With the relatively recent realization that the U.S. needs a comprehensive public transit system, it looks as though one might be on the horizon. According to the aforementioned report (Global Competitiveness in the Rail and Transit Industry), “In the face of challenges such as high gasoline prices, traffic congestion, and greenhouse gas emissions, public transportation offers a range of benefits over private automobile travel. Indeed, rising urban rail and bus ridership, as well as plans for high-speed rail corridors, suggest a rekindling of U.S. interest in these alternative forms.” At the beginning of 2011, U.S.’s President Barack Obama revealed his plan to build a high-speed rail system in the U.S. His plan includes the investment of 8 billion dollars and will conceptually provide a high-speed rail system accessible to 80 % of American citizens. In May 2011, the U.S. Department of Transportation also announced that it would invest 2 billion dollars in the project. (Congress has since cut off most of the funding for high speed rail)

Traffic in Mumbai/ cc Bodenseemann, Spring 2004

The  Carfree movement has caught the imagination of the people across the world. Perhaps it is is hassle faced by city-dwellers on a daily basis while commuting that motivates them to take an active part in such movements. The hardship is not only for those who are using an automobile – due to traffic jams etc, but also for all others who are subjected to increased pollution from the increasing number of cars working for an increased number of hours daily.

The information age also allows faster communication within communities which helps in the sharing of views on issues of common importance and concern. The recent past has witnessed people lending support to many such issues globally and coming out in the open to express solidarity for a cause. The only unfortunate part is that some such events also attract some unscrupulous elements who are more interested in personal gains rather than any real contribution to noble causes. Recently Mumbai in India witnessed one such Car Free Day where a Cycle Race and Walkathon was organized. The organizers were more interested in rubbing shoulders with politicians and government officials rather than seriously planning the event to percolate the importance of Car Free Days. The local media also fell into the trap and allowed its platform to be used for the tom-tom by the politicians and organizers. It is doubtful whether the city really experienced reduced emissions due to the Car-Free Day. While some of the vehicles were diverted to some longer routes to reach their respective destination with a view to accommodating the Car Free event, many vehicles were able to barge into the route which was meant for the Cyclothon or Walkathon. Both were problematic: the vehicles that were diverted to alternative/longer routes for their destinations produced more pollution than they would have done and the ones which moved parallel to the participants on the same road actually threatened the participants’ safety.

However, such movements should gain more popularity and international organizations like WCN and its members can play a formidable role in influencing people’s behavior.

A few suggestions for making such events more useful and beneficial could be:

a. The Car Free Days could be organized with greater regularity, say every month or once in a quarter.

b. Such events should also be held on working days rather than on holidays alone. If the event is organized on working days, the local government and authorities should endeavor to provide more public transport vehicles so that people can commute to their work place without using their own vehicles. Similarly, people may be encouraged to create car-pools to ferry more people in a single car.

c. Can “Exchanges for Proximity” be created?  It would be essentially a pool where the members would exchange their houses with a view to minimize travelling. For example Mr. A has a house in locality “X” but works in locality “Y”, similarly Mr. B has a house in locality “Y” but works in locality “X”.  Both exchange houses with a view to minimize travel to work. On the face of it such arrangements may seem difficult, but if tried could bring in new possibilities.

d. Small shopping complexes in close proximity to the residential complexes may be promoted so that the inhabitants of the residential complexes are either not required to travel more than 400-500 meters – a distance which is walkable for most people .

e. Use of cycles should be encouraged. This could be achieved if the leading lights of society use cycles at least once in a month, so that the behavior of the people at large could also be influenced.

f. Organizations like WCN and its members could enlighten the local governments and authorities about the “model-requirements” for holding carfree events. This would help to ensure that only those people who are serious about a cause rather than their own personal gain would take the lead for such events. This would also ensure the safety of the participants, which would lead to larger numbers of participants in all subsequent events.

— Arvind H Mittal

© Andy Singer - http://www.andysinger.com/

Vehicles impact the environment in numerous ways from their production, use and disposal. Below are some of the ways vehicles harm us and our environment.

Production

Manufacturing vehicles is harmful to the environment. The average U.S. vehicle (in 2007) required 1129 gallons of gasoline to produce. That’s equivalent to two years worth of gas bought by the typical driver and that’s before the car has ever hit the road. The hybrid Prius is minimally better, requiring 1065 gallons of gas to produce.

It isn’t just the gasoline consumed during vehicle production that pollutes the environment. According to Greenercars.org,

Environmental impacts start with mineral extraction and the production of the raw materials that go into the parts of a car. For example, iron ore gets turned into steel, which now accounts for most of the mass in vehicles…. The lead and acid in batteries are poisonous and dangerous…. Some degree of pollution is associated with all of these components, much of it due to the energy consumption, air pollution, and releases of toxic substances that occur when automobiles are manufactured and distributed.

Use

The average U.S. passenger vehicle uses 575 gallons of gasoline yearly. Hybrids, such as the Prius, guzzle about 255 gallons of gas a year.

Gasoline-powered cars emit the following greenhouse gases and pollutants:

- Benzene.

- Carbon dioxide (CO2).

- Carbon monoxide.

- Nitrogen dioxide.

- Polycyclic hydrocarbons.

- Sulphur dioxide.

About a third of all U.S. energy-related greenhouse gas emissions comes from transportation, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with carbon dioxide making up 63 percent of the greenhouse effect. For every burned gallon of gasoline, almost 9*10-3 metric tons of carbon dioxide are produced. The average American household produces 11.7 tons of transportation related carbon dioxide every year, according to a 2003 U.S. Energy Information Administration report.

After Life

Even after cars’ lives end, their materials continue to pollute our environment. Lead, nickel, and other hazardous materials are in car parts and batteries, leaking into the ground as they sit in junkyards and landfills.

The Environmental Toll of Our Deficient Train System

Train systems are not something the U.S. is known for, unlike Asia and Europe. As a matter of fact, it isn’t an exaggeration to say that our train travel options are non-existent. When we do have the option to travel by train, we find it is either more expensive or comparable in price to travel by plane or car, which in many cases involves half, if not less, of the travel time of a train. European and Asian countries do not necessarily see price similarities or huge differences in travel time (unless the distance is exorbitant). The reason for these price and travel time discrepancies is mostly due to the fact that there aren’t many routes or a high usage of trains in the U.S.

While we all harp on the economics of it, we seem to forget the toll that plane and vehicle travel has on the environment when compared to train travel, which holds more passengers and emits substantially less CO2. It is difficult to know how plane versus train travel differs in the United States because of the lack of a sufficient train system. However, here is information comparing the two types of travel to routes from London to popular destinations in Europe from seat61.com.

An article on planetgreen.discovery.com purported that the CO2 emissions of traveling alone by car over long distances were almost as bad as airplane emissions.

As is very clear, train travel produces considerably less CO2 in the environment than both passenger vehicle and plane travel; and seeing how CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect by over 60 percent, this means something significant to the way our travels affect the environment.

The U.S. currently has plans to expand our train systems. However, to realize the environmental benefits of train travel in the U.S. will involve massive expansion; it isn’t an overstatement to say that to fully realize these benefits will take to decades, if not our lifetime. Until then, the U.S. will continue to use vehicles and planes as our primary means of travel.

Andy Singer - http://www.andysinger.com/

—

Gina Williams is a guest post and article writer bringing to us information on the environmental impact of vehicles and an insufficient train system in the U.S.

Gina also writes about various topics like “electric cars versus gas powered cars“.

]]> http://carbusters.org/2011/12/11/the-environmental-impact-of-cars-and-trains/feed/ 1 http://carbusters.org/2011/12/05/bicycle-portraits/ http://carbusters.org/2011/12/05/bicycle-portraits/#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:31:10 +0000 carbusters http://carbusters.org/?p=2585

As you might know, South Africa is a world within one country, home to various cultures, with a tragic history of segregation and racism. Through this project we hope to give people a glimpse into each other lives through a well known object of movement, practicality and joy – the bicycle. Looking at individuals through their, sometimes unconscious, involvement in bicycle culture, we will inadvertently touch on many charged issues like the implementation of public space, lack of infrastructure development and also social problems like class division and unequal wealth distribution, but also perhaps bring those unfamiliar to each other together in their love for a simple thing…

—
Stan Engelbrecht

www.bicycleportraits.co.za
www.bicycleportraits.co.za/kickstarter

Community gardens can satisfy more than just their gardeners’ nurturing  instincts for food and Nature. They add instant visual beauty and interest near bike and pedestrian routes.  After all, car drivers are usually moving  too fast to encourage up close lingering and reflection on budding plants and garden art.   Sample approaches of community gardens in relation to active transportation routes, will be highlighted for cities of Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary.

A Bright Spot in Industrial Area by Leslie St. Spit- Along Toronto’s Waterfront Bike Route

Leslie St. community gardens protected by fence on right. Waterfront bike-pedestrian path connects between Beaches area, east Toronto and along Lake Ontario into downtown Toronto by Harbourfront. Road is heavily used by trucks during work week 2011. Photo by J. Chong

Fifteen years ago, before community gardens became the blooming rage for growing local food and flowers, I used to cycle to work daily and pass a large community garden along Toronto’s Waterfront bike route  –not far from the Leslie St. spit.  At that time, this garden had a low wire fence where one could look over top to see a profusion of plants, compost piles and garden lawn chairs scattered about for resting.

Now, the Leslie St. Allotment Community Gardens are protected by higher secure fencing.  But these gardens still thrive in the same location.  They have expanded and matured with some lawn grass rows and ever-thickening bushes.  Most likely, the choice location wasn’t because of the bike path location. It was  the reality, that sometimes people could drive and stop briefly to unload soil and other gardening tools.  Besides, the location was on a convenient plot of public land across from a light industrial area that continues to have flotillas of trucks rumbling on the road.  Thank goodness for a marked bike and walking route.  Without the Leslie St. allotment gardens and signed pathway, this area would be dull, bleak and an area to avoid.

Vancouver’s Spirited Reclaimation of Abandoned or Underused Land
Some Vancouver community gardens display creative reclamation of abandoned public right of ways and other underused land plots, such as traffic calming circles.  Just a 5-minute walk from the Granville Public Market, lst Ave. near Fir St., are recent new community gardens lining the  abandoned Molson branch rail line from the Arbutus Corridor, another abandoned rail line.

The gardens line a well used bike route that feeds to and from the popular Burrard St. Bridge separated bike lanes that are 2 blocks away. The Burrard Bridge separated bike lanes have a daily average of 5,300 cyclists. (2011)

Davis St. Village community garden in heart of Vancouver BC at a busy corner of Burrard and Davie St. Cyclists transit, cars and pedestrians converge in this area. 2011. Photo by HJEH Becker

You can’t help but stop by to marvel bright red poppies, miniature tongue-in-cheek, homemade transmission line art and jewel-coloured floral annuals dotting  decorative grasses, ground cover plants and some veggies, including tomatoes.  It’s a brave garden: it has no fencing –yet. There’s even an arbour built right by the rail crossing sign.  Certainly cyclists have to slow down anyway to look,  in order to angle their wheels safely across the rail line.

One of several traffic calming circles containing community gardens. Ontario St. bike route, Vancouver BC 2010. Photo by J. Chong. A road centrepiece that slows down cars, cyclists and pedestrians.

After cycling another 10 minutes north on the separated bike lane via the Burrard St.  Bridge, you will reach the Davie Village garden.

This community garden is planted right in the heart of downtown Vancouver,  at a street corner thronging with people, car traffic, buses and bikes during the day.  The garden has overtaken land where there was once a gas station. The land was specially prepared to contain soil contamination for gardening on top.  There, sunflowers rise like smiling, calm faces to greet the harried crowds and traffic.

The City of Vancouver had only discovered within the last few years, that its cycling network had some major routes close to a wide range of community gardens. Here are maps that combine its bike routes and community gardens.

Bright Spots in Calgary– A Prairie City

Calgary has less of a lengthy history and number of community gardens. People tell me it’s the shorter warm growing season since it is over  400 km. north or 8 degrees latitude north  of  Toronto.   While Vancouver has over 2,500 community garden plots, Calgary has 30 community gardens with over 115 garden plot allotments.

So the expectation to find many of Calgary’s community gardens near its signed bike routes and paths, is a bit premature at this time.  The most obvious community garden would be a large full community garden behind Fort Calgary along the heavily used Bow River bike path in the downtown core.  If it weren’t for the occasional concert and staging area for annual Calgary Stampede, this flat prairie parkland is otherwise underused. The community garden is a bright spot under the blazing hot, naked sun.

As you continue along the path and near the heritage Simmons Bedding Factory which now house architectural offices, there are temporary community gardens in the rising, rehabilitated East Village area.  The gardens pop cheerfully and humbly amongst the construction flurry of condos, a new Central Library and more.

Butternut squash, tomatoes, flowers and visual interest at Leslie St. Allotment Community Gardens. Toronto 2011. Photo by J. Chong

Community gardens and bike-pedestrian routes, if well-positioned and integrated into community design, enhance neighbourhood property values, health of its residents, and promote conviviality among people in shared outdoor activities.

Further Reading and More Photos of  Other Community Gardens
Calgary Horticultural Society.  Community Gardens. List provided with links.

Chong, Jean. People’s Oases: Community Gardens. In Cycle Write Blog. Apr. 9, 2010.

Chong, Jean.  Touring Vancouver’s Community Gardens Along its Bike Route. In Velo-city Global 2012 Conference Blog. Apr. 15, 2011.  Includes community gardens on front lawn of Vancouver City Hall.

City of Vancouver.  Community Garden Walking and Cycling Tours. Includes maps.

Toronto Community Garden Network.  Community Gardens in Toronto and GTA. For unknown reasons, Leslie St. Allotment Gardens are not on this list.

—- Jean Chong

http://thirdwavecyclingblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/25/community-gardens-near-cycling-and-pedestrian-routes-complementary-community-amenities/

You can't have Wall Street without the oil economy. And oil's pushers, Big Oil, are doing better than ever. Image: Leader Nancy Pelosi via Flickr.

Wall Street is the best immediate target for a huge protest movement, since it was the freewheeling gambling of big banks that pushed the economy over the edge in 2008 and started the Great Recession.

Now, as Occupy movements pop up around the US and across the globe to draw attention to economic inequity and the government corruption that abets rule by the top 1%, Occupiers should not forget that ExxonMobil is as guilty as Goldman Sachs in buying politicians and squeezing the 99%.

The New York City General Assembly recognized the role of Big Oil in the declaration of grievances against corporations that it put out in late September: “They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.”

Yet, in media coverage of OWS, little attention has been paid to the role of oil companies in tanking the economy. Perhaps it’s because sneering banksters and coke-snorting stock traders are such satisfying and visible targets of middle-class ire over unemployment, home foreclosures and stagflation.With so many people to hate on Wall Street, who has time to notice all the baddies down in Houston?

But while the crimes of Wall Street are very real (if rarely prosecuted), Big Oil may actually be the bigger villain in today’s economic tragedy.

By hooking the public on its product and then continually quashing alternatives from solar power to conservation, the petroleum industry has played a more fundamental role than Wall Street in making the global economy unfair, unsustainable and vulnerable to dangerous crashes — and even catastrophic collapse.

And while it’s easy to finger high flyers at AIG, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch for the banking collapse that hit in the fall of 2008, the media has overlooked the underlying cause of that collapse — record high crude oil prices reaching $147 a barrel just a month before the banks started to fail.

“As oil prices soared from $35 per barrel in early 2004 to almost $150 per barrel in the summer of 2008, consumer price inflation in the US tripled to a rate of almost six per cent. It didn’t take long before interest rates caught up to inflation and, in the process, blew up the massively over-leveraged sub-prime mortgage market and the economy with it,” economist Jeff Rubin has explained.

Dollars are backed by oil

Today, the US dollar and all the world’s other major currencies are effectively backed by oil, which they have been since they went off the gold standard starting in the 1930s, as Rep. Ron Paul has so effectively explained. For more than a century, in a world of fiat currencies and ever-expanding credit, cheap oil has enabled an explosion in global manufacturing and trade.

Given how much manufacturing has moved from industrialized countries to China, it’s safe to say that there would be no global economy at all without refined products of crude oil — particularly the diesel fuel that runs the container ships and big-rig trucks needed to move Chinese products to domestic markets.

So, without oil, banks would have little money to lend, traders would find few stocks and commodities to trade and there never would have been enough credit flying around in the 1990s and early 2000s to enable financial weapons of mass destruction like sub-prime mortgages and credit-default swaps.

Our whole out-of-control money, banking and financial system are marinated in oil. This means that if Wall Street is like an office coke dealer, then Big Oil is like the kingpin of the Medellin Cartel.

Starve the beast

Silly chain emails calling on drivers to boycott one brand of gas station, say BP, in order to bring down the price at every retailer’s pump, just distract from the real problem with oil. Even if it made any difference (which it won’t), whining for cheap fuel is degrading and disempowering, keeping us just where the oil companies want us, hooked to their product.

Instead, people empowered by the open-air education in active citizenship that we’re all getting from the Occupy movement need to focus on things that we can do individually and together to reduce the economy’s reliance on oil while fighting against the corrupting influence of Big Oil in politics. Here are the top five:

1. Get oil money out of politics.

Oil and gas companies have donated $238.7 million to candidates and parties since the 1990 election cycle, 75 percent of which has gone to Republicans, who have worked shamelessly to protect industry subsidies and fight restrictions on drilling. But to get oil money out of politics, we’ll have to attack the issue of corporate politicking in general.

The Founding Fathers saw corporate power as a threat to their new democracy. “Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against,” said Samuel Webster in 1777. Madison and Jefferson feared a pseudo-aristocracy of corporations and echoed the sentiment that large corporations needed to be subordinate to ordinary citizens. Only in the age of the Robber Barons did it become legal and acceptable for large companies to support political candidates and lobby politicians. At the same time, the Supreme Court laid the framework for “corporate personhood,” a mistake which the court solidified in 2010 with the infamous Citizens United case that lifted nearly all restrictions on corporate political giving.

The solution? Pass a constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people. That may not be as hard as it sounds. Most Americans, including 68% of Republicans, support an amendment to get corporate money out of politics.

2. Cut direct subsidies to oil companies.

Over the last sixty years, 70% of all government subsidies for energy have gone to fossil fuels, as opposed to just 10% to renewable energy. Oil and gas companies alone have received a whopping 58% of all subsidies, and they continue to receive this corporate welfare despite reporting record profits. In an economy where market demand is clearly sufficient to ensure that companies make money — and lots of it — from pumping gas and oil, only the massive political influence of the industry has been able to maintain obviously unnecessary taxpayer handouts.

Once we can curb the power of corporate money in politics and make Congress and the White House more accountable to citizens than to corporations, we need to repeal all direct subsidies to fabulously profitable companies from ExxonMobil to Chesapeake Energy.

3. Cut indirect subsidies for oil through the ARSE (auto/road/sprawl) Complex.

While subsidies given directly to the oil industry get the most attention in the media, it’s really the subsidies that they receive indirectly in many different ways that artificially inflate oil company profits. And these dwarf direct subsidies, as David Roberts writes at Grist.

Indirect handouts to oil include $3 trillion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with billions more in ongoing costs each year to protect shipping lanes for oil tankers from the Strait of Hormuz to the Niger Delta. Then, add in costs to human health from air pollution and climate change, which may be hard to tally, but are easy to recognize. As Bill McKibben has put it, making the connection between oil and finance, “Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere.” Finally, billions more spent on a transportation infrastructure of roads for personal cars will turn out to be money wasted when America finally makes the inevitable transition away from oil-based transportation.

Starting as soon as possible, the US should put a moratorium on new road construction, as groups in the UK are pushing for. Then, would it be too radical to quickly ban the sale of any new gasoline cars, as Norway has proposed doing in 2015? After that, it will be much easier to start a crash program of repairing our passenger train system while promoting transportation that doesn’t require oil like bicycling and walking (see below for more on that).

4. Remove barriers to renewable energy.

If the US is to retain any semblance of an industrial economy and be able to provide the jobs that the Occupiers want in a future beyond oil, then we’ll need to trade in today’s inefficient personal cars, trucks and planes for electric trains powered by clean, safe energy sources like solar and wind.

Fifty years ago, auto and rubber companies dismantled the best rail system in the world to create a bigger market for cars and tires in the US. Now, auto and oil companies continue to use their influence over government to cripple public transit and prevent the US from building a modern rail system. Likewise, Big Oil is trying to strangle clean energy in its cradle by killing the public support that helped all energy sources to grow in the past (Solyndra “scandal,” anyone?).

Even worse, dirty energy interests, including oil and gas companies, have helped turn government into an obstacle to clean power through monopoly electric utilities on the state level. To generate power, electric utilities favor natural gas, along with coal and nuclear power, over solar and wind. And even if a utility has little interest in building out its own clean generation, the utility may still invoke its legal monopoly power to stop anybody else from installing solar and wind in that utility’s service area.

To break the iron grip of yesterday’s energy sources on the neck of the energy sources of tomorrow, it may take nothing less than passing a mandatory Renewable Portfolio Standard on the federal level, requiring electric utilities nationwide to offer their customers more and more clean energy over time and thus creating a growing market for solar and wind.

5. Conserve and relocalize.

While it will be necessary for the United States to build out all the clean energy we can as quickly as possible, we also need to be realistic and recognize that no amount of renewable energy sources are likely to replace the huge amount of fossil fuels that the world economy relies on today, as Richard Heinberg has demonstrated. Therefore, we’ll have no choice but to use less energy in the future. And as they say in cop movies, we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way.

Today, we continue to feed our addiction to oil by trying to squeeze out every last drop of tar sands or deepwater oil, no matter how dirty, dangerous or expensive. Concerns about climate aside, from the viewpoint of supply alone, that’s just kicking the can down the road. Sooner or later, continuing to feed our fossil fuel addiction will lead inevitably to an oil crash that will bring suffering a hundred times worse than the 2008 Wall Street crisis.

A better way would be to start powering down our whole economy now, while we can still do so with some control. A big piece of that will require the US and other rich countries to bring their manufacturing back home from China. We need to stop outsourcing and then we need to reverse it. On the national level, OWS can help a movement gain steam to repeal the deceptively named “free trade” and reinstate import tariffs to protect the domestic industry that’s still left and start bringing our factories back home.

Meanwhile, on the community level, the Transition movement offers an increasingly popular model for towns and cities to take more control over their economic fate and start reducing their reliance on imports from big corporations by providing more of their goods and services at home. Cutting our purchases of consumer products made 5,000 miles away is perhaps the best thing we can all to do use less oil now and in the future.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Source: http://transitionvoice.com/2011/10/top-5-ways-to-occupy-big-oil/ ]]> http://carbusters.org/2011/11/26/top-5-ways-to-occupy-big-oil/feed/ 0 http://carbusters.org/2011/11/20/railroad-lines-that-are-flourishing/ http://carbusters.org/2011/11/20/railroad-lines-that-are-flourishing/#comments Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:58:09 +0000 carbusters http://carbusters.org/?p=2558

http://www.railroad.net/

Cycling around in a neighbourhood designed for walking and cycling. Here, roads are not built for cars. Malmo, Sweden 2010. Photo by J. Chong. Bikes parked by home, not cars.

I’ve been wanting to write this article for awhile:  how cycling can change your spending habits.  I should know –I haven’t lived in a household with a car for over the past 30 years. Yup. It really has been a car-free joy “ride” to financial liberation.

I have been cycling  over the past 19  years.  By moving to a cycling lifestyle, you redirect your money for things you really want, instead of sitting in car-clogged traffic while gas money is literally vapourizing away.

So if I may offer, over a quarter century of homespun, financial savvy on what it truly means to live a cycling lifestyle, dollar-wise:

• Less  impulsive purchases
• Buy what you need, what you really want  –that includes buying less  junk food. After all, you have to cart the weight away by bike  and chug up the hill with loaded panniers.
• Buy less fashionista clothing –my attention is more on cycling clothing.
• No knowledge of gas prices and pricing wars.   I have been blissfully ignorant for over a quarter century.  I am psychologically freed from vehicle gas costs. I’m only aware of fuel costs  –when I pay for a plane ticket.
• Less window-shopping.  I am more focused when I shop.  If an area doesn’t offer a place to lock up my bike safely, I go somewhere else.

So really what have I done with the money I have saved by not owning nor driving a car, for all these years?  I have redirected my  precious dollars:

• Bought my own home—mortgage-free.
• Several memorable cycling vacation trips, in Ontario, Quebec, Maritimes, Alberta, British Columbia, Hawaii, New England, Washington,  Oregon, California and some  European countries.  I support  the local economy as a cycling tourist.
• 3 bikes   –all add up to less than cost of a used car.
• Cycling clothing and equipment  –equivalent to car tune-ups and repairs costs.
• Nice restaurant meals on bike vacation trips.  “Fuel money” for our body. Instead of gas.
• Money  to take other plane trips to see family. So yes, from car fuel to plane fuel, which I can only justify because I don’t do it often.  However these trips are essential for my soul.
• Occasional evening art courses over the years. ( I created some of my own art which adorn my walls.)
• Replaced 1 desktop computer with another new computer plus a new couch and bed.

I am pleased to say that I have reaped the benefits of living within a 15 min. walk or less from public transit and cycling infrastructure for the cities of: Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary.

All three cities do have areas that are more time-consuming, transportation-wise  but I simply focused only on neighbourhoods where I could  live a car-free life.  There are trade-offs but  a peace of mind and healthier lifestyle, is what draws me to cycling lifestyle and walkable-bikeable area.

Cost of Car Ownership and Driving
For major Canadian cities, a parking spot for a residential building costs approximately $30,000 – $50,000 with Vancouver at the higher range.   In 2010 the Canadian Automobile Association estimated cost for a small car at $18.00  daily which includes owning and driving a car (based on 18,000 km. mileage annually or 49 km. daily).  Add on parking and now total costs could be easily be $30.00 daily.

Thanks to 30 years of car abstinence, I have $328,000 to spend on other things.

If you still don’t believe this money-saving wizardy, check out your car credit bills.

— Jean Chong

Source: http://thirdwavecyclingblog.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/30-car-free-years-cycling-pumps-money-into-my-wallet/

Hey Joe Cartoon - Michael David Lipkan

When modern humans began creating settlements that could flourish because their people were farming the land, a remarkable growth of culture began to occur.  Before the development of farming, modern humans were hunter/gathers that spent much of their time looking for food.  Agriculture made it possible to provide so much food that methods of preserving and saving food became necessary.  This plethora of food also increased the amount of “free” time people had to pursue their own interests.  This free time led to the blossoming of the arts, music and technology.  A type of cultural renaissance was occurring because of the introduction of agriculture.

The invention of the printing press eventually led to another renaissance that is still evolving today.  The popularity of the personal computer may lead to another, even more global, renaissance.  Literacy will increase worldwide which will tend to allow more people to have more “free time” which leads to further growth of culture and technology.

We are living in the computer revolution.  Although this revolution has only been happening since the late seventies, powerful changes have been made to the way people live and think.  The internet and world wide web make it possible for people to connect to things they need in ways that save energy and resources.  The enlightenment of people made possible by much faster access to information is causing another kind of renaissance.

I believe the growth of complex, humane, very energy efficient, modern, cities, will lead to another renaissance that grows beyond human accomplishments thus far.

Further, I believe that linearizing existing cities, and joining them in a way that creates a long, thin, line, of megacity, will greatly accelerate the renaissance that follows the computer caused awakening.

Long, thin, densely populated megacities will need more effective and efficient forms of transit than the automobile.  Mag-Lev trains, buses, gravity ramps, elevators, and bicycles, working along well integrated paths, will make transit in the future megacities affordable, fast, and efficient.  This improves the synergism of the city which leads to a global renaissance.

—  Michael David Lipkan — Linear City Concepts

http://www.imagine-city.info/