Well that kind of puts a damper on it, but my part of the state is pretty good about keeping the main roads clear, and I won’t be going very far on it usually.
10 mile an hour on the back roads should be relatively safe, with safety gear, and get me where I need to go. Albeit half frozen. Then just save the longer trips for better weather. Worst case scenario I can get a ride from someone on the bad days, and the increased scooter ranger might be able to get me a job on the side to pay for another car.
The stiff fingers could be a problem though. Maybe invest in some decent ski gloves.
I used a motorcycle to commute from Rochester (England) to London. It did 70 miles per imperial gallon. I had a heated jacket and gloves for the winter.
It was great. When I stopped at lights, I’d warm my hands on the crank case. In summer it was more fun than anything you can do while wearing leather. Well, maybe not anything, I guess. The only weather that stopped me riding was snow/ice and strong winds.
It is a problem, but heated gloves help a lot. They are wired onto the bike’s battery, and the cables run up your back and down through your sleeves.
The only downside is that they don’t offer as much protection as the leather/kevlar summer gloves. But heated or not, you can’t wear those things in winter anyhow - you need insulation.
Here’s an example of the type of thing I mean. I haven’t tried this brand, so I don’t endorse them in any way - they’re just an example of the type of thing I mean. Most folk seem to report that they get only one winter’s use out of the things, but it’s still a good deal IMO.
One point - if you get a bike, get training. Seriously. It can be dangerous out there for bikers, since everything else on the road horribly outweighs you.
But have fun. Once you know what you are doing, it’s great.
Oh I plan on it. Once when I was 9 I wiped out on a bike going as fast as I could get it. About a month later the side of my leg was almost healed. Lessen learned. Respect anything that can tip over and take your skin off.
Tao, my experience was with ski rated gloves, so I wouldn’t assume that they’d be able to do a good enough job for more than very short trips. But, I’ll admit the majority of such experience I’ve had was several years ago, synthetic fills may be better, now.
I can believe that they might. I’d had no idea such items were made. cool
Now is it worth porting along a motorcycle battery next winter for snowball fights?
This bike just has to get me through till next year. Then I’ll be certified in electronic repair, and hopefully able to get a job and afford a Honda Prious, or something better fuel economy wise. Plus when the weather’s nice I can motor bike!
I had heated gloves and a heated jacket. Well, a heated underjacket - I’d wear my regular clothes, then insulated pants and a waterproof jacket with kevlar protectors on the back, shoulders and elbows. Under that would be my heated jacket, which was really more like a waistcoat, I guess. Only problem was if I forgot to unplug myself from the bike before walking away :smack:
I also saw heated pants and socks, but it doesn’t get that cold in the UK.
As to the snowball fights - I think that carrying a motorcycle battery might restrict your movements a bit Though I dunno: they feel heavy to me, but I am a 5’7’’, 110lbs weakling.
It’s probably more accurate to say that we’re now reaping the results of what was sown a few generations ago in the post-WWII period. Cheap fuel and certain cultural factors unique to America definitely propelled the explosion of middle-class, suburban living dependent on automobiles, and, once started, it was impossible to stop. The cultural factors are the urge to have one’s own piece of ground, and the notion that cities are bad. If I bring this up now, people say well just look at the dirt, and crime, and the state of the schools, but I think the roots of this anti-urban attitude go back much further, to the railings of 19th century preachers about the Babylon-like wickedness of the big cities, in comparison to the countryside populated by the virtuous, sober, and hardworking.
I bought a ’78 Yam 650 about five years ago as a project. The Yam 650 has some history to me. Used to ride a ’76 to high school. Pretty bike. Vertical twin.
A great deal of it was in boxes, but I got a great deal. It took me about a month to figure out that the engine had been rebuilt 180 degrees off. I swithched the left coil to the right spark plug, and the right coil to the left plug and varuuuummm.
Had to take off the cam covers a number of times and actually look at which valve was opening and closing before I figured it out. 180 degrees off. Crazy.
It’s behind my shed right now, and coverd in snow. It’s a little to small for me. But who knows…. All the parts are there……Perhaps I could make a cool bike out of her…… hmmmm….Some folks actually used that 650 as a dirt bike.
Even L.A. has very high population density, and traffic, along certain corridors. They’re talking now about extending the subway out to the beach, and while there’s the grumbling about the cost, and reluctance that one would expect, it’s sure to happen in the not-too-distant future.
Well…we definately need to work on public transport. City Officials at Arlington Texas are famous for having said they don’t want public transportation because they don’t want people coming to their town that cant afford cars. we have public transportation here in Fort Worth, sorta…it’s getting better but in my neighborhood while I wouldn’t have a problem walking to the bus stop on a day when im not in too much pain I wouldnt let my wife stand at the bus stop without an armed guard. She works a 20 minute drive away, the closest job she could drive to and the only house we could get to rent was that far away from potential jobs.
And it’s true, people in other parts of the world are pretty clueless what it’s like here. I was at a coffee roasting class in Florida a few years back and one of my classmates was from Canada…I found nearly colapsed on the side of the road from the heat and gave him a ride. He didn’t rent a car because the hotel wasn’t that far from the class after all. After we got some fluids into him he gasped "how do people live in this?’ I told him “We drive”
But it’s going to take time to build a public transportation infrastructure…even if we started full tilt boogie on it today with all the money that we don’t have 10 dollar a gallon gas would still be devastating to our economy long before the rail and buss systems were completed. There will never bee buses running in the rual areas…Semi’s will still need to carry goods across the country. People still need to comute between towns…The US was designed around the idea of having cheap transportation and it will take a long time to re-engineer it.
So while we need to plan for the futre we have got to come up with some temporary fixed in the right now.
MY car runs off of soybean oil, which unfortunately the price of it has gone up because of the price of dino oil…
To be pedantically accurate, it was not the boomers themselves, but the the parents of the earlier part of that generation who got this thing rolling, since it started in the post WWII period.
I don’t think driving for pleasure is politically incorrect at all. The problem isn’t the driving that’s done for pleasure, it’s the workaday commuting driving that has us over the barrel.
There’s no doubt a lot of Americans like Joe the roofer will be hurt by rising gas prices. But most people could be doing more to save money on gas. I’m not just talking about taking public transportation. Many people don’t drive fuel efficient cars, tend to make scattered and unplanned trips as need be. There’s a lot of things people can do even if you must drive everywhere, like plan trips out to do multiple tasks in one trip, sharing rides with other people, etc. And a lot of people have poorly insulated and energy inefficient houses.
The idea that public transportation takes forever to implement: No it doesn’t. Get a fleet of buses, hammer out some routes, expand your existing transportation network. We’re not talking monorails here. Here in Pittsburgh, we’ve seen gutting of bus routes for 15-20 years because of a lack of public funding. You used to be able to get a bus from pretty much anywhere the city or the burbs to anywhere else fairly quickly and easily, now it can take up most of your day just to get from one place to the next. If they got dedicated funding and just restored the bus service to what it was in the late 80s / early 90’s, I bet they’d at least triple their riders. But no, we get stuff like…the Monorail. The Monorail was proposed in the mind to late 90’s, and seemed to me too short and too expensive to be even remotely viable. Yeah, lets connect the 2 most congested areas in the city with an expensive space age train! Hey, why can’t we use that money to fund our buses? “It’s different funding”. Ooookay. The big project now (and its already underway, which means it’ll be finished in 8-10 years) is an underwater tunnel, which connects 2 places that are already connected by approximately 20 bridges. I guess they’re trying to divert attention from the ailing light rail system, which consists of trolleys made by an obscure German company. The trolleys break down every 2.6 hours, and have to be shipped to Germany to be repaired (I am not making this up). But hey, we saved a bundle on them things!
Anyway, not everyone would benefit from public transportation, but the existing networks could relatively quickly and easily be expanded. People will reduce the amount of trips they make, build smaller, more efficient cars and houses, and take other steps to reduce energy. Gas will shoot through the roof, and people will be hurting, but we’ll survive.
Sorry, it’s just not that quick or simple. First you have to fund it, and buy the damn things. Notice a bus dealership with a lot full of busses in your town? Me neither, they are pretty much made to order. Try gearing up production to build a couple of million of the things. We’re not talking about one city here, but all of them that don’t have adequate public transport. GMC has nifty hybrid one out, but I don’t think they make more than a few dozen of them.
Then You have to plan out the routes, plan bus lanes, build the refueling and maintenance facilities, hire and train drivers, and build bus stops…off the top of my head. Then you have to convince the public that they are reliable and safe to ride and they wont make them late for work.
I’m not saying it doesn’t need to be done, because it does. but it’s not going to happen overnight.
In my home country, Uruguay, I could literally walk out the door, and within a 500 meter radius I had the option to take a bus to any place in the city AND the country. Granted, i was in a slightly gifted area but almost anywhere in the city you could take a bus or make a two bus combination to go anywhere.
Setting up a bus system is the least expensive vial infrastructure you could implement, you don´t need to buy 1 million buses on a single stroke, bus stops are easy and cheap to make and the rest is just rolling the buses out on the streets. It´s easy, relatively cheap and very flexible.
I still take a bus to work here in Bangkok, takes nearly the same time as it would be to drive or take a taxi.
On average a bus carries 20 or 25 people, takes the same space on the road as 2 cars which usually carry 1 or 2 people, I´d say on average 1.2. So to move around the same amount of people as a bus you need more than 20 cars, that take up 10 times more space on the road. I see the traffic jams everyday here, cars carrying a single passanger stuck bumper to bumper, 8 wide and miles long burning fuel away. It´s depressing.
Though I dunno: they feel heavy to me, but I am a 5’7’’, 110lbs weakling.