Tuesday, March 04, 2008 - Posts
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.