Shek's Footprint

The terms cargo and bike are not popularly used in the same sentence. Bicycles make excellent cargo carriers. They don’t have to carry a piano to qualify as a cargo bike. Something utilitarian like a grocery store trip makes a bicycle a cargo bike. It changes a bicycle from a sport or a toy to a tool. It changes the bicycle from being a lifestyle to being a mode of transportation.

We have been reinforcing the utilitarian prowess of a bicycle by providing free valet parking at the Riverside Arts Market. People who choose to use their bicycles as modes of transportation are being encouraged at the market.

We have met many amazing people arriving at the market on their bikes. From little kids on trikes to mommies with kids in a trailer. Since we are always occupied at the market guarding the bikes (with our dear lives), we never get an opportunity to ride and hang out with these amazing people. Hence, we came up with the Cargo Bike Picnic Ride. It is a three mile leisurely ride in the friendly streets of Riverside that ends in a picnic. People are encouraged to bring their picnic gear, games, beverages, musical instruments etc. along for the ride.

Information Website: http://shekscrib.com/cargobikepicnic

Date: Sunday 23 May, 2 pm

Start: Five Points Coffee & Spice (820 Lomax)

End: Memorial Park

If you have parked with us, here is a chance to ride with us and hang out at beautiful Memorial Park. If you haven’t parked with us yet, you are welcome too. Anything that can carry cargo is allowed, including your backpack. Bring your friends along for the ride or simply have them meet us at Memorial Park for the picnic.

I am buying a motorcycle. It has been my life long goals to own one and I am finally doing it. I enjoy living car free. I enjoy not heavily depending on oil for transportation. I also enjoy not having any insurance expense.

I have chosen to move to another part of town 13 miles away. A bicycle friendly and socially active part of town. I therefore need a motorcycle to commute to and from work. I would have done it on a bicycle but I have a dog to take care of and it is not fair to leave her in a room for 12+ hours while I am away.

My goals are to keep my expense at a minimum, gasoline usage low and not much insurance to pay. I have been looking at commuter motorcycles for a while. These are the options I am considering:

My route includes 12 miles of Interstate 95 and State Road 202 where the average speed of travel is 65 mph.

I bought some red tomatoes, green tomatoes, egg plant, cucumbers, lemon, shrimp from the farmers market at the St. Johns Town Center.

Having left work at 5 PM, I rode over to the ATM to pick up some cash. The rain was a little more than a drizzle but my rain gear was adequate. Cash in hand, I made it to the farmers market. After a quick browse, I started pickng up the vegetables. I think they were quite reasonably priced. It wasn’t organic but it was local. This means my vegetables did not travel a couple thousand miles to my kitchen.

Shopping at your Local Farmers Market is a good way to reduce your carbon footprint. The best part about shopping there is one gets to come home and make a delicious Tomato Sandwich. Toast a couple of slices of bread apply mayo while the bread is hot so the mayo can melt a little. Lay a variety of tomato slices on top. I like how the crunchiness of the green tomatoes compliment the taste of the red. Top with salt and pepper. Eat open faced.

Posted via email from shek’s posterous

$4500 is given towards a new car to people whose clunker achieved 10 mpg or more lower than the new car. $3500 if the mpg difference between the clunker and the new car is less than 10.

Lets assume that most people with an 18 mpg clunker “upgraded” to an SUV achieving 5 mpg more. They received $3500 from the $1,000,000,000 allocated funding. Some simple division later, approximately 285,000 clunkers were pulled off the streets (1,000,000,000 / 3500). Therefore, there are now 285,000 people or families on the road saving 5mpg (or saving 0.012 gallons per mile) more than they usually were.

An average family drives around 15,000 miles a year. This leads to 180 gallons of gasoline saved per family per year. For the 285,000 clunkers replaced, we save 51,300,000 gallons of gasoline every year. Increase the federal funding to $3 billion and we will save a little over 153 million gallons of gasoline every year.

If the average clunker is replaced by a vehicle achieving 7.5 mpg higher, with a $3 billion stimulus, America will save almost 205,200,000 gallons of gasoline every year.

The total consumption of Finished Motor Gasoline is 137,801,370,000 gallons (approximately 8,989,000 barrels per day in 2008. Data from http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html). Hence, a $3 billion funding, by saving 205,200,000 gallons of gasoline, saves only 0.1489% of total consumption. Not too significant in my opinion.

To achieve a 1% reduction in nationwide motor gasoline usage, around $20 billion (that is $20,000,000,000) needs to be pumped into the new-car market replacing over 5.7 million vehicles with a new vehicle achieving 7.5 mpg higher.

I wonder if gasoline consumption can be reduced by 1% by utilizing only $3 billion in bicycle infrastructure and alternate energy driven mass transit and rail infrastructure? The budget for this year’s Mass Transit infrastructure is $8 billion, $5 billion more each year for the next 5 years, not including operating costs. The Cash-for-Clunker’s $3 billion will be a nice addition to the mass transit budget and shave off 8 months from the 5 year proposal.

Further, evaluating the impact on a family, and assuming $3 billion in funding, these 857,000 families (285,000 X 3, assuming one clunker per family though there is no such rule) will save around 180 gallons of motor gasoline related expenses. At an average cost of $2.50 per gallon of gasoline, each family saves a measly $450 a year and gains $15,000 or more debt on a depreciating asset. With $3 billion in funding towards overhauling the streets to make bicycling actually and subjectively safe, families may be able to reduce from two cars to one, saving upwards of $4000 annually in car payments, insurance and gas.

My 50 year old mass produced dutch city bike, a text book definition of clunker, needs no replacement. At the most, it needs $50 of TLC. The next time someone tells me to get a registration for my bicycle, I’ll tell them at least I don’t need Cash for my Clunker!

Walkscore.com is a fantastic way to find what shops and businesses you can comfortably walk to from your home. My apartment gets a whooping score of 20 out of 100. Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Walkscore.com graded Jacksonville as the least walkable city in USA (news link). A bicycle effortlessly bridges the distance gap between walkable destinations to drivable ones.

So how is living car free in a part of town with an undesirable quality? Challenging would be my answer on an optimistic day. The grocery store is only a mile away. With a tiny bit of planning, grocery shopping is achieved in one trip on the weekend. The trusted Xtracycle is a fantastic grocery hauler. For that mid-week craving of Mexican food or to buy a critical grocery item I missed, I whip out the old single speed Dutch bike. Its front basket has plenty cargo capacity for a doggie bag or a case of Yuengling.

Zaxby’s, the only fried chicken restaurant worth visiting, is 5 miles away, mostly through deserted local roads. A trip there takes 30 minutes. I usually go alone as what I do with my fried chicken isn’t pretty. Riding back can be tad adventurous. Sitting on a hard saddle for half an hour after ingesting spicy buffalo sauce smothered chicken fingers isn’t ideal. The Town Center Mall with its departmental stores, pet food stores and Friday Farmer’s Market is within 3 miles away. In fact, I am hopping over there this evening for errands, all on a bike.

Dry cleaning seems challenging but easily solved if you ask the good Turkish people to fold your clothes into boxes. A trip to the movie theater dictates a longer route than one would take if driving but I chose to not ride on roads with a loosely imposed 45 mph speed limit. A trip to downtown is 12 miles long and a fairly pleasant one. A trip to the beach is 13 miles long and not so pleasant. Surprisingly, distance is not a challenging factor. I have gladly ridden 10 miles to a dentist, had her drill, scrape and clean my teeth and ridden back smiling, only this time with better teeth. On days with tighter schedules, I have hired a taxi cab.

So what is the challenging part, you ask? It is the people who meet you on the road through their protective shields of glass and metal. Living in a neighborhood with a walk score of 20 subjects you to people, who usually love their car-dependent life styles. They also have a patriotic attachment to things like big rims on their Kia and the roads they drive those low-profiles on. Most walkscore-20-dwellers will take the on-road-bicyclist-infringement without any patience. The bridged gap between walkable destinations and drivable ones is ugly.