woozyspace

I wake up every weekday morning at 5:30 so I can get ready to ride my bike 14 miles into work. Some mornings when it is cold and dark out I can't help wondering if it is really worth it. I haven't seen the weight loss that I had hoped for and getting up earlier takes away from the precious little sleep that I do manage to get.

This morning when I was riding into work I couldn't help but notice all of the cars, each one sitting in traffic, most of them with just one person in it. I thought that its amazing that we allow our government to kill innocent people so we can have this lifestyle that comes from cheap gas & oil. Since I moved to N.C. I've done more than my share of sitting in traffic alone in my truck burning up the gas. So I'm no better than anyone else when it comes to this, but being on a bicycle in the midst of it this morning definately shed a different light on the situation.

I don't expect people to change overnight and for the most part I don't expect the majority of people to change at all. But when it comes to change I'm a big fan of baby steps. Through small steps the hardest tasks become possible (more or less). While I was looking at all these cars the thought came to me; what if everyone made an effort to carpool just once a week or maybe just once a month? What would the impact of that be on our gas and oil consumption?

I started doing some simple math in my head as to what I save by carpooling and biking to work. I bike 4 - 5 days a week so for the sake of this equation I'll round down to 4 days a week. The roundtrip from my house to work is approx. 40 miles ( I bike part of this and carpool the rest ). So 40 miles * 4 days = 160 miles. I'll assume that this happens roughly 50 weeks a year ( NC is great for year round biking ) so we're talking about 8000 miles a year. My 2003 Dodge Dakota Quad Cab 4 x 4 gets about 16 miles to the gallon around town. It probably gets a bit less but I'll use 16 mpg for this. So 8000 / 16 = 500 gallons of gas per year. At a cost of 2.31 / gallon of regular ( current gas price at Costco ) I save $1155.00 per year in gas. Add to this the savings in servicing ( at least two extra servicings per year ) and the savings in pollution generated ( 6 lbs CO2 / gallon = 3000 lbs ) and I have a pretty good reason to get up at 5:30 tomorrow before the sun has even thought about coming up and get myself ready to get on that bicycle again.


* I came across this on the EPA web site and thought it made an interesting footnote to this entry:

What Has Emission Control Meant for Air Quality?

Efforts by government and industry since 1970 have greatly reduced typical vehicle emissions. In those same years, however, the number of miles we drive has more than doubled. The increase in travel has offset much of the emission control progress.

The net result is a modest reduction in each automotive pollutant except lead, for which aggregate emissions have dropped by more than 95 percent.

With ozone continuing to present a persistent urban air pollution problem, future vehicle emission control programs will emphasize hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide reductions. Carbon monoxide control will remain critical in many cities, and limits on vehicle-generated carbon dioxide may become important in the future.

I came across a great source of inexpensive cycling eyeware courtesy of a post on the Icebike.com mailing list this morning. Safety Glasses USA has these great Radians Revelation glasses for around $5.00 each. They carry them in a number of tints as well as the anti-foggin clear (shown). Now if I could only find inexpensive prescription cycling glasses.

I don't remember where this link came from but I thought this story about a new recumbent powered coffee company in Winston Salem, NC. was pretty neat. Can Durham, NC be far behind??

On another blog. Who would have thought?

One of the things that's been going on lately that I wasn't sure how to approach in writing is that I started cycling in the mornings last summer and have continued at it pretty steadly through the fall and winter. By a strange twist of fate Phillip Barron over at Nicomachus asked me a few questions about it one day after he had seen me riding to work, so now I don't really need to figure out how to write about it here. Its all over there.

Its so totally cool that we have a local cycling columnist. What a great thing.

I do have to say that I totally hate the photo of me though. My wife says its the helmet that makes me look weird and that anyone would look strange with a bike helmet on. I don't know, Lance looks pretty damned suave here in his helmet sippin' champagne.

Oh well, what can ya do?

Saturday morning I decided to drive out to Paul's Cycling & Fitness in Winston Salem to look at the Schwinn Stingray reissues. I figured that the trip was going to be at least an hour and a half in each direction but they were the nearest Schwinn dealership to Durham that carried the reissued Stingrays. To make a long story short, here is the result of that trip.


Our Pea Picker in all it's pea picking glory


A really great family moment on "the curve hill"


Laura putting the Pea Picker through its paces


We really could use a flowered basket on the handlebar here

Clay and I spent a good part of the day on both Saturday and Sunday riding around the local elementary school parking lot and grounds. Me on the Schwinn Stingray and him on his Trek Jet bike. I got to teach him how to jump his bike off a curb and lots of other good stuff. This has brought up so many thoughts over the past few days about being a father and childhood and Quaker values like simplicity and these thoughts are really all over the place right now. Hopefully at some point soon I'll be able to sort things out and write them down here...

Until then, here is a short Quicktime movie (528 k) of us going down "the curve hill".

I'm coming to the party a bit late here since this list has been up since last August, but I thought it was pretty cool thing none-the-less:

WRAL's list of local bloggers.

Weeeeha!

Its been quite some time since I last posted here. A lot of changes have been going on in the real world and I didn't feel like writing about them, at least not yet. In any event I'm breaking the silence in the name of gross consumerism. There aren't that many things that I really "WANT", but I really do want this.



Schwinn rocks for bringing these back. That other chopper thing they came out with a couple years back just didn't cut it, but these are as close to the real thing as I'm going to get. I miss the stick shift from the original, but the stick shift is what did them in the last time. This original Lemon Peeler from 1968 (below) is up on ebay with a Buy it Now price of $1400. The Grey Ghost (above) is the most expensive of the new Schwinns at ~$500.



The Lemon Peeler is super-nice, but $1400?