being so pleasurable. Jail time, for example, would end one's opportunity to drive, thus bad drivers need reasons to avoid punishment for their irresponsible driving. That might explain why traffic violation is one of the few criminal activities that's SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE! Since it is socially acceptable, victims are likely to be blamed for the behavior of bad drivers for the forseeable future. And I thought my right to live is supposed to be more important than their right to drive!

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

Electric bikes in China study

2007-08-21T05:50:10Z

This is a very interesting read

http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~cherry/Publications/EVS22.pdf

Why isn't such a Eco friendly technology encouraged not just in China but world wide. Even in China some cities are actively trying to discourage or stop the technology. It Doesn't make sense

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Bike Raid on East 6th Street

2007-08-13T00:20:02Z

The cops are part of the problem again...

"Bike Raid on East 6th Street
posted: 12:30 PM, June 4, 2007 by Laura Conaway

Parking a bike can be a crime.

Around 9 p.m. last Wednesday, Robert Carnevale got an emergency call from his girlfriend. Police had showed up on his block of East 6th Street, between 1st and 2nd avenues. They were cutting the locks off bicycles chained to street signs, Caroline Dorn told him.

Carnevale, who owns three bikes himself, raced back to find what's become known as Operation Bike Raid in full swing. Sparks from the NYPD's circular saws arced through the night. Police, some in plainclothes, were piling cycles by the dozen in a heap on the sidewalk. Carnevale says he ran up and down the street, buzzing all the doors to alert his neighbors. People who live nearby were trying to claim their bikes.

At first Carnevale took still pictures, then he switched the digital camera into video mode. He approached the plainclothes lieutenant who seemed to be in charge and asked for his name. Carnevale says the officer gave his name, but got annoyed when asked to spell it. "You got my name," the officer says on the video. "I did you a favor. . . . Now I'm going to lock you up."

And he did, sending Carnavale to the pokey for 22 hours on a charge of disorderly conduct. The cop also rang up Carole Vale, a nurse who happened by and asked for an explanation. Vale spent 13 hours in a cell, on the same count.

In addition to the two arrests, the NYPD collared about 15 bikes. Officers, some in plainclothes, loaded bikes into unmarked black vans. "Why is domestic spying being used on non-polluting transportation?" asked Time's Up director Bill DiPaola at a press conference today.

City code does prohibit locking a bike to anything other than a city-approved rack, but there's some dispute over whether that applies solely to abandoned bikes. The rusted carcasses of old cruisers, often picked cleaned of valuable parts, litter street signs and bike racks around the five boroughs.

Transportation Alternative reports that the East Village police precinct, the 9th, started trying to identify and tag abandoned bikes in 2005. Cyclists generally see getting rid of useless junkers as a positive, since it leaves more room for bikes in daily use. Not surprisingly, they take less kindly to having their bikes cut loose and removed with no advance notice or information afterward about how to get them back.

Civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel, representing the East 6th Street riders at the press conference today, said the raid might have been prompted by a complaint from Community Board 3. He cited a court decision from September 2005, in which a judge ruled that the city had violated the due process rights of three cyclists by clipping their locks and hauling off the bikes with no warning. "The unlawful activity here is not by the cyclists, it's by the cops," Siegel said.
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/runninscared/archives/2007/06/bike_raid_on_ea.php

posted in Cars Suck - 6 replies

Peak Oil and it's Aftermath.

2007-07-18T07:20:26Z

With the rising current gas prices,there is much talk of "Peak Oil" occurring faster than expected,some say it's happening right now,if so,what can we expect? Here's a few thought's Iv'e found on the Net:
Oil Companies bloated Profits will drop as demand exceed's supply and the remaining Oil in the ground is harder to locate and costlier to refine.
People in lower incomes will no longer be able to afford to drive a car since as supply becomes scarcer,the prices will skyrocket with 6 dollar a gallon gasoline being a very real possibility. This would leave the "Luxury" of Driving a Car,a commodity only available to persons with a high enough Income to pay for the high price of a gallon of gas.
Food and mercantile items doubling in price becuase the current means to get them into stores is by Truck and the prices will have to be raised to make up for the triple-cost of fuel to run these Trucks.
A possible takeover of the Middle East by the United States in a last-Ditch effort to secure what little Oil is remaining for their Country when Peak Oil hit's bottom and there's "No More Oil".
Lets face a few Facts:
People today live in a "fossile fuels based World" when these fossil fuels run out Life as we know it will cease to exist. More than 10'000 Products that we take for granted and use in everyday life are manufactured from Petroleum Products made from Oil. In the advent of "NO More Oil" it's possible that society will revert back to "near stone age times".
Peak Oil and it's aftermath? VERY Scary Indeed!
any "thoughts"?

posted in Cars Suck - 5 replies

My solution

2007-05-25T13:44:49Z

This is my E bike
top sustained speed 23 MPH
Range 20+ mile
Fun Factor incredible

http://people.tribe.net/markcycle/photos/de7e1367-ef8b-445d-ab14-c29114399c5e

posted in Cars Suck - 12 replies

Car share coming to Santa Cruz

2007-05-18T00:55:45Z

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2007/April/12/local/stories/02local.htm

Any opinions on car sharing?

posted in Cars Suck - 4 replies

It’s Just the Price of Doing Business

2007-05-16T16:39:55Z

Published on Tuesday, May 15, 2007 by the Guardian/UK
A Million Road Deaths Every Year? It’s Just the Price of Doing Business
by George Monbiot

Corporate social responsibility often resembles the adventures of The Good Soldier Svejk. In 1914, about to be conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, Svejk puts on his old uniform and a volunteer’s buttonhole and, waving his borrowed crutches and shouting “To Belgrade, to Belgrade!”, has his landlady push him to the recruiting office in a bath chair. Jaroslav Hasek’s marvellous creation is lauded by the newspapers for his extraordinary patriotism.

By this means Svejk attempts to persuade the authorities that he is doing everything he can to get to the front, even if, to his enormous regret, his rheumatism prevents him from having his brains blown out. By noisily volunteering to subject themselves to stricter standards, the corporations try to pre-empt the rules which might otherwise have been imposed on them. This, they hope, will allow them to participate only when and how they see fit.

In Svejk’s case it didn’t work. His patriotism was rewarded with enemas and emetics until his rheumatism was miraculously cured. The corporations, on the other hand, always seem to persuade the authorities of their undying commitment to the causes they espouse, which ensures that they can enter the war on their own terms. This seems to be the way that the global campaign for road safety is going.

Death and injury on the roads is the world’s most neglected public health issue. Almost as many people die in road accidents - 1.2 million a year - as are killed by malaria or tuberculosis. Around 50 million are injured. Some 85% of these accidents take place in developing countries. The poor get hurt much more often than the rich, as they walk or cycle or travel in overloaded buses. The highest death rate is among children walking on the roads.

The annual economic cost to developing countries, in lost productivity alone, is $65-$100bn, roughly the same as the amount they receive in foreign aid. I caught a glimpse of the human cost when I was hospitalised in northern Kenya. Some of the men on the ward had bullet or axe wounds inflicted in tribal wars, others were dying of HIV/Aids, but over half had been smashed up in road accidents. They could not afford good painkillers, and sobbed and screamed through the night. It looked like a scene from the first world war.

The problem is likely to become much worse. By 2020, according to the World Bank, deaths from road accidents are expected to fall by 28% in rich nations but to rise by 83% in poorer ones. By 2030, they will overtake the deaths caused by malaria. But while $1.9bn of foreign aid will be spent on tackling malaria over the next five years, the annual global aid budget for road safety is less than $10m. This issue has been neglected partly because it is something the rich inflict on the poor, and partly because it is widely perceived as an unavoidable price of doing business - as the global transportation industry expands, so must its human costs. Governments are just beginning to wake up to the problem. But the corporations got there first.

In 1999, at the invitation of the World Bank, the motor and oil companies joined something called the Global Road Safety Partnership. It was supposed to bring together “governments and governmental agencies, the private sector and civil society organisations”. But its executive committee contains no one from a civil society organisation and only two representatives of government. BP, Total, DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, Michelin and Volvo, however, are all represented.

Professor Ian Roberts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine compared the prevalence of certain words in the partnership’s annual reports to their prevalence in a similar report written by the World Health Organisation. In the partnership’s reports, he found a pattern of systematic neglect of pedestrians and cyclists. In the WHO’s report, “speed limit” occurred 17 times in every 10,000 words; in the partnership’s reports, just once. “Pedestrian” was used 69 times by the WHO, and 15 times by the partnership; “buses” and “cyclists” were mentioned 13 and 32 times respectively by the WHO, and not once by the partnership. “Reclaiming the streets for walking and cycling,” he notes, “will not serve the interests of the car makers.”

Instead, the Global Road Safety Partnership emphasised better training for drivers and better safety education for children. These measures do not interfere with the commercial interests of the transport industry. Neither, according to peer-reviewed papers Prof Roberts cites, do they work.

The motor industry also appears to dominate the most prominent international body on road safety. Three weeks ago, the racing driver Michael Schumacher wrote a column - quite a good one - for these pages to mark Global Road Safety Week. He described himself as a member of the “independent Commission for Global Road Safety”. The commission launched the Make Roads Safe campaign, which is modelled on Make Poverty History. But how “independent” is it?

It was established by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile Foundation, which is run by motoring and motorsports associations. Of the eight commissioners, one is an executive of General Motors, one runs the Bridgestone Tyre Corporation, one is a trustee of the FIA Foundation, one is chairman of the FIA Foundation and a president of the Automobile Club of Italy and one is Michael Schumacher. The commission’s secretary is the director general of the FIA Foundation.

Its report is better than the material published by the Global Road Safety Partnership. There is more emphasis on speed limits, road design and traffic management. But there are some odd gaps and contradictions. It complains that “participation by middle- and low-income countries in the existing international road safety organisations … is low” and that there is a “lack of ownership” of road safety programmes by the governments and people of developing countries. So why do all its own members come from the G8 nations? The commission prescribes an “action plan” for global road safety, to be run by something called the Global Road Safety Facility. This - surprise, surprise - also turns out to have been launched and partly funded by the FIA Foundation.

Most importantly, it calls for the developing nations to follow the path taken by richer countries in reducing deaths and injuries. But at no point does it mention that much of this reduction was the result of cyclists and pedestrians being driven off the roads. This is a much bigger issue for poor nations - where the great majority of people who use roads do not own cars - than for rich ones. Is this the vision:that the space now used by pedestrians and cyclists and ox carts and rickshaws is surrendered to car drivers? If so, it might reduce fatalities, but it would also represent a classic act of enclosure, through which the rich are able to secure the resources of the poor.

Michael Schumacher is in danger of finding himself in the same position as Bob Geldof - a celebrity who claims to speak for the poor and weak but who is informed and guided by the powerful. We need a global campaign on road safety, but it must belong to the people on whose behalf it acts.

monbiot.com

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/15/1205/

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

Hello to all!

2007-04-27T00:48:49Z

The whole auto industry sucks and has been fooling people since Henry Ford.
I don't know if this has been posted before, but this shows what USA values most,
"In June 2001, 23 year-old forest defense activist Jeffrey "Free" Luers was sentenced to 22 years and 8 months in prison for the burning of three Sport Utility Vehicles (SUV's) in Eugene, Oregon. To make a statement about global warming, Jeff and his codefendent, Craig 'Critter' Marshall, set fire to 3 Sport Utility Vehicles at a Eugene car dealership. Their stated purpose was to raise awareness about global warming and the role that SUVs play in that process. No one was hurt in this action nor was that the intent. An arson specialist at trial confirmed that the action did not pose any threat to people based on its size and distance from any fuel source. Despite the fact that this action hurt no one, caused only $40,000 in damages and the cars were later resold, Jeff was sent to prison for a sentence considerably longer than those convicted of murder, kidnapping and rape in Oregon state."
From http://www.freefreenow.org/
Makes you think ....

posted in Cars Suck - 11 replies

Mohawk Nation to convert maintenance vehicles to biodiesel

2007-03-19T23:15:00Z

Mohawk biodiesel project to utilize casino's vegetable oil Email this page Print this page
Posted: March 19, 2007
by: Shannon Burns / Indian Country Today

AKWESASNE, N.Y. - Used vegetable oil discarded from the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe's Akwesasne Mohawk Casino will soon be used to run the tribe's maintenance vehicles, using an innovative biodiesel system.

Clarkson University, located roughly 30 miles from Akwesasne, had a team of students from its Engineers Without Borders program conduct a feasibility study that concluded the tribe could benefit from the 3,000 gallons of used vegetable oil produced monthly at the casino.

''They told us it would make economic sense for us to move forward,'' said Laura Weber, director of solid waste management for the tribe. ''Of course there are the environmental benefits, too.''

Weber is optimistic that other tribes with casinos will use the Mohawk project as a model to conduct their own environmentally friendly practices.

When the system is in place, casino employees will dump used vegetable oil into a tank, where it will then be put through a series of pipes and other tanks before being turned into useable biodiesel.

The end product will then be transferred to the Mohawk's solid waste transfer station and be used to fuel the trucks responsible for collecting trash throughout Akwesasne.

Biodiesel can be used in any diesel-operated vehicle.

When the tribe confirmed they'd be going ahead with the project, Weber began receiving phone calls and requests for interviews from across northern New York.

''It's cutting-edge technology at work,'' Weber said. ''It's really the alternative fuel drawing all the attention to it.''

Charles Kader, assistant director of public information for the tribe, added, ''Converting used cooking oil from our restaurants into biodiesel will help our community reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, thereby reducing pollution and move the tribe one step closer to our goal
of sustainability.''

The interest in changing things at the transfer station sprang about nearly three years ago when Weber was looking at ways to minimize expenses as the cost of fuel was rising. She contacted Clarkson, her alma mater, and discussions began.

The EWB program ''is a nonprofit humanitarian organization established to partner with developing communities worldwide in order to improve their quality of life,'' according to its Web site.

Nationally, EWB organizations have improved the quality of life for thousand by improving small community sewage systems, implementing improved water filtration systems and improving the infrastructure of roads in small towns.

EWB has had a presence in dozens of countries worldwide, including Malawi, Kenya, Honduras, El Salvador, the United States and Canada.

Clarkson's chapter currently has 21 members.

Implementing the biodiesel project at Akwesasne will cost roughly $8,000. Funding will be paid for by a grant awarded to the tribe by the Environmental Protection Agency; EWB will kick in the rest.

The Mohawks' Environment Division is continuously looking at ways to change procedures in Akwesasne to more environmentally friendly practices.

''It's been noted in the past that we have one of the most advanced environment divisions that you'll find across the country,'' Weber said.

In addition to the biodiesel project, the tribe's other environmentally minded projects have included implementing a fluorescent light exchange program. Those types of lights contain mercury that can be shipped away. They also offer free tire cleanup.

''We're looking at ways to continue to reduce, reuse and recycle,'' Weber said.

The Akwesasne Mohawk Casino is the first known Indian-owned casino to implement its own biodiesel technology. However, other tribes have begun using biodiesel on their territories.

The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota has a biodiesel production plant capable of producing 400 gallons a day of usable biodiesel from vegetable oil.

While the Mohawk biodiesel operation will be small in comparison with other plants around the country, it's a step in the right direction and the tribe is very proud. Once the construction is complete, sometime this spring, they hope others will view it and begin their own plans to begin using biodiesel.

''We designed the project so that it can be a model,'' Weber said. ''We have shared information in the past and we will do the same for this project.''

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

New educational program called Rock 'n' Renew

2007-03-16T01:13:53Z

Rock ‘n Renew is an educational series that examines the topics of global warming, energy conservation,alternative fuel, and the sustainability of our planet. The Rock‘n Renew program was founded by professional rock musicians and encourages students to explore these ideas and take action through their classes,artwork, music and other media.

http://www.rocknrenew.com/about.php

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

Off Set Your Cheating!

2007-03-15T07:42:13Z

What is Cheat Offsetting?
When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.

Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.

Can I offset all my cheating?
First you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you've done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating

http://www.cheatneutral.com/

Tee Hee Hee

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Drag Racing @ Intermodal Station

2007-01-18T21:04:52Z

I saw something last night that was absolutely disturbing to me. I went straight to a lecture from work, so I made it back to the intermodal transfer station pretty late at night. It was about 10:30 p.m.

As I stepped off the No.77, I saw a whole bunch of young people and their stupid cars using the intermodal station parking lot area as a drag racing scene. They even had the audacity to be racing each other around the bend where the buses have to drive up to the bay to pick up passengers. I was incensed. Yes, it was late at night, and only a few routes go in and out at that hour, but that's not the point. Using any area for drag racing, but particularly an area where there are potential pedestrians, is just straight up dangerous. I've already sent an e-mail to transit officials.

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

The Bicycle in Modern China

2007-01-18T17:30:22Z

Bike or car? Think twice

Published January 14, 2006 by ShanghaiDaily.com
By Song Mo and Wen Chihua

Ah, the bicycle. Is it going the way of, well, the bicycle? The humble bike, once an emblem of China, ubiquitous, iconic, demanded by brides as part of their dowries - along with a sewing machine, a watch and a radio - sadly seems old-fashioned to many urbanites, write Song Mo and Wen Chihua.

Standing atop a stool clamped to a bicycle rack in her long white wedding gown, the giggling bride clasped her bouquet of white roses as the bridegroom pedaled frantically down Huayuan Road in Beijing's Haidian District to the reception restaurant.

"This is the way we like it. I'll never regret this," Fan Xiaoping told The Beijing News.

"It's really romantic to have our wedding ceremony this way," Fan's husband Jiang Yang, a doctoral student at Peking University, said.

Their prominent picture story appeared to mark something more significant than a wedding announcement: the beginnings of a mini-backlash against the motor vehicle in the Beijing print and online media. Other environmentally-friendly events have been widely publicized, such as the "Driving One Less Day a Month for a Blue Sky in Beijing" activity held on the World Environment Day, June 5.

Recognizing that alongside Mexico City, Beijing shares the dubious distinction of being the world's most polluted capital, more than 200,000 Beijing drivers pledged to use public transport, ride a bike or walk to work on that day.

"It tells us that many people still reserve a special place for the bicycle in their heart, regardless of there being so many cars on the road," says Wang Yan, a civil servant from the Shenzhen Intellectual Property Bureau, who used to work in Beijing for 10 years and go to work by bike every day. "Still, I ride a bike to work almost every day, although I now own a car. I only drive to the suburbs for the weekend."

The Chinese mainland has about 500 million bicycles, according to the Beijing-based China Bicycle Association.

"It's time for us to rethink or rediscover what the bicycle can bring us," says Wang Fenghe, the association president.

Sooner rather than later, "government and people alike, including those car owners, will realize how convenient, healthy and environmentally-friendly riding a bicycle is," says Wang Yan.

"It's often said that Americans were brought up on the rear seats of cars. It's no exaggeration to say we Chinese were brought up on the rear seats of bicycles," says Shen Zhong, an accountant with a soap opera producer in Beijing.

More important, the 52-year-old says, "the bicycle has stored your bitter-sweet memories."

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, she recalls, "you'd have to obtain a coupon in order to buy a bike, regardless of whether or not you had the money."

Every year, each work unit was provided with a few coupons. Normally, Shen says "one out of 100 employees had a chance to get one coupon."

In the 1970s, a worker's monthly salary could be about 30 yuan (US$3.80). Not until 1973 did Shen get her first bike.

Status symbol

"It was second-hand, but it still cost me 100 yuan. My father asked his friend to fix the rattling for me. For that, my mother even cooked meat for him, which we could only eat at Chinese Spring Festival," says Shen, with a big smile. "My bicycle was like a family member. Life was difficult back then, so that happiness seemed much more precious than today."

Thus the bicycle was once an important status symbol. Shen remembers that when couples planned to marry, one of the prerequisites was the "san zhuan yi xiang," or "three things that go around and one sound" in English - a bicycle, a sewing machine, a wristwatch and a radio.

It was a bicycle that brought Lu Yuling and her husband together.

"We lived far apart," says the retired high school teacher from Chengdu in southwest China's Sichuan Province. "It wasn't so easy to get together. He had a bike. Therefore, almost every evening, he rode all the way across the city to see me.

"Instead of coming into my house, he used to sit on his bike and play a Russian love song on his harmonica. That was our secret signal. On hearing his harmonica, I'd dash out and then we'd ride out to the city park."

Her engagement gift? "Striking and sexy. All my girlfriends were so envious of me."

A fire-engine red bicycle, of course.

"The bicycle was a key part of my romance and my life," says 55-year-old Lu. "I really miss the days when the city was like a huge neighborhood, where car drivers respected cyclists and cyclists respected pedestrians."

The figures from the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that every 100 urban families in China had 162.7 bicycles in 2000. That figure dropped to 120 in 2005.

Urban sprawl appears to be one reason. "People's freedom of movement expands after relocation," says Peking University student Cai Zixuan, 21, whose family bought a car three years ago after moving to the West Fifth Ring Road from downtown Beijing.

"It's so inconvenient to go downtown without a car. Both my parents and I have drivers' licenses so we can make full use of the car. None of us ever rides a bike any more," Cai adds.

It seems that for a certain kind of affluent urban elite, the car has replaced the bicycle as the key expression of affluence, while the bicycle has now become its poor cousin, even a symbol of poverty.

"This way of thinking hinders the development of the bicycle. One's use of a bicycle shouldn't be taken as an indicator of one's financial status," says Wang Fenghe.

Wang feels the media overemphasizes the glamor of the automobile at the expense of the bicycle's obvious advantages: keeping fit, safety, easy to use, zero pollution, energy-saving, cost-effectiveness and size.

"These are the secrets of why the bicycle has lasted ever since its invention," says Wang.

Yang Shan, 36, is a salesman at Beijing Cuiwei Shopping Mall, where he sells 10 bikes a day on the average. The price ranges from 200 to 3,000 yuan.

"Most people buy the cheapest ones, because bicycles often get stolen," Yang says as he assembles the new arrivals.

Apart from the classic Chinese brands like Forever and Phoenix, electric bicycles and portable folding bicycles are becoming increasingly popular.

Although most of his customers are high school students, Yang notes that more drivers are now buying bicycles.

Wang Xiaohui came to try out an electric bicycle.

"I want to buy an electric bicycle to deliver and pick up my son from school. It's less of a headache and quicker," says the 34-year-old mother. "It takes only 10 minutes by electric bicycle, but a half-hour drive in the Beijing traffic."

Other drivers are sticking folding bicycles alongside the spare tire in their car trunk, Wang says.

"They say when there's a traffic jam, they just park the car and get on their bike."

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Right of Way

2007-01-17T15:07:57Z

This is something that has bugged me for a long time but that I've never heard anyone else express similar annoyance: As a pedestrian I walk on the footpath (sidewalk) and cars drive on the road, right? And when I want to cross the road I must give way to the cars; so when a car wishes to cross the footpath/sidewalk to pull into a driveway/right of way they are supposed to give way to pedestrians, surely.
But how many drivers actually do give way? Not many, it would seem. And what's more, judging by the way they honk their horns at me they seem to expect me to leap out of their way. Do they really have (or just believe they have) the right of way when crossing the footpath/sidewalk?
Or is it just that a vehicle hitting a pedestrian will do more damage to the pedestrian than the pedestrian will do to the vehicle - another case of "might is right'?
To me this behaviour is indicative of drivers' attitudes to pedestrians generally.
PS: I believe it's not cars per se that suck, but the people who insist on owning these outmoded rellics of the 20th century. I quite like looking at them in museums.
There! I've got that off my chest! I feel a better now.

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Worst drivers on tape

2007-01-15T16:23:10Z

I found an ad on Craig's List asking for "the Worst Drivers caught on camera." Since I live in Detroit where the average car driver is a blood-thirsty killer, finding that kind of footage should be very easy.

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

hi there

2007-01-14T17:13:14Z

I just joined this tribe & I would like start off by saying I HATE CARS, I'm 31, never got a drivers license & I never will, just me & my 10 speed.

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Kunstler: Making other arrangements (for transport)

2007-01-11T01:40:29Z

This is an excerpt from a longer article in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of Orion magazine. The full article is available on the website (see below). I tried to just include the most car-related paragraphs.

------------------------------------------------------------
Making Other Arrangements
by James Howard Kunstler

AS THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CONTINUES sleepwalking into a future of energy scarcity, climate change, and geopolitical turmoil, we have also continued dreaming. Our collective dream is one of those super-vivid ones people have just before awakening. It is a particularly American dream on a particularly American theme: how to keep all the cars running by some other means than gasoline. We'll run them on ethanol! We'll run them on biodiesel, on synthesized coal liquids, on hydrogen, on methane gas, on electricity, on used French-fry oil . . . !

The dream goes around in fevered circles as each gasoline replacement is examined and found to be inadequate. But the wish to keep the cars going is so powerful that round and round the dream goes. Ethanol! Biodiesel! Coal liquids . . .
…
Still, the widespread wish persists that some combination of alternative fuels will rescue us from this oil and gas predicament and allow us to continue enjoying by some other means what Vice-President Cheney has called the "non-negotiable" American way of life. The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them will allow us to continue running America, or even a substantial fraction of it, the way we have been. We are not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, Monsanto, and the Interstate Highway System on any combination of solar or wind energy, hydrogen, ethanol, tar sands, oil shale, methane hydrates, nuclear power, thermal depolymerization, "zero-point" energy, or anything else you can name. We will desperately use many of these things in many ways, but we are likely to be disappointed in what they can actually do for us.

The key to understanding the challenge we face is admitting that we have to comprehensively make other arrangements for all the normal activities of everyday life. I will return to this theme shortly, but first it is important to try to account for the extraordinary amount of delusional thinking that currently dogs our collective ability to think about these problems.

The widespread wish to just uncouple from oil and gas and plug all our complex systems into other energy sources is an interesting and troubling enough phenomenon in its own right to merit some discussion. Perhaps the leading delusion is the notion that energy and technology are one and the same thing, interchangeable.
….
Of course, the single worst impediment to clear thinking among most individuals and organizations in America today is the obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs. Even the environmental community is guilty of this. The esteemed Rocky Mountain Institute ran a project for a decade to design and develop a "hyper-car" capable of getting supernaturally fabulous mileage, in the belief that this would be an ecological benefit. The short-sightedness of this venture? It only promoted the idea that we could continue to be a car-dependent society; the project barely gave nodding recognition to the value of walkable communities and public transit.

The most arrant case of collective cluelessness now on view is our failure to even begin a public discussion about fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system, which has become so decrepit that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of it. It's the one thing we could do right away that would have a substantial impact on our oil use. The infrastructure is still out there, rusting in the rain, waiting to be fixed. The restoration of it would employ hundreds of thousands of Americans at all levels of meaningful work. The fact that we are hardly even talking about it—at any point along the political spectrum, left, right, or center—shows how fundamentally un-serious we are.

This is just not good enough. It is not worthy of our history, our heritage, or the sacrifices that our ancestors made. It is wholly incompatible with anything describable as our collective responsibility to the future.

Full text at:
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/07-1om/Kunstler.html

posted in Cars Suck - 5 replies

ADM

2006-12-08T06:45:28Z

Give Green, Go Yellow
How cash and corporate pressure pushed ethanol to the fore.

Article:
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/12/06/ADM/index.html?source=daily

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Rail and DC representation

2006-12-05T22:13:03Z

This may not seem manifest at first, but a proposal pending in Congress could have a positive effect on America's rail future. The proposal is to give the District of Columbia it's first true voting representative ever. (Which in itself is long over due.) The bipartisan balance calls for additional Rep from Utah for the undercounted missionary population. Now the obvious is that DC will bring a Democrat and Utah will bring another Republican. What's not so obvious is that not only do Democrats tend to support rail, but that Utah is witnessing the benefits of lightrail in Salt Lake City, and the new Utah Republican might not be so anti-rail after all.

Please consider supporting the bill currently waiting for a vote:

www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp

Thank you,
david

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

90 (ninety). NINETY!

2006-11-28T04:25:19Z

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/27/BAGBPMKDSP1.DTL

and a bonus!

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/27/MNGVLMKIAM1.DTL

Fun times!
Peace.

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Bike advocacy article in the New Yorker

2006-11-27T17:31:04Z

This week's (No.v 13) issue of the New York has an article about bicycle advocacy. I looked forward to reading it because of the great writing in that magazine, but I found the article weak and disappointing. Not just because it's skewed, though it is. The headline is "Holy Rollers: The city's bicycle zealots" and the teaser on the cover is "Hell on Two Wheels: the city's bicycle crusaders", so with language like that you get the idea.

The reporter chooses two men to represent their respective sides of the debate: Paul White, head of Transportation Alternatives, and Tom Bernardin a professional tour guide and general curmudgeon (he doesn't like the sound of bike chains: "It sounds like a rattlesnake coming up behind you"). For me the article seems to miss something essential. The reporter trivializes the issue; instead of bringing the people and the issues alive, he seems to watch it from some vantage of being above it all, like it's all just a little amusement for him, like watching children have a playground fight.

I'd be interested in others' opinions of the article. So far it's available online, but the NYer is a weekly, so content probably changes often:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061113fa_fact

Cross-posted: Bicycle!; Critical Mass

posted in Cars Suck - 5 replies

Now

2006-11-24T18:39:44Z

The momentum is on our side.

On January 3, 2007, both legislative bodies of the US will change from rail-hostile hands to rail-friendly. Jim Oberstar will become chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and he wants to increase passenger rail capacity and start high speed rail outside the NE corridor.

San Franciscans please don't let Nancy Pelosi forget that Blue people in Red states are starving for rail transit. Many of us have fought hard uphill battles to convince local leaders and populace to start projects (AZ, CO, NC, TX) only to find the federal government has "limited" recourses, yet funneling tons into highways and bridges to nowhere. The projects may have stalled, but the successful referenda prove that statements of “people love their cars” and “everyone wants the suburban lifestyle” are ignorant if not passé. They are ready for a change.

If anything, we should encourage transit reformation in Red states. Extend high speed corridors: Acela into Virginia, and start new ones: Dallas to Houston. If Mr. Carlover watches a jettrain pass him on the highway at 150 mph, three times as fast and with one third the energy per passenger, we'll make some converts. If Red states join Blue states in reducing energy consumption, we might just save this planet.

Championing hydrogen, ethanol, and hybrid cars is a joke. It still takes EIGHT BARRELS of oil to make a car. Cars still carry one person on average - 20% efficiency with five seats. Every car still needs at least two parking spots (home and work) and highways galore leading to an immense acreage of toxic asphalt regardless what the damn things run on, enough already, STRIKE THREE. Moreover, the new technology is playing right into the hands of the automobile manufacturers. It’s called planned obsolescence.

We ALREADY have the technology: lightrail, streetcar, walking, jettrain.

We have the tools, we have the Chairmen, we just need the inertia, that’s you, and the time: now.

Lovingly always,
Mother Earth

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

New film: CM and "velo love" in Vancouver

2006-11-18T19:48:57Z

There is a preview you can watch online at the website
youneverbikealone.com/

----------------------------------------------------
"You Never Bike Alone is an 80 minute documentary looking at how cyclists are building critical mass in Vancouver, Canada, and changing the face of the city.

[. . .]

Vancouver has become renowned for its big Critical Mass bike rides, and particularly the party spirit that attracts all types of cyclists.

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

The Bottom Line

2006-11-18T18:14:25Z

It's becoming more apparant each year that "eventually" Oil production will top out and decline rapidly!
When this happens(and it WILL!) The Bicycle will be the first choice(First line of defense) for remaining mobile in a society that will become VERY Immobile almost overnight when the end of Oil occurs.
Of course this ushers in a nightmarish scenario of Bicycles no longer being able to be manufactured becuase much of it is oil-based construction tecniques . Bike parts and especially tires and tubes wich are petroleum based will be harder to find,and bicycle thefts will skyrocket.
The Bicycle is the most efficient human powered vehicle in the World...and when the Oil runs dry...we may just find out how Valuable the Bicycle will become.

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

Canadians love their trucks

2006-11-17T04:27:32Z

From Statistics Canada (a government agency ) november 9 daily newsletter:

Transportation activities generated more than one-quarter of Canada's
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2004 and accounted for 28% of their
growth from 1990 to 2004. [...]

The report points to the growing use of heavy-duty trucks to move goods
and a shift towards greater use of light trucks (vans, sports utility
vehicles and pickups) for transporting people. These two trends have put
upward pressure on GHG emissions [...].

A contributing factor to increasing truck traffic on roads is the
concept of "just-in-time" delivery of freight, whereby companies require
delivery that is tightly synchronized with manufacturing processes.

Just-in-time delivery helps companies compete by reducing the expense of
carrying large inventories. However, it means that trucks are making
more trips.

Growth in cross-border trade has also pushed up demand for trucking.
Between 1990 and 2003, truck traffic across the Canada-US border grew
five times faster than domestic traffic. ("Traffic" is measured on a
tonne-kilometre basis, where a tonne-kilometre takes both distance
traveled and weight of shipments into account).

About 32% more tractor trailers were registered in 2005 than in 2000,
according to the Canadian Vehicle Survey. The number of straight trucks
was up 12%.

*Canadians relying more on cars and trucks*

Canadians have come to rely more and more on their cars and trucks. In
1951, there were nearly five people for every vehicle registered in
Canada. This declined to fewer than two people per vehicle by the
mid-1980s and has remained steady ever since.

Between 1990 and 2004, the volume of fuel purchased at the pump by road
vehicles grew by more than 20%.

Canada's transportation system (roads, railways, airports and harbours)
is immense, and essential to the proper functioning of society and the
economy. [Essential, eh!]

The nation has more than 1.4 million kilometres of roads, enough to
circle the globe 35 times, as well as 72,093 kilometres of operating
railroad tracks, 300 commercial ports and harbours, 10 major
international airports and 300 smaller ones.

Full article: http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/061109/d061109b.htm_
Also available in french

posted in Cars Suck - 5 replies

Cars kill in the Arctic too

2006-11-10T21:56:41Z

The newest official car-related accidents stats for my jurisdiction (where most communities do not have road access) just came out. It's for 2005...

So, according to the Northwest Territories (NWT) Department of Transportation, last year 786 motorized collisions have been reported in the NWT, out of which 128 hit pedestrians. A net increase of 13,5 % since 2004.

Car accidents killed 8 persons (5 pedestrians). It's twice as much as in 2004.

Maybe this is linked to the fact that the overall NWT car-pool has gone up by over a thousand. 34 669 cars are now registred with Transportation NWT .

The NWT is home to 31 843 driving license holders.

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

The 2007 Chicago Critical Mass Anti-Auto show -- first announcement!

2006-11-05T16:44:25Z

Calling all artists!

This year's Critical Mass Anti-Auto Show is going to be the best ever. We don't have a space yet, and we don't have a single dollar for organizing. What we do have is a battalion of visionary bike riders and artists whose collective contributions will surely astound and enlighten the uninitiated. Bring your unusual inventions, your fantastic renditions, your most clever creations to Chicago's Tenth Anniversay Critical Mass Anti-Auto Show, and help us to celebrate the end of car culture.

Start to think out your artistic statement about city life, car culture, or the beauty of the bicycle. The show will open on the second saturday in February, and run through to the end of the month.

Check out this address for images and information from earlier CCM art events. Go to http://www.chicagocriticalmass.org/cmart02_rightframe2.html.

Velo & Pais,
Travis Hugh Culley

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

A few cars didn't suck this week.

2006-10-28T09:29:27Z

It's a drop in the bucket, but I notice when cars are nice...

The other night on my way to kickboxing, I was waiting to make a left at a busy intersection and not looking forward to letting the zillions of oncoming cars go past. Then, a oncoming car actually stopped and waved to me to take my left as he held back the stream of cars. I reckon this is the first time this specific incident has occured...

Then yesterday in the bus on my way to the train station in Bordeaux, I saw a car driver and a bike ride stopped next to each other at a stop light sharing a joint. Warms the heart! (During that same bus ride I saw an older man on a very beat-up bike with a purloined BMW hood ornament/plate thing under the handlebars. Cute...)

Thought I'd share these positive vibes in order to forget about the VERY near accident I saw this morning as I was walking the dog. I could hear the crashing as the cars tried to occupy the exact same space and yelled, "Attention!" but not only did the drivers not hear me (I was 6-10 feet away, the streets are very small around here) but it appeared that the offending driver didn't even notice the other car she almost became one with...

Bof.

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies

If I had shares in Chevron...

2006-10-28T09:27:04Z

I might not be able to live with myself. But I'd be living damn well:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/28/CHEVRON.TMP

Peace.

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Canadian Arctic Pipeline Movie

2006-10-27T15:57:01Z

There's a short movie I shot with a friend, when the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, visited my small arctic town, last summer, to throw is support behind out-of-scale gas development in the Canadian far North

It's not exactly anti-car related but I thought you'd like it.

http://www.wamp.ca/video/harper.mov

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Extinction Stinks

2006-10-27T15:36:56Z

The dinosaurs against fossil fuels' music video "Extinction Stinks" is now online on youtube;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7smTn75yRE

posted in Cars Suck - 5 replies

Carfree USA Blog

2006-10-22T15:55:11Z

We're blogging the emerging carfree movement in the USA.

Stop by for the latest.

http://carfreeusa.blogspot.com

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

Breathing poison

2006-10-22T15:51:43Z

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr52/en/index.html

"Air pollution is estimated to cause approximately 2 million premature deaths worldwide per year".

Who dies? Children and the elderly.

posted in Cars Suck - 4 replies

war for oil SUV song n dance

2006-10-22T12:20:58Z

an entertaining video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmsOIjzQ1V8

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

Video: Automobile Society

2006-09-30T12:47:09Z

http://luddista.multiply.com/video/item/7

A short video, the whole documentary soon.

posted in Cars Suck - 6 replies

why is the sierra club promoting an suv?!?

2006-09-29T17:59:12Z

ok, why is the sierra club promoting the purchase and consumption of the 2006 mercury mariner hybrid SUV? even though it's a hybrid, the thing still only gets 29-33 mpg, much less than even some non-hybrid cars.

http://www.sierraclub.org/mercurymariner/

never mind all the other social/safety impacts of these vehicles (higher kill rates, decreased visibility for other vehicles and non-motorists, use of more materials in construction, use of more public space for parking, driving, etc).

of course, i recognize that sierra club is pretty mainstream as far as environmental organizations go, and they are far, far from recognizing that there's no choice other than moving completely away from car-buffet-culture. but to promote a vehicle with mediocre fuel efficiency just because other ones in its class are worse is just unbelievable to me.

maybe i expected too much from the sierra club, but now i just don't think i can renew my membership in good faith. i'm going to let them know, and if you agree, i hope you'll do the same.

amberina

posted in Cars Suck - 21 replies

Bikes can still work after EMP

2006-09-28T17:02:23Z

You know, if an EMP hit, say, the continental U.S., the folks with bikes might be at an advanges since most cars won't be working in the aftermath. Just thought I'd bring that up.

posted in Cars Suck - 23 replies

"Please use transit to get to our event"

2006-09-24T12:12:50Z

My housemate and I live in a big nondescript modern apartment building, but within a few blocks are historic neighborhoods with gorgeous old rowhouses. The Phillips Collection (a small private art museum, for those unfamiliar) is nearby and my housemate is a member so he gets invitations to their openings and such. Today I saw their postcard for their show about to open, which included this line:

"Please respect our neighborhood and use public transportation to attend this event."

How cool is that?! Not only is it actively discouraging car use -- a radical position in itself -- but instead of framing it in terms of the readers benefit (they could've said "it's virtually impossible to park around here") they framed is as respecting the neighborhood.

I think this is a great precedent. Of course it won't work in all places, and yes, the Phillips is in an upscale urban area with access to the Metro, but still, it's a start. Good for them!

posted in Cars Suck - 0 replies

statistics cars x bicycle

2006-09-24T02:20:24Z

Energy used per passenger-mile (calories):

Auto 1,860
Bus 920

Rail 885
Foot 100

Bicycle 35

Bicycles per 1,000 people in the United States (mid-1990s) 385
In Germany 588

In the Netherlands 1,000

Percent of urban travel accounted for by cycling in the United States (1995) 1

Percent in Germany 12
Percent in the Netherlands 28

Persons per hour that one meter-width-equivalent right-of-way can carry, by mode:

Auto in mixed traffic 170
Bicycle 1,500

Bus in mixed traffic 2,700
Pedestrian 3,600

Suburban railway 4,000

Percent of adults that are obese in the United States (2003) 30.6
Percent in Germany 12.9

Percent in the Netherlands 10.0

Total spending on health as percent of GDP in the United States (2002) 14.6
Percent in Germany 10.9
Percent in the Netherlands 8.8

Source: Wordwatch (http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4057) via Apocalipse motorizado (apocalipsemotorizado.blogspot.com/)

posted in Cars Suck - 3 replies

CA sues Detroit?

2006-09-23T16:58:39Z

I read something brief in one of the free dailies here in France that the state of CA was suing the top 5 auto makers.

Anyone got any news on the topic?

Peace.

posted in Cars Suck - 1 reply

Video: Sports Futility Vehicle

2006-09-23T09:43:01Z

Very sweet, pro-bike romantic music video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myykjFthrBg

posted in Cars Suck - 2 replies