Commuting by Car

...Or Other Personal Transportation

2011-11-09T15:39:00.001-06:00

When the Ford Model T was first sold in 1908, it cost $950. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator only goes back to 1913, but even then that $850 translates to over $21000 today, so the car wasn't "cheap" by any means. But Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line and completely interchangeable parts to his factory, and the price began to drop. Ford also discovered that cutting the profit per car resulted in more than making up for that cut in sales, and in 1914 48% of all cars sold in the U.S. were Model Ts. At their lowest price they were only $280, perhaps $6400 in today's dollars.

For comparison's sake, a 1912 Henderson 4-cylinder motorcycle sold for $325, $45 more than a model T. This spelled the end of the "motorcycles as primary transportation" era in the U.S. and Canada, though in Europe two world wars kept motorcycles "relevant" until the early 1960s, and in many places in the world motorcycles are still used to carry entire families.

But this is a blog about commuting via automobile. What's this about motorcycles? Well, I bought a one, primarily for commuting. I don't go riding around on weekends, and don't expect to take a trip on it. I've seen ads for used motorcycles where the owner says "I don't have time to ride anymore", to which I am tempted to fire off an email asking "don't you go to work 5 days every week?" No time to ride -- bah!

I want to say that this is an economical thing to do, but I can't. I won't be selling my car, so it can't be justified economically, and during yesterday's afternoon-commute rainstorm I was glad I wasn't one of the two people I saw on motorcycles. No, I bought it because I wanted it, but to not ride it to work would be silly. And boring.

What this is, is a 2011 Royal Enfield B5, descendant of a British make, but made today in India. It's inexpensive for a motorcycle, listing for $5495 new, and has a modern fuel-injected engine and a catalytic converter. So far I'm averaging 61 mpg, though I suspect it would do much better than that if I weren't riding at 65-70 mph. (It seems happiest at 45-55.)

I'll write later about the advantages of commuting by motorcycle, and the drawbacks as well.

They Go Together In The Good Ole USA

2011-11-03T10:59:00.002-05:00

As the commercial from the 1970s said, "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet" go together. We currently have two Chevrolets (a 2009 Traverse and a 2006 HHR). My wife had a Nova in the 70s (before I knew her), and in addition to the two Chevys we now own, together we've had a 1990 Lumina, a 1994 S-10, and a 1985 Corvette. Additionally, our older son's first car was a 1991 Cavalier Z-24, and our younger son's first new car was an '06 Cobalt.

Why am I talking about a particular make? Because today (November 3, 2011) is Chevrolet's 100th anniversary!

I haven't been able to find the original 1974 television commercial online, only a 1975 ad that doesn't come close to the first one. Anyway, as an advocate of getting around by private automobile, I'll leave you with a line from a much older ad campaign: See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet! And if you prefer Fords, that's okay, too!

There's No Need To Go In Reverse

2011-10-06T11:08:00.004-05:00

Old things:

In November, Chevrolet will celebrate their 100th anniversary.
Last March's Indy 500 was the one-hundredth anniversary of that race.

I've often thought about how there is really nothing new anymore: The telephone, the electric light, and the automobile are all products of the 19th century. That's the century before last! The airplane is 106 years old. And now, it has been 100 years since the first 500 mile race. That was quite an endurance race back then, lasting six hours and forty-two minutes, but the average speed of over 74 miles per hour, well, that's faster than you are allowed to drive on most freeways even today. If the fact that this occurred one-hundred years ago isn't the fact that establishes that there is nothing really new, well I suppose the hundredth anniversary of the first intercontinental telephone call four years from now will be the thing.

There are people today who wish that some of this, maybe all of it, would never have happened. Oh, they enjoy some modern conveniences, but some of it doesn't fit with their version of Utopia. They long for urban density, which they envision as a squeaky-clean environment where we all live in one-hundred story buildings heated and cooled by the sun's rays, and travel to our jobs mere minutes away on foot or on electrically powered trains or buses. There is no personal transportation in this picture, save for our feet and bicycles.

I'm glad we have people like that. I tend to believe that if their vision were ever realized, we would find that density is just another word for overcrowding, but I've always said that it's the radicals who get things to move in the right direction. It is they who will push until we get gasoline powered cars that are near zero emissions, and electric cars that are even more convenient than the liquid fueled vehicles of today. (My prophecy on that is 1000 miles per charge within 20 years, and we'll remember and laugh at having had to fill up our gas tanks every week in the old days.) It is they who will push until public transportation actually becomes a convenient alternative for many people, allowing them to reach their destinations as quickly as if they were driving their cars. But they'll never be happy, because their vision of Utopia will never materialize. They won't be satisfied when the air and water are cleaner than nature ever imagined and the Earth's weather is perfectly pleasant all over the globe, because they will have substituted their imagined future as the goal, rather than as a means to reach the goal.

We've already increased our density to some extent. "Suburban sprawl" is decried by those who look for urban Utopia, but it is actually the result of more businesses moving to cities. What used to be small towns are now small cities on the edges of large cities, and while we still live in single-family homes, the sizes of our lots are decreasing. Small town far from large cities are getting smaller as people move to, or near to, the mega-cities. That's increased density.

Our cars are cleaner due to 50 years or regulation. Market pressure is now giving us even cleaner, more efficient choices.

And the roads, the highways... yes, the public works projects that the environmentalists believe are the enemy: They are part of the very solution the environmentalists envision. They help us to live closer to the cities where we work. The "problem" (which most people don't consider to be a problem at all) is that these amazing roads allow us to efficiently utilize high-speed private transportation. I can live 35 miles from the office and get there in 45 minutes.

Perhaps you've seen this film made on board a San Francisco streetcar in 1905. There are a few automobiles in it, apparently circling around many times to make the city look busier than it actually was, but generally you see a lot of horse-drawn wagons and a whole lot of people walking. People rode the streetcar then because it was easier and more convenient than walking long distances. Once Henry Ford made the automobile affordable (and created the middle class by doubling his worker's wages) people were less reliant upon mass transit. In crowded places like New York City, mass transit may indeed be more convenient, but for most of us the highways take us quickly from our homes to the city, then drop us off on surface streets very near our destinations — easy in, easy out! Highways began to progress in the 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, and both advanced, becoming better and more efficient, throughout the 20th century and now into the 21st. To become reliant on mass transit today would be to digress to a time before there was a middle class. While today's (temporary) economic situation (setbacks are always temporary) seems to say that the middle class is shrinking, and may as a result increase dependence on public transportation, in general, we do not go backwards.

I'm an optimist, and I have reason to be. Yes, great societies in antiquity did vanish, but they were not as global as today's society. In general, life has gotten better and easier throughout the centuries, and we have become more mobile and less dependent. We'll clean up what's left of the mess, building on the environmental progress we've made since the 1950s, and at the same time continue to improve our personal transportation options. Maybe we'll add high-speed rail to supplement air travel, and maybe someone will actually come up with a public transportation system to serve the suburbs more conveniently than our cars, but we will not transition to a system that's more cumbersome than the current one. For the foreseeable future, we'll continue to improve upon my favorite option, commuting by car. (Or motorcycle... in an upcoming post.)

Car Sales are Up!

2011-02-01T13:41:00.000-06:00

According to an AP release (found here on MSNBC), car sales were up in January for just about every company, when compared to last year. In a somewhat misleading headline, however, it is implied that people are returning to buying trucks ("Trucks help life sales at GM and Ford"). Reading the article, it's clear that the increase in truck sales is largely attributable to businesses returning to the market, an excellent sign for the economy.

For Kia and Chrysler, it's the crossovers that are moving. Kia's Sorento, a small crossover, leads the way for them, and Jeep's Grand Cherokee, a new, large crossover, had sales that were up 130% over the old model's sales from last January. The old model rode on a truck-based platform. These crossover vehicles, front-wheel-drive vehicles based on car platforms, provide the versatility that station wagons did several decades ago, while remaining more fuel efficient than the truck-based SUVs that were so popular only a few years ago.

For Chevrolet, the new Cruze compact car slightly outdid the Cobalt's January 2010 sales, but significantly, it's sales were 90% to consumers, whereas the Cobalt, last year, went 60% to fleet use (company cars and rentals). Again, this is a good sign that people are more comfortable with their economic situations, and to me it says that people are interested in fuel-efficient transportation. With gasoline at $2.85/gallon here and over $3.00/gallon in many parts of the U.S., this is understandable. People haven't forgotten the $4.00/gallon prices of 2.5 years ago.

For some reason, fleet sales have dropped overall. I don't know what to make of that.

Regardless, when I'm driving to work every day, I'd much rather be surrounded by cars than trucks. I still can't see over the crossovers with my HHR, but if the proportion of cars to crossovers increases, it'll make the drive that much easier.

Rising Gas Prices Allow Public Transit Riders to Ring in the New Year with an Average Savings of $805 This Month and $9,656 Annually

2011-01-16T15:36:00.001-06:00

The title of this post is the title of a bit of propaganda to be found here, on the website of The American Public Transportation Association. I ran across it in a SmartPlanet article.

The "methodology" section at the end of the article should really be called a disclaimer, as it's a section explaining how they came up with the most exaggerated results possible. Included is the statement "The savings assume a person in two-person household lives with one less car."

That's an interesting assumption, but one that needs more detail. In assuming the person switching to public transit gives up a car, you must make assumptions about what kind of car they've given up. Was it assumed to be a new car? According to the NADA (quoted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in this article), the average price of a new car in the U.S. is $28,400. Spread out over 5 years at an excellent rate of 3.99%, not having a note on a car of that price would save a commuter $6274.80 in payments alone. Of course, they don't say what kind of car the commuter is not buying, but this would account for 2/3 of the supposed savings.

The savings includes the price of parking, but some who commented on SmartPlanet say that they have to pay for parking at the park-and-ride where they leave their cars each day. These are folks who ride public transportation because it is, indeed, easier than driving into the city each day, yet they save nothing on parking, and they don't get to "give up" a car. There may be an alternative for these folks, in that their spouses could take them to the train or bus station each day, but if there are children to take to school, or if their work schedules don't mesh well, the two-car solution may still be the only viable one.

That's not to say that it's impossible to give up one car and thereby save money. Both of my sons have done exactly this. One lives in Austin, where his wife normally uses the city bus to go to the university. The cost of that trip is hidden in her student fees. He's close enough to work take a bicycle when weather permits, so there is a potential for the car to be left at home many days. If a couple were to live within biking/walking distance from both of their daily commutes, they could leave public transit out of the picture, as well. I don't suppose that the public transit people really want you to consider that option, though.

Here's the thing: They're presenting a scenario for savings that's unlikely to apply to anybody. If a person can afford two cars that expensive, they're probably going to keep them. If they can only afford one car that expensive, then it's the older or less expensive car that's going to be sold, because you're likely to want to keep the better car. Such an exaggerated claim may get people to read the article, but most likely it will result in dismissal of the claim as simply pie-in-the-sky.

Multi-modal Transportation

2010-12-30T14:28:00.002-06:00

On Tuesday, I didn't commute by car. The first half of the day was spent interfacing several modern forms of transportation.

My son and his wife were headed back to Germany and had made arrangements to ship their car, so we started the day heading down Texas-146 toward Galveston. Highway 146 follows the western edge of Galveston Bay, so we passed several port facilities and container terminals along the way, but for shipping personal vehicles, the nearest place was on Galveston Island, about a 50 mile drive from our house. We followed them down there, and he was escorted into the terminal, parking his car in line. It'll sit there a week or so and then be put onto a ship. I expected it would be crated, but they actually drive the cars right onto the ship. We had to wait outside the gate; when he returned he was interested in a couple of other cars waiting there, including a Dodge Viper and an old Mercedes Benz in immaculate condition. I suppose the Viper owner just wants to drive his supercar in Europe. According to the port employee, the Mercedes had been sold for a good sum of money to a museum in Switzerland; the man had tears in his eyes as he left the car there.

Yes, we can love our possessions: They have meaning to us, and we can be attached to them because of the joy they bring us. Is it any wonder that some like me actually enjoy our daily commute, especially on days like today, between Christmas and New Year's Day, when there are few other cars on the road to interfere with the process?

After an enjoyable breakfast at IHOP, we headed up Broadway, which turns into I-45, and aimed for Bush Intercontinental Airport north of Houston. This was about a 62 mile trip up 45, making the interchange to US-59, and then to Beltway 8 and JFK Blvd. I must be a nerd, but I have to admit that I enjoy dropping people off at the airport. As you approach you find the sign that directs you to your airline's terminal, then you wind your way around to the passenger drop-off area. There's something about the hand-off from automobile transportation to air transportation that makes me feel like the future has arrived. It took nearly an hour to travel from Galveston to the airport, and they would wait nearly 5-hours before their flight actually left, but then they were merely 9 hours away from Frankfurt, Germany on the other side of the Atlantic. (They won't see their car for a month!)

Yes, I'm still a kid in some ways, just fascinated by the ways we're able to do things today. I'm sure that the Wright Brothers, 106 years ago this month, and the builders of the DC-3 which first flew 75 years ago this month, all envisioned this future, but it's here, and it's still amazing.

Then I had to go home and "telecommute" the rest of the day.

Driving Blind

2010-12-14T12:50:00.001-06:00

How quickly we become dependent! Because of construction, I've learned to depend on my GPS with realtime traffic. I've told you in the past how it has saved me time, and when used without good judgment, cost me time, but for the most part it has been a great tool to have.

My son and his wife flew in from Germany last night and planed to head out of town to visit some friends for a couple of days, so he asked if he could borrow the GPS, unless I felt like I needed it for traffic. Being no wimp, I handed it to him. I can do the commute on my own!

Actually, I haven't been using it on the way home from work lately because the eastbound construction has been completed and I don't ever have a problem in the afternoon. On the way in, it's often still useful, but I headed out blind this morning. There's less traffic now because of people being off of work during the holiday season, I reasoned, and I shouldn't have any need for traffic alerts.

I did get past downtown without a problem, just a short backup that I expected, but suddenly things came to a halt in an unusual spot. I had no GPS to warn me ahead of time, but I have that old standby, a pair of eyes! On the top of the overpass I could see that the backup stretched for miles ahead, so I made my way to the right across 5 lanes and exited at Heights Blvd. I did find surprise construction that prevented me from turning left on 11th Street, but it was easy to make a block, and the GPS wouldn't have known about that anyway.

This post may seem silly, and I felt a little silly when I mentally hesitated before giving him the unit this morning. The technological tools are nice, but the truth is that most of the time we don't need them. Still, if it were stolen, I'd buy another one.

Winter Blues

2010-12-07T13:24:00.000-06:00

I did the "Sonic" thing again yesterday. We have a Post Office box in Mont Belvieu, so I try to go there after work a couple of times each week. Most days I go home right after work, or else meet my wife in Baytown for dinner if she's out of the house, but once in a while I'm going to have the evening to myself. She was running errands and rather than meet to eat, well, we didn't. My goal was to put up the Christmas tree.

At the Post Office, I found my January issues of Car and Driver and Cycle World. Usually, that's cause to spend the evening reading about my favorite subjects, but that would have caused me to fail to meet my goal. Christmas comes early at my house this year due to family members who have limited time, and it wouldn't do to not have the tree up by Monday when we pick my son and daughter-in-law up from the airport.

Outdoor decorations have to wait, and that brings up the thing I hate about this time of year. We don't have real "winter" in this part of the country, and we're so far south that it doesn't get dark that early in comparison with most of the country, but it's dark before 6:00, and that's too early for me. The westbound side of I-10 is construction free now, reducing my drive back to 45 minutes, but there's still no daylight to speak of when I get home. If there's a big drawback to the commute, it's winter time.

Daytime will start to last longer before you know it. I'm surprised every year when it starts to get dark early, but I'm equally surprised that it starts to feel better so quickly after the solstice. Maybe not so surprised this year, since I'm already anticipating it.

Although it still needs to be decorated, I got the tree up and lit, and the Abominable Snowman perched on top in his traditional place.

The Car Culture

2010-11-23T21:14:00.001-06:00

Things that people remember fondly are usually things that no longer exist. Nostalgia is for things long gone, after all. Fortunately, some things continue as they have always been. I don't suppose that there are many drive-in restaurants around any more, but around here, there's still Sonic. Sonic originally opened in Oklahoma in 1953. They didn't arrive in Southeast Texas until the 1970s, a date that was really past the prime of drive-ins. It's nice, then, that they've managed to not only hang on, but to thrive. There are four Sonic Drive-ins within 10 miles of my house, and one is only a half-mile away! I just got to thinking about that as I was enjoying a hamburger (with mustard... this is Texas after all) and tots at the Mont Belvieu Sonic before going to the post office this evening.

2006 Chevrolet HHR at the Mont Belvieu Sonic

Possibly the best memories are of when we were first married. We couldn't afford much (wow, is that a setup for a nostalgic statement, or not?), but the Sonic on Dowlen Road in Beaumont was something we could manage. And when my wife was expecting our first child, I remember specifically stopping there for ice cream after the Lamaze instructor mentioned that ice cream (but not chocolate ice cream!) was an acceptable source of calcium for expectant mothers. (I'm not so sure about that, but we went with it anyway.)

And for the 5 years I had the Corvette, removing the targa roof and heading to Sonic just seemed like the right thing to do. Even now, on a cool day my wife and I will go to Sonic, and eat at the picnic table rather than in the car.

Nights like tonight, when I'm just stopping for a bite to eat while my wife is running errands, are just nice because I can sit in the cool air and watch the cars go by.

Thanks, Sonic, for helping to keep the car culture alive!

Oh Frabjous Day!

2010-11-22T20:34:00.000-06:00

Much to my surprise, all four eastbound lanes of I-10 between I-45 and US-59 were open this afternoon! Approaching I-45 it wasn't obvious because there was a backup in the lanes that exit to 45. And, of course, once I got past that backup, three cars in adjacent lanes didn't bother to speed up, holding the rest of the traffic up. As I got around them I realize that there was about a quarter mile of empty space ahead of them where everyone else was already up to speed. Hurray!

This means no more Loop 610 on the way home.

Unless there's more road work schedule further up. If so, I hope the stimulus money runs out really, really soon.

Technology Giveth, and Technology Taketh Away

2010-11-14T14:29:00.000-06:00

I like to say that commute time isn't the worst part of the day, meaning, really, that it can be quite enjoyable. Lately, though, construction on all possible routes has made it nothing but stressful. I have to admit that I know, if I'll just relax and take it in stride, it really could be nice: That's what the radio is for. But every day?

Normally it takes awhile for the GPS to figure out where all of the delays are, but the other morning I plugged it in and before I got out of the driveway it was warning me of a delay of over an hour! I decided to head south to highway 225, which I haven't done in some time. Then it did a funny thing: It told me to get off of the freeway and run the access roads when I got to I-45. Usually that's a bad idea. The GPS doesn't track speeds on the access roads, and usually if the freeway is backed up, the access roads are worse. But when I got stuck in the mainlanes and saw apparently empty access roads, I decided to exit. It turns out that these are almost completely empty, and it really shortened the drive.

Ah, but Friday. Friday mornings are the best time of the week for traffic, and Friday afternoons are the worst. I checked before I left the office and knew that it was even worse than the typical Friday, so I opted for an I-610 around to TX-225 route. As I got to the southbound portion of 610, the GPS said to exit at McCarty and run three miles east, then go to I-10. Having never gone that way, and because I wanted to know the route, I took its advice.

Thirty minutes and only half of a mile down McCarty, I turned around. That's 30 minutes I wouldn't have had to spend if I wouldn't have listened.

Fortunately, as I got back to the loop it suggested staying on the access road and heading back on side streets to the south of I-10, then taking Market Street (which parallels I-10). Good idea, but I should have headed back to I-10 on the major road before the one it told me to take. The lesson in chilling out would be a very good one to have learned before this trip — my 45 minute drive home took an hour and a half.

I could have either been relaxed, just taking it in stride and listening to the music, or I could have done my best to avoid traffic and, failing to do so, become very frustrated and completely exhausted. I took the latter course and paid for it. Note to self: Remember to choose the most likely route and stick with it (unless it becomes impossible), then go with the flow.

80 MPG Into the Wind

2010-10-21T21:44:00.000-05:00

Craig Vetter's orignal purpose for selling the Windjammer fairings for Goldwings in the 1970s was to make the motorcycle both more aerodynamic and comfortable. Motorcycles are about as aerodynamic as bricks (yes, that's a cliche'), so very often they don't get much better mileage than a car. (Since most motorcycles engines/transmissions are optimized for power, motorcycles very often get worse mileage than cars.)

Since the 70s, motorcycles have only gotten heavier, in the same way that each revision of a particular car model is larger and heavier than the one that preceeded it. (This is why Honda now makes the "Fit" and Nissan, the "Versa": The Civic and Sentra are no longer subcompacts.)

The original Goldwing weighed about 650 lbs, which was huge for the time, but not uncommon now. It had a 999cc engine, again, huge for the time. The current Goldwing has an 1832cc engine and weighs about 900 lbs. Kawasaki and Triumph make motorcycle engines that are over 2 liters.

Because of this trend (and also because the manufacturers started making their own fairings, I'm sure), Mr. Vetter has become an idealist about aerodynamics. His current goal is to build a vehicle that will get 100 mpg at 70 mph, into a 30 mph headwind, and be able to carry four bags of groceries. He recently conducted a competition based on this goal.

His latest competition saw 5 vehicles, including Craig's streamliner, make a trip up the California coast. He wasn't too strict with the rules, however, as two of the five compitetors could not have carried the groceries. He determined the winner based on cost, which meant the highest mpg vehicle, a diesel, didn't win, because gasoline is currently cheaper than diesel.

The 125 mile trip from San Luis Obispo to Salinas saw fuel costs in the $4.50 range. (The stock Suzuki DRZ in the competition really didn't expect to win, and indeed had the highest cost at $8.49 and lowest mileage. The rider was simply there for the experience.) Vetter's own machine, a Helix scooter with a streamliner body, DNF'd when a fabricated gear shaft for the modified CVT broke.

Vetter has been expecting an engine in the 250cc range to work best, based on his calculations of the horsepower necessary to move a streamlined machine at the desired speeds. It's ironic, then, that the best fuel mileage was recorded by a traditionally styled motorcycle, one with a sport-style fairiing, but diesel powered. (This machine couldn't carry the groceries, however.) This Hayes Diesel motorcycle has a 670cc engine. Hayes already builds military motorcycles based on the Kawasaki KLR 650, because the Army wants one fuel for all vehicles in the battlefield and gasoline won't do. The civilian version in the competition will soon be on the market.

The result of this competition tells me that perhaps diesel is the best path toward fuel efficiency. The gasoline engined vehicles, even with far superior aerodynamics, got from 80 to 82 mpg, and the not-so-aerodynamic diesel, with an engine 2.5 times as large, got 89 mpg. Perhaps Mr. Vetter needs to put a diesel engine in his streamliner to see what it can do.

What Would It Take To Successfully Sell an Electric Car?

2010-10-15T12:27:00.001-05:00

From Smart Planet, CEO Kevin Czinger, of CODA Automotive, explains what he believes it will take for the average consumer to want to buy an all-electric vehicle.

His main point is that the car must have enough range for an "aggressive" driver to use it all day without having to worry about their range. To me, this means that a person who makes "jackrabbit starts" and drives at or slightly above the speed limit should be able to get to work and back home, including whatever stops or detours they might occasionally have to make (grocery store, dinner, etc.). He wisely indicates that it must be able to make this trip in all seasons. After all, the air conditioner uses a lot of energy, and in an electric car the heater is going to drain the batteries substantially, as well.

But I would go a step further. Perhaps 98% of the time I drive my commuter-car simply to work and back home, and most stops (for dinner or groceries) tend to be not far out of the way. But there are occasions when I may have to make an out-of-the-way excursion. My drive is 36 miles each way, but if I need to make a trip up north of town for some reason, I could easily add 30 more miles. If I go to my brother's house, that's 20 miles further from my house, adding 40 miles to my round trip.

For me to buy an all-electric vehicle, it would have to have a 250 mile range under the worst conditions. With that vehicle I would normally only have to charge it every three days, and I would be able to handle most of the "unusual" days as well.

Real Time Traffic Info, or Ahead of Time?

2010-10-09T08:17:00.001-05:00

I've talked about commuting tools such as online traffic information, and GPS with traffic. It seems there's potential improvement ahead.

Right now, if my GPS determines that there's "severe traffic ahead" (and I'm quoting the GPS voice), it recalculates the route. The New Jersey Turnpike Authority has purchased a system that predicts the traffic backups before they happen. Now there's something useful, if you can get people to pay attention to it! Suppose when you leave the house, you check the traffic map and all appears to be okay. You may still get stuck, not just because of a wreck, but because the traffic load caused a slowdown. If the traffic system can predict this, then people can choose an alternate route, either avoiding the slowdown, or maybe (if enough people pay attention) preventing the traffic jam.

Unfortunately, people don't necessarily pay that much attention, or don't alter their route. When this story appeared on Smart Planet, one commenter mentioned an 18 mile backup on I-495 in Massachusetts that morning at 8 a.m., where people had been warned at 6:30 of a 5 mile backup because of a major accident. They chose that route anyway!

As for me, I'm learning. My usual route had a predicted 45 minute delay yesterday afternoon, and the normal alternate wasn't much better. I didn't follow the GPS instructions (it was too slow in picking up the delays, and I knew about them from checking the internet before I left), but I went a route that I learned through its suggestions, following surface streets past the delayed area. Saved myself at least 30 minutes!

Maybe I need a way to automatically start up the GPS about 15 minutes before I leave the office, so it will have all of the information it needs. Its problem is that it's collecting information as the radio-based system spits it out, so it takes awhile. Someday these things will be able to talk instead of just listen, and will send their destination to a server, which will already have the delay information and send back the best route. Even better, as the New Jersey system shows, it can suggest a route based on expected delays instead of just current conditions. Someday, but when?

Economic Recovery Act

2010-10-02T10:09:00.000-05:00

I can get through this. I know I can.

Living east of Houston, where fewer people want to live, has been a blessing as far as commuting. I've been making this drive for 16 years now, and although I've had to endure some amount of construction over the years on I-10 East, it has been less than, say, the Southwest Freeway (U.S. 59), which has had some portion under construction continuously since the 80s. And I-10 East seems to be ahead of the game, where the number of lanes is always ahead of need. (Side note: This conflicts with the claim of anti-freeway people, who insist that wider freeways lead to larger suburbs. The fastest growing areas have had worse traffic for years, and the freeways have always been behind in those areas.)

The Bush/Obama Economic Recovery Act has pumped a lot of money into transportation, and in Texas it's being used for "shovel ready" projects. This means that maintenance and construction projects that were already approved, but waiting on funding, have been accelerated. Projects that were once to be done sequentially are now being done concurrently.

I have one main route that I take to work (I-10 for almost 30 miles), but if there's a traffic problem, I can divert to the I-610 North Loop. Because of construction on the poorly designed downtown section of I-10, I've been taking the 610 option, but this was actually under construction first. Last week's traffic switch on 610 makes taking that route home almost always the worst choice, but in the morning, it still works better some days. But it's never good, because there are no shoulders in many places, and bottlenecks due to construction.

What is typically an easy 45 minute commute lengthened to around an hour, and I don't know when it's going to get better. Do you suppose anyone considered the negative impact of doing these projects at the same time? If they considered it, well, they decided it didn't matter.

Anyway, it'll get better soon. I really don't want to complain about road construction, because without these continual improvements, the commute would become unbearable.

Just hurry it up, would you!

Celebrating the Beginnings of our Mobility

2010-09-21T17:47:00.001-05:00

Mobility is what wheels and engines are all about. Horses and other animals helped people to move further and faster, and the addition of wheeled vehicles extended the usefulness of the animals. Then the bicycle, in the 1800s, proved to be a permanent extension to our mobility. Who doesn't remember the freedom they felt when they first rode on two wheels? But that internal combustion engine... now that changed things!

The first cars, of course, were like many new things today: The early adopters had to have money. But suppose you could rig one of those new internal combustion engines up to a bicycle... wouldn't that be something? People of modest means might enjoy quite an extended range! And so it was that bicycle manufacturers like Triumph and Royal Enfield in England, and Indian in the United States, began building motorized bicycles... motor bikes or motor cycles... around 1901 and 1902.

I recall an episode of NCIS where the assassin "Ari" met Gibbs in some remote location, riding up on a motorcycle (a Ducati as I recall). Gibbs said "nice bike", to which Ari replied "it isn't a 'bike', it's a 'motorcycle'". In his arrogance, he ignored the history of the machine.

Until Henry Ford reduced the price of his cars and doubled his workers' incomes, regular folk saw these motor cycles as a great liberator. It was now possible to get a good paying job in the city while living on the farm. It was now possible for a single fellow to take a very long trip. And it was fun! Indeed, after the great wars in Europe, and even today, motorcycles and scooters allow mobility for a lot of people who would otherwise be dependent.

In celebration of that time, the time before automobiles were affordable, there's an event going on right now called the Motorcycle Cannonball. It is essentially a rally, the goal being to cover as many miles of the route as possible under your own power. If you break down one day, you can fix it and pick up at the next day's starting place. There are three classes: Single cylinder, single speed; two-cylinder, single-speed; and two-cylinder, multiple-geared motorcycles, the most "modern" of the bunch. As of today (Tuesday, September 21) 11 of 45 entrants have traveled 2114 of the 3300 mile rally completely on their own, and these motorcycles were all originally manufactured in 1915 or earlier. Even more amazing is that only a few are completely out of the event. Yes, it's been a lot of work, and many are spending their evenings making repairs, but it reminds us of the time when an average person could build or rebuild an engine and get their machine on the road. I wish I lived close enough to see them!

It seems somehow fitting that this week, the winners of the Progressive Automotive X-Prize were announced, in which participants had to build a car and a business plan to produce it, and the car had to get the equivalent of over 100 mpg. "Equivalent" because they could be powered by electricity or a hybrid system. And it's fitting to this historical event, because the winner, made by a company called Edison2, was the Very Light Car powered not by a complicated and heavy system requiring batteries, but by a two-cylinder motorcycle engine. Internal combustion has some years left as the most efficient and cleanest option, it seems.

It is a celebration, and celebrate we should! I'm 100% on board with making engines run cleaner and for finding ways to use less energy, but would any of us want to go back to the days before we were mobile? I'm thinking that it's time to do my own celebration by taking a road trip with my wife; no airplanes this time.

Urban Living Makes You Crazy

2010-09-09T14:30:00.000-05:00

It must be true, because there's research to support it! An MSNBC article in their "The Body Odd" section points to a study in the Archives of General Psychiatry showing that city dwellers in Sweden have more mental problems than suburban dwellers due to "social fragmentation". Isn't that supposed to be a problem associated with suburban life?

I don't necessarily think that the stresses of living in a city are worse than the stress of making that daily drive, but this does hint that those who present their views against commuting are simply exercising their personal bias.

The actual article is entitled "Individuals, Schools, and Neighborhood: A Multilevel Longitudinal Study of Variation in Incidence of Psychotic Disorders". You have to be a subscriber to read the entire article at the journal's website.

Seeing Where You've Been

2010-08-31T20:48:00.003-05:00

There's an article in the summer issue of Mazda's "Zoom Zoom" magazine that describes some of the ways the test to determine how well driver's see around them, and how easily they are able to gather information from inside of the car, with the goal of minimizing the time spent not looking ahead. This means being able to gather information from inside and around the car faster. It's good to know they're thinking about that sort of thing.

I suppose that's why many cars now come with "blind spot" mirrors, the small part of the external mirrors that is angled further out, to help the driver to know what's to the sides of the vehicles. It's amazing, now that I think of it, that there was only an outside mirror on the driver's side of most cars until the early 1980s.

There's a technique for adjusting your mirrors that for years has served me well, allowing me to completely eliminate the blind spots and to do without the extra mirrors. You can read about it on the Car and Driver website. Essentially, the goal is to point the outside mirrors away from the car, rather than straight down the sides as most people do. When the mirrors look straight back, you see much of the same thing that your inside mirror shows. The technique I've used as a starting point is to move my head over toward the window and aim the mirror straight back from that vantage point, then to move my head as far right as possible and do the same thing with the right side mirror. When you move back to the center, you have the mirrors set so that any car passing you on either side will move into the side mirror as it moves out of the rear-view mirror. This isn't precise, however, so you have to make adjustments. If done properly, cars passing you will not move out of the view of the side mirror until they have begun to move into your peripheral vision. Voila! No blind spot!

But manufacturers are still putting the blind spot mirrors on the outside mirrors, and it turns out to be a necessity. With the HHR I just bought, I realized very quickly that the view out the back is narrow. Besides the wide edges of the hatch making the window smaller, the rear-seat headrests obscure a lot of the view. This means that I have to aim the outside mirrors more directly back, because I still want vehicles disappearing from the rear-view to show up immediately in the outside mirrors. The result is a restricted side view. So I solved the problem:

I solved it by adding convex blind-spot mirrors. The hard part is getting used to looking in them.

What Does the Computer Know?

2010-08-24T21:53:00.000-05:00

When I was growing up, my parents kept a small notebook in both cars where the odometer reading and fuel purchased were recorded, along with oil changes and other maintenance items. We always, always, always filled the tank. By recording the fuel usage and calculating the mileage, you might notice because of a sudden drop that something was wrong, even before you had any other signs. And I suppose it's just something that people used to do. Driving wasn't always a hop-in-the-car-and-go affair, and perhaps keeping the log was a leftover from the early days of motoring. I still have the note pad that was used for a couple of the cars.

After I got married, I dropped the practice, largely because my wife didn't participate. That was one of the first times I realized that just because my family had always done something, that didn't mean it was strictly necessary. Even though I quit logging it, I almost always fill up, and calculate the mileage if the vehicle had been filled up the last time. With the Traverse, it isn't always possible to fill up because one gas station I go to stops at $50.00, and depending on the price, that may not be quite a full tank.

The Traverse is the second car we've had that calculates your mileage for you. The calculation is made based on fuel flow rate and speed. The first car that did this was the '85 Corvette, the first car we had with any sort of computer-driven display. I seem to recall it being fairly accurate, and I've had people tell me that their experience is that the computer is accurate. I've been checking it closely in the '06 HHR that I bought few weeks ago, and the computer doesn't do such a good job.

The results from the first five complete tanks are as follows:

Miles/gallons = mpg; computer est.
433.9/15.6 = 27.8; 27.4 (not far off)
371.2/14.4 = 25.8; 27.9 (more in-town on this one)
404.3/14.4 = 28.1; 28.9 (more highway on this tank, since I drove to my parents' house)
412.6/14.9 = 27.7; 27.9 (close again)
382.3/14.1 = 27.1; 28.5

I don't know what happened on that last tank, unless it was excessive stop-and-go traffic. But the computer guessed high.

I was really hoping to get around 30.0 miles per gallon with this car. I got 33 with the air conditioner in the Saturn, and 36 without. Maybe in a few weeks I'll be able to see what this car does when I don't need the a/c in the mornings. However, this car has a 16.5 gallon tank, so I can easily go over 400 miles on a tank. The Saturn would give me 400 miles without the a/c, but in the summer time, 400 miles was really pressing my luck.

Later, I'll post regarding the effect of using the air conditioner versus having the windows open. Believe it or not, that's a controversial subject.

Delays, or Non-delays!

2010-08-16T22:55:00.001-05:00

A commuting tool that I didn't mention in my last post is the weather website. That radar picture can be your best friend. Depending on your perspective of time, it hasn't been many years that instant radar images have been at our disposal. I suppose it's really been at least 10 years now, so maybe that does count as having been awhile.

This afternoon a guy in the office announced rather suddenly that he was headed out the door... he had checked the radar and a line of thunderstorms was very near. Fortunately for him, he lived the way it was headed, not where it had already been. I elected to hang around awhile, since the storms were between work and home, but there have been times when I've left early because I knew storms were coming. Wrecks occasionally cause the commute to be a headache, but strong storms almost guarantee it.

Today, though, the radar warning was for naught. Somehow, the storms fizzled. All of the reds and oranges faded suddenly, and it didn't leave a drop at the office. There had been rain along the way, and there had been quite a bit at my house, but even that didn't seem to slow the traffic a bit. Quite a pleasant surprise!

And my lawn is happy, too.

Commuting Tools

2010-08-09T20:35:00.002-05:00

It may seem a bit silly to think of needing special "tools" to drive to work and back, even if your drive is long. In fact, you can make that commute with nothing but a reliable car, but there are things that can make the commute more pleasant, and even easier or quicker.

Air conditioning, heat, and a radio are basic. I've spent summers without functioning air conditioning, and in this part of the country, with a long commute, that's miserable. I'd like to say that a heater isn't really necessary here, but the one winter I spent without one was pretty cold, especially since I ended up being out after dark quite a bit that year, not something I usually have to do in my "work car". The radio is what makes the commute a good part of the day for me, as it's really the only time I get to listen to music.

I have a couple of recently acquired "tools" that help the commute in other ways. One is a solar-charged bluetooth hands-free unit. It sticks on the windshield with suction cups and keeps itself charged. It was easy to pair with my phone, and it sounds... it sounds okay. I've had a bluetooth headset that sounded very good, but occasionally I'd have to take it in the house and charge it, and the battery might run down at inconvenient times. Of course, I don't use the phone much in the car, perhaps once or twice a week for about 3 to 5 minutes, just to figure out where to meet my wife for dinner. Having the hands-free device keeps me from having to fiddle with the phone when she calls.

Another tool doesn't go in the car at all. It's the "traffic website". I can check the Houston Transtar weather map for a quick view, and used this website for several years. More recently, I've found traffic dot com to provide a better service. I've saved several "drives" on the site comprising the various routes I may take to and from work, and it shows me the delay and total travel time for each route. This helps me decide very quickly whether to follow my usual route or to choose one of the alternates.

More recently, I bought a Garmin Nuvi 255WT GPS unit specifically for commuting. How odd does that sound? Don't I know the way to the office after 16 years? Well, yes, but I've seldom ventured off of the freeways, and since there are limited ways to get back on the Interstate after getting off, having the Nuvi has allowed me to find some new ways around traffic jams. More importantly, though (and the reason I got it), it has a lifetime traffic subscription.

I had doubts about how well this would work after reading online reviews, but my brother purchased one and assured me that it works quite well. In the couple of months I've had it, I've been amazed at how well it works. The traffic receiver is built into the lighter plug cable. Once turned on, it begins gathering local traffic information via Clear Channel Radio's FM traffic network. This model came with a free, lifetime traffic subscription, though some models may require a subscription. Certain XM and Sirius satellite systems have traffic services, as well.

Once it gathers the information, it tells you the estimated total delay on your route (two minutes in the image on the left), and color codes the delays along your route. You can see a very slow (red) section in this image that begins just before the entrance ramp, and that turns to "slow" (yellow) shortly afterward. Because it does take some time, it doesn't always have all of the information by the time I reach the freeway in the afternoon. For this reason, I always check traffic.com to make a decision about my route. In the morning, however, it's generally 15 or more minutes before I encounter traffic, so the Nuvi saves me from having to turn on a computer to check the traffic before I leave the house. If there's a major delay, it directs me to take loop 610 instead of staying on I-10 all the way to my exit, making the decision easy. The traffic signs on the freeway typically have not been that reliable.

And, as I mentioned before, it has allowed me (encouraged me, actually) to get off of the freeway in the downtown area to avoid traffic jams. If it "discovers" a problem on the route you're taking, it announces "severe traffic ahead; recalculating" and tells you which exit to take. While you must still use your own judgment, based on your experience as to what traffic normally does along your route, I've heeded it's instructions and saved myself 30 minutes or more on several occasions. That's a quick payback, in my opinion.

Speaking of using your own judgment, I have followed its instructions with doubts a couple of times. One of those times, it led me to a long wait on a train. There's its biggest drawback: It doesn't know what's happening off of the freeways. It will often direct me to remain on the frontage road through several lights before entering the freeway in the afternoon, but I know that if I stay in the right lane of the freeway I'll get home more quickly than if I deal with the backup at the traffic lights. It also doesn't know about entrance ramps that are closed temporarily due to construction. But it's a tool, and must be used properly, not blindly, and it truly has saved me a great deal of time in the short time I've been using it.

It also gives me a glimpse of the future... someday, and if the current state of the art is any indication, that someday isn't far off, we'll have routing information that takes all of the traffic, on and off highway into account, and will be smart enough to route different cars different ways, saving us all a lot of time and gasoline. Two years ago, I would not have believed we'd really have a device that gave us real-time traffic in our cars. Most exciting gadget I've bought in a while!

Why Would Anyone Choose to Drive to Work?

2010-08-02T23:13:00.001-05:00

The general impression I get when reading comments on the web is that most people think that the automobile is a scourge on humanity, and that the only reasons a person would drive to work rather than take public transportation is if they have no choice, or they're Neanderthals. Since I haven't seen any Neanderthals lately, except in Geico commercials, we'll have to assume that people have no choice.

Well, that's mostly true in the U.S. But given the choice, what would it be? According to a 2005 ABC poll, 60% of drivers like their commute. Why would we choose this way of getting to work above other choices, like living close enough to walk, or living near enough to use public transportation? The online "screaming" about it seems to be coming from a very, very vocal minority of social engineers and common people who think they know better than the majority, the masses being sheep that have been led astray by a General Motors Corporation who forces their products on the public rather than letting us choose.

According to the Wikipedia article on 'Commuting', and quoted elsewhere on the web (but unsubstantiated, as far as I can tell), "Before the 19th century most workers lived less than an hour's walk from their work." This idea seems to be quoted in some places with the idea in mind that it's only proper that we live no more than a couple of miles from our place of business, but it strikes me that "one hour" seems to, historically, be about the maximum an average person would want to spend getting to and from work. Longer than an hour, it becomes tedious.

According to The Encyclopedia of Chicago, it was the availability of public transportation that allowed people to live further from their places of business or labor. It was Henry Ford, who drastically cut the cost of manufacturing automobiles, and who subsequently raised employee pay to $5 per day (thus enabling his assembly line workers to afford to buy the very automobiles they were making), who changed commuting forever. But still, don't most of us live less than an hour from our workplace, measured by our chosen mode of transportation?

Houston has a relatively new light rail system. This system has not increased commuting options, but, rather, replaced some bus routes. I've said before that if the trains would run along the freeways, out to where the car drivers live, and stop at the freeway exits, where people could catch a bus to their workplaces, you might get a few people out of their cars. But they don't work that way. The trains compete with car traffic downtown. (Back in the 1980s, Mayor Whitmire proposed a monorail system that would have placed the trains above ground, where they would not hit or be hit by automobiles, as happens now.) If I want to use public transportation on my daily commute, I must first drive 7 miles to the park-and-ride location, then take a bus downtown, walk a couple of blocks, and catch another bus that takes me close to the office. Total time from the first pickup to the last drop off is 91 minutes, plus 8 more minutes for the initial drive, and 5 for the final walk. That's 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to work.... far beyond what people have historically considered to be acceptable. Additionally, the bus fares would run $11.50 per day, versus the $6.37 I'm spending on gasoline right now. While we really should add in the other costs of operating the car, most of those are fixed, whether the car is driven to the park-and-ride or driven all the way to work.

Does this mean I have no other options? Well, at this point in my life, I could move closer to work, though when the kids were at home, the Houston Independent School District would not have been an option. A smaller, older home for the price of our larger, newer home doesn't seem like a reasonable trade, but you do pay a price for living nearer the city center. And I'd still be driving.

Would we actually choose to do this? There are other reasons for our choices. Moving closer to work means moving further from our parents, and we expect to be spending more and more time with them over the next few years. That may be the deal-breaker, because it would mean that my wife has to drive 2 hours to get to her parent's home, rather than just over an hour, and that will soon be a weekly (or more often) trip.

Remember that statistic I quoted at the beginning: Most people actually enjoy their commutes. When construction in multiple places isn't throwing a monkey wrench into the works, I enjoy mine. It's 1-1/2 hours I have each day to listen to music on the radio. When else can I listen to music? And it's virtually the only time I've ever alone. Do I really want to give that up? Commuting by car is my hobby.

Besides, if I wouldn't have had my 36 mile drive today, I'd have missed this 1955 Oldsmobile 88 that some lucky guy was hauling home to restore.

Face it... we also commute by car because we're car crazy.

Choosing Your Car

2010-07-26T21:06:00.004-05:00

There are many ways to get to work each day, and the place you live either expands or limits your options. For now, it's sufficient to say that many people who work in Houston live outside of or on the outskirts of the city, and have determined that the best way to commute is in a car, alone. I'll discuss another day what options are actually available and the pluses and minuses of each.

A few weeks ago I would have proudly told you what an exceptional choice I made in 2003, when I purchased a 1999 Saturn SL1. For the previous five years I had been driving a 1985 Corvette. I had always wanted a Corvette, and when I found myself in need of a car, at that time in my life a 13 year old Corvette with 156,000 miles for $8200 seemed like a great idea. And it was a great idea! I enjoyed the 120,000 more miles I put on it, but it reached the point where it wasn't worth the expense of the repairs. By this time I had one son beginning his second semester of college, and another one in high school. I began to look for something economical.

Shopping exclusively online, I had narrowed down the choices to the Saturn or a Chevrolet Prizm. (Prizm = Toyota Corolla, made less expensive on the used market due to the lack of a high-perceived-value nameplate.)

In my "wisdom" I bought the Saturn. This turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. My wish as I drove it home from the dealer was that I wouldn't hate it. (I was coming out of a Corvette, after all, and into a car with 100 horsepower.) As it turns out, weighing only 2350 lbs make a car fun to drive, even without a lot of power. (My children may not agree about the fun part, and I know my wife doesn't, but it would corner like nothing else, even with skinny tires.) Not only that, it got 36 mpg in the months when air conditioning wasn't needed, and 33 in the other months. Repairs? Less than $200 for mechanical problems in 7 years, plus a brake job (the most expensive thing), a battery or two, and multiple sets of tires. The drawbacks? Well, such a car does not fit your wife's idea of your status in life, especially when the guy she almost married 25 years earlier is kind enough to let you out of a crowded parking lot ahead of him, and he's driving his new Hummer H2 that he's made sure everyone knows about. (Politically incorrect and perhaps embarrassing now, but in 2003 he could think he was hot stuff and have some people agree.)

Ah, well. The car turned out to be exactly what I needed at that time. But I had been thinking that it was time to get rid of it, and had been internet shopping again. After all, at some point any car is going to become a headache, and there were signs it would come soon. How ironic, then, that I decided on the way home one day that, no, I would keep it until next spring, and five minutes later I was rear-ended in traffic and pushed into another car, ending the usefulness of the only wise financial decision I've ever made in my life. My mind was changed for me.

And now I had to choose again. How do I pick a car now? Can I possibly do as well? Do I still want, at age 50, to be seen in a car like this? I had been looking online for months, actually. I had looked at Mini Coopers, Porsche Boxsters, Honda S2000s, between $12,000 and $15,000, but also at Hyundai Sonatas, Pontiac Vibes, and Honda Civics, under $10,000.

Time to haul out the sage in myself that chose so, so wisely before, right? And since I'm blogging about it, well... no, this isn't a blog by an expert. It's a blog about life.

If you can afford a new Ferrari, get it! But at this point I will give one bit of advice for those looking for inexpensive, reliable transportation, while admitting to not being any sort of an expert: Get the best thing you can afford, taking care to find something with both a low price and low miles. But low miles and low price don't usually go together, so sometimes that prospect is scary. (A place called "Smart Motors" has prices that seem amazing, but it's because their cars all have big dents. Maybe that's okay!) My local Chevy dealer had two prospects, and a sale involving my credit union and a $500 gas card. One car was a Saturn Ion, successor to the SL1, with less than 60,000 miles, for $7995. The other was a Chevy HHR, a small "crossover" that actually rides on the same GM Delta platform as the Ion. It had 79,000 miles and was listed for $6995. I went the day after I totaled my car and drove both of them. The Saturn was awful, but the HHR drove okay, looked cool, and I've always liked wagons anyway, so I bought it. Without taking a good look at the tires. Two of which I had to replace a week later.

I was hoping for 30 mpg in the summer, but my first tank only yielded 27.6. There's a bit of a clunk in the suspension, but you can potentially drive for years with a clunk. I like it okay, though I'm not completely comfortable in it. (Will my lower back conform to the seat?) I like the looks a lot. Very important: My wife isn't embarrassed about it; in fact, she wanted to drive it home when we picked it up. Pluses and minuses, that's the way it is. Time will tell whether the choice was wise, foolish, or (more likely) somewhere in between. It'll probably be okay, but I no longer feel like a genius. Wish me luck... because skill has nothing to do with it.

How much is there to say?

2010-07-23T16:18:00.000-05:00

Actually, there's a lot to say about commuting. It's something I do every day for about an hour-and-a-half, sometimes two hours.

But this blog might turn out to be something like a new band's progression of albums. On the first album they come up with 12 songs, 5 of which are good enough to chart, and 6 of the other 7 are close. But those songs have been written over a period of years, and their sophomore album doesn't have that luxury.

Blogs start out fast and furious, too, but often get abandoned. I've actually been blogging for years, but not about a particular subject. I have quite a bit to say about this subject, though, so I'm ready to get started. The first real post will be about having to replace the car.

Please join me!