March 2008 - Posts
Your political
motives for helping improve air quality don't matter; you can
save money by
carpooling (even one day a week), biking, walking or taking transit to work. We
often hear people alleging this or that political agenda is responsible for the
push to improve
air quality. The combinations of alleged agendas are almost
endless and sometimes bewildering: liberal, progressive, conservative, neo
-conservative, libertarian, green; it all depends on whom you ask. All of that doesn't matter at the
practical and local/regional level. The fact is that you can
save money and
resources while you carpool, take transit, bike or walk to work. If you are
business oriented, the
savings represent extra funds to invest back into your
small or growing
business or an extra parking space freed up for a customer. If
you are a
non-profit the
savings represent extra funds to go toward your core
mission. For the individual, the
savings represent an extra investment to your
retirement account, a pizza on the weekend, a movie a week, extra contribution
to your child's 529 plan, or any number other alternative use of the money you
save. The bottom line is that helping the
environment can help you (
business,
non-profit or
individual)
save money, and that
savings can be applied to
whatever your personal preferences (or "political agenda") leads you to.
Savings are for all comers, we need not quibble over political motives.
My wife and I are big horror movie fans. I recently updated my NetFlix to include the second round of the Horrorfest flicks - 8 Films To Die For. We caught most of the original films that circulated around Halloween of 2006 (they were, on the whole, "meh"), and want to catch up on last year's selection.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, one of the films is called "Tooth and Nail." One synopsis of the movie goes:
A group of young people, called Foragers, fight to survive against a band of vicious cannibals, known as Rovers, in a post-apocalyptic world which has been depleted of fossil fuels.
The voiceover from the trailer puts it like this:
We never saw it coming, that's for sure. It wasn't nuclear war or a deadly virus. Or a comet crashing into the planet. It wasn't overpopulation, or global warming. We simply ran out of gas.
Apparently, running out of gas is the stuff of post-apocalyptic nightmares. In the future, I guess, everyone forgets how to ride a bicycle.
I came across
this video via The Onion. It's a British PSA, but its message is certainly applicable here. It also has the benefit of being hilarious.
Update: I have been told by several friends that this video is really old. But its new to me, so its probably new to some of you, too.
Transportation choices can help us meet the new clean air standards. There is
good news. We can meet the new federal 8-hour Ozone standards. The new
standards are at 75 parts per billion (ppb). Our current 3-year average is at
76 ppb. With simple choices and concerted effort we can reduce one ppb from our
average this summer alone. Through a combination of local actions, state
programs and federal rules we have reduced our 3-year Ozone average from a high
of 87 ppb in the late 1990s, to the current 76 ppb. So, it is definitely
feasible to improve one ppb or more this summer. One of the easiest ways to
help is to carpool, take transit, walk or bike to work, even if it is just one
day a week. Small actions have a way of adding up when you are right on the
borderline. Otherwise, please don't mow or fill up the car during the hot part
of the day i.e. before 5:00 pm. That's it! A small to moderate group of people
consistently doing these simple things will really add up. It may even save you
some money as well. To take the one day a week (carpool, transit, walk or bike)
challenge go back to the
air quality page for details. Check out the
BBC article from last week as well as a
local news report that brings it closer to home.
As you may have noticed from the
website, Clean Commute Day will be held on May 16 this year. Within the next day or two I expect to have the Clean Commute Day website available, but by way of preview I wanted to mention Bike to Work Day and the Bike to Work Routes that will be a centerpiece of the CCD effort this year.
Working with the Blue Ridge Bicycle Club and others, we've created a series of routes that criss-cross the valley centered on Downtown Roanoke. We've been test-riding the routes to make sure we've worked out any tricky parts, and yesterday was my morning to test my assigned route: Floodwaters, going from Garden City to Downtown.
First of all, I hadn't touched my bike in over a year. One of the tires had rotted and the tubes needed to be changed. There was some other minor maintenance to be completed as well, none of which I was very good at and none of which I had the proper tools for. After several hours of struggling with tires, overinflating (and rupturing) a brand-new tube, getting covered in grease, and becoming very frustrated, I can attest to the benefit of having a professional spend a little time with your bike before you get on it for the first time. It was also a good thing I spent as much time with it as I did - I found a number of potential safety issues that I would not have otherwise noticed.
I eventually did get the bike in ridable condition and took it downt the Roanoke River Greenway to Garden City. The ride would have been a pleasant one if it weren't for the wind, against which I was riding pretty much the whole time. It made for a chilly ride. I will enjoy the route much more in a couple of weeks when winter has finally released its grip and we're in full-fledged spring mode.
When it's a paved shoulder.
VDOT will be having a series of public meetings to discuss its bike and pedestrian planning efforts. In the Roanoke Times
article that announced the meetings, Jeff Sturgeon said:
For instance, bike and pedestrian amenities are planned on U.S. 221 near Cotton Hill Road in Roanoke County. Bike lanes were added last summer when Hollins Road was widened.
I'd heard from a couple of other sources that there were bike lanes now on Hollins, so I drove over there to check them out. Unfortunately, there are no bike lanes. What there is is a paved shoulder - a wide swatch of 8 to 10 feet of striped pavement that runs only along the northbound lane of Hollins from the intersection of Plantation to Beaumont. Now, this is a great accommodation, but it's not a bike lane. First of all, it's not marked appropriately - a bike lane needs to graphic identifying it as such, rather than an emergency pull-off or parking lane. Second, while the width is great, its only on the northbound lane; southbound cyclists still need to drive in vehicle traffic. With the width of the paved shoulder, it seems VDOT could have split the difference and restriped the whole section of road to provide 4-foot bike lanes on both sides rather than an 8-foot paved shoulder on one side.
It's doubly a shame because after Hollins narrows past Beaumont, it becomes a much quieter, slower neighborhood street. Transitioning into that from safe bike lanes would have made all of Hollins from Plantation to Shadwell a rather bicycle friendly corridor.
The Salem Veteran's Affairs Medical Center has joined the growing rank of Workplace partners. See the press release
here.
Visit the website for a complete list of Workplace partners.
I'll be set up in the VA lobby on March 25th to accept registrations and answer questions about RIDE Solutions. If you work at the VA or know someone who does, be sure to come by and visit. I'll be around from 11:00 to 1:00.
This article from MSNBC discusses a study drawing links between vehicle pollution and low IQ in kids:
The effect of pollution on intelligence was similar to that seen in children whose mothers smoked 10 cigarettes a day while pregnant, or in kids who have been exposed to lead, said Dr. Shakira Franco Suglia of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, the study's lead author.
The study looks at ground-level pollution, specifically mention "black carbon," a component in particulate matter pollution. Add this to the long list of diseases and health impacts of air pollution driven by vehicle emissions; a compelling reason why, even if you are not convinced of the argument against CO2 emissions and global climate change, there are still good reasons to keep vehicle emissions (and by implication, vehicle trips) to a minimum.
The hastily edited (my fault) and poorly shot (doubly my fault) video of the Sharebike Painting Day is now
online at YouTube.
I should have been more careful to keep the lens clean of all the yellow paint that was floating around. Still, you can see the effort it took and how many bikes we tackled that day, which was just the beginning. Watch for Sharebike in the St. Patrick's Day parade and then throughout the Valley this spring.
This press release just arrived in my inbox from the City of Roanoke:
ROANOKE, VA - The City of Roanoke will post signs on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Bridge prohibiting skateboard and bicycle riding across the bridge. However, bicycles may be walked across the bridge in the same way that the city allows them to be walked across the Market Square Walkway (pedestrian bridge). The signs are being posted as an effort to minimize activities that have detracted from the appearance of the bridge. This decision was made in order to enable the city to properly care for and preserve the appearance of this important community landmark.
Guess I'll have some rework to do on the Clean Commute Day bike routes, many of which utilize the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Bridge and the Railwalk.
VDOT will be hosting a series of public information meetings to get input on their bicycle and pedestrian efforts. Information on that plan can be found here.
The Virginia Department of Transportation will hold three informal meetings in southwestern Virginia to provide information about its bicycle and pedestrian program and allow people interested in bicycling and walking to discuss the program with VDOT representatives.
VDOT’s bicycle and pedestrian program was formed to ensure that bicycling, walking and other modes of nonmotorized transportation receive the same consideration as motorized transportation in the planning, design, construction and operation of Virginia’s transportation network. The meetings to discuss the program will be held in Christiansburg, Salem and Martinsville from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. as follows:
Christiansburg - Thursday, March 13
Montgomery County Government Center
755 Roanoke St., Christiansburg
Salem - Tuesday, March 18
VDOT Salem District Office
731 Harrison Ave., Salem
I will try to be at the Salem meeting. Be there and make your voice heard.
We are currently doing a project, in conjunction with Valley Metro, that involves an on-board counting of the number of bus passengers boarding and alighting at different stops. The purpose of this project is to estimate bus ridership using a random, statistically speaking of course, set of observations. While I was doing some of this fieldwork, I started noticing parks, schools and other amenities that I never knew existed in the Roanoke Valley. This suprised me since I was raised in this area, and after returning in adulthood, have lived here for the past 8 years. The beauty of this fieldwork is that it takes me on bus routes to neighborhoods that I rarely frequent. Eventually, I started pretending, to myself not to the other passengers, that I was a tourist and I would challenge myself to notice as many interesting things as I could along the way. For the average long-time resident or newcomer, this is an excellent way for you to better know Roanoke. For the cost of bus fare you could pretend you are a tourist and explore an area of town where you have yet to venture. An hour later you will be back where you started in Downtown Roanoke (Campbell Court). Give it a try and see what you can discover.
From Jeremy: I noticed the same thing while doing my part of the project. I've discovered places to take my daughter than I wouldn't have noticed before. In fact, my daughter (who is just shy of three) has a blast on the bus, so simply riding it around with her can be a lot of fun. A few weeks ago we took the bus to the Kid's Day event at Tanglewood Mall rather than driving - not only did it save the gas and emissions that I would have spent driving myself, she got to enjoy the afternoon outing even more.
From the
Wall Street Journal:
Economists and policy makers have puzzled for years over what it would take to curb Americans' ravenous appetite for fossil fuels. Now they appear to be getting an answer: sustained pain.
Stinging, but probably true. And in this case I am perfectly happy
to be wrong.
A couple of quick follow-ups to
my earlier post. If you're the type who suffers from motion sickness that makes it difficult to read in a moving vehicle (this is sometimes an issue for me, particularly on bus routes that involve a lot of stops and starts, like either of the Valley View routes) an audiobook can be a good alternative. And just in case you'd like to catch up on some of those classics that you've always meant to read someday, there's a free option:
Librivox, which provides audio versions of books in the public domain, all available for download to your MP3 player of choice. You can even get involved as a reader if you're interested.
If your interests tend towards the educational rather than literary, check out this
list of college and university podcasts you can download for free. Most are available for subscription via iTunes or an RSS feed. I spent a little bit of time with a few Oxford podcasts on medieval literature before I got sucked into some Great Courses collections (borrowed from a friend) on economics and linguistics.
We're back below that psychologically important $3.00 mark now, though we've not even hit the beginning of spring. I'm predicting this to fluctuate its way back up to $3.20 or so by April.
This morning I'll be joining Ron McCorkle and the other fine volunteers and organizers of
Sharebike to get their bicycles ready for distribution across the Roanoke area this spring, where they will be avaialble for free community use. We'll be painting them safety yellow, so they'll share that with similiar
"yellow bike" programs around the world. You can get information about how the program works and where bike can be found at Sharebike's website or on the RIDE Solutions
Interactive Bike Map.
Having a program like Sharebike's will be a vital part of Roanoke receiving the League of American Bicyclists's "Bicycle Friendly Community" designation, a recognition program that I believe the City is making a go at. Support them all you can, and ride their bikes once they're on the streets!
I hope to get some video of the event today, so keep watching the RIDE Solutions
YouTube channel for that.