Come to think of it isn’t the OP’s the called the Blue Mountains?
Come to think of it, this is why bikes were pretty useless where I grew up, too. We lived in a very hilly neighborhood, and for just getting around we had to walk, until we were old enough to drive or ride motorcycles. We had bicycles, but a bicycle was something that you walked up to the top of whatever steep, windy road you lived on, so you could ride back down. It wasn’t transportation, it was entertainment. Of course, it must be admitted that these were just fairly inexpensive kids’ bikes; better gearing might have made them easier to use,.
I also remember how much it sucks to walk a bike over a long distance, when for some reason you can’t ride it.
[QUOTE=Spectre of Pithecanthropus;10240554
To the bikers, the ones who bike to work specifically: if you have to wear dress clothes to work, how do you manage to ride a bicycle long distances and not arrive with you and your clothes all sweaty?[/QUOTE]
I sort corn. It’s a job for money now for college, not a career. They don’t mind if I’m all sweaty.
That said I’ve noticed as I do it more and more I get less and less sweaty. If I wanted to be dress up for work I’d wear a really good antiperspirant and wear biker clothes to work then change to work clothes in the loo.
I would not attempt it in hot weather unless you have access to a shower. I’m 1/4 inuit so I get hot easy I consider too hot to be in the 90s. lower 80s if I didn’t want to get sweaty.
I’m in Raleigh and we’re starting to get a little low here, too. There are three gas stations near me - one is completely out of gas and the other two only have Regular. I don’t know what the situation is in other parts of the city, but there was an item on the news last night advising people that it’s okay to put regular gas in a car that usually takes the higher grade.
My mom’s preferred gas station in Raleigh was out of gas the last time she drove by there. I work in Rocky Mount; I haven’t noticed any kind of shortage here or on my drive home. I have heard reports of stations in Raleigh being out of the higher grades of gas.
And so, in a crisis time like this, where you’re riding your bike to buy groceries, you don’t buy popsicles. You buy staple foods and live without the luxuries for a little while. A week, two weeks, however long it’s going to take to get the gas distribution back to more normal conditions, you live without popsicles.
I mean, what did people do before cars were invented? They traveled under their own power and they bought only what they could carry and had to pick and choose carefully. And they did in fact have to budget hours of their day if they had miles to travel. This situation is a wake-up call to a lot of people, showing just how easy we have it today, and how easily our modern lives can be disrupted by the lack of one simple commodity.
That puts it right out of the question for me, in central Mississippi. If I want to look ‘professional’ then I can’t ride my bike to work from April until October. I’d love to be able to. It’s about 8 miles.
Can anyone 'splain why there is a gasoline shortage in NC? I’m puzzled.
Yeah, we’re just kinda sorta getting done with all that here in Nashville. Gas is pretty easy to find today, but last Friday through the weekend, it certainly wasn’t. I filled up before everything happened, but I was lucky.
And no, there is no public transport here in town that can get me from my house to my workplace. I would love for them to do what they did for Lebanon and build a train that runs to downtown. But I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
That was my thought - getting to school isn’t a crisis (and it appears they’ve suspended it anyway), but if you’re out of food, cycle on down to the store and get some staples that you can carry in a backpack. No, it’s not ideal, but crises rarely are. The OP says;
You need to make some changes to fix that, because that’s a really sad thing.
I feel for you, pmat. Rumor is the BP stations in the area have gas if you get there by 6:00 am.
There are public buses within the city of Asheville itself. But the region is mostly made up of small towns separated by mountains. As for bikes, I work 15 miles away from home, going by the highway. Taking safe back roads would put my biking commute at closer to 25 miles. I’m 6 months pregnant, and even if I weren’t, biking 50 miles a day ain’t gonna happen. There’s bus service to my workplace after 3:00 pm, but not before then. I can and do walk to shops in my neighborhood, but getting to work is the kicker. (And, yes, I’ve been carpooling.) Bikes are great, but they’re not a solution for everyone.
Thing is, most people around here are dependent on cars for their livelihood. It’s pretty common to live at least 20 miles from where you work, in large part because housing prices are through the frickin’ roof here (nice side effect of a tourist economy). And if you’re working as a CNA or in an $8 an hour service industry job (health care and tourism are the two biggest employers in the region), you can’t exactly telecommute. If people can’t get gas, they can’t get to work. They can’t get to work, they don’t get paid and could get laid off. That tends to make folks testy.
The problem seems to be the hurricane, of course, combined with the differing requirements some areas have for different gas formulations because of oxygenated fuels requirements, valve pressure requirements and other government mandates. These require the gas companies to supply a vast range of fuel - which they can’t do nearly as well if fuel supplies are down overall.
The stations themselves are under huge political pressure not to gouge on price - but that doesn’t help shortages like this.
The state and federal governments are lifting the mandates - that should ease the pressure, but it might take a while for this to make its way through the supply chain.
This is obviously why people went out for ice cream in the old days; most people didn’t have freezers at home, and neither did the retailers, who made their product fresh on site. As frivolous as popsicles and ice cream may be, many people do have a genuine need for easy availability of ice and other frozen products. One obvious example is post-operative surgery patients who need to ice the wound periodically–and that brings up another issue, which is that only the fit and healthy can get around on bikes or on foot. What is someone to do when they are wheelchair bound? On the other hand, IMO it’s not too smart to choose to live in a place like that, if that applies to you.
They lived in cities that were compact and had good transportation. I’ll bet you don’t hear many people crying about gasoline prices in NYC.
Or if in the rural areas, they were self-sufficient, but in ways that would no longer be possible for everyone, for the reasons I mentioned above. If you were old or infirm, you lived with your children or other younger relatives who could get things for you.
Did people ever routinely budget “several hours per day” for travel? In the days before cars I assumed that everything tended to be much more local, so that one didn’t normally need to travel more than a few miles.
My best friend lives in Atlanta (or actually Roswell, a northern suburb) and same story. He said it’s incredible seeing lines at the few stations with gas so long there’s no way the last car will get gas, and this in a city of millions of people where it’s never been an issue.
Is there much price gouging at the stations that do have gas?
Does’nt anyone make moonshine in your area ? Mind you, some adjustments to your vehicle might be required but most older vehicles at least drove okay on alcohol.
It might be something to have on hand next time around.
<sniff> Didn’t you realize that getting pregnant is a luxury? God, modern Americans are so lazy, it’s just too hard to ride a bike 25 miles up the biggest mountains east of the Rockies in the third trimester. This is what’s wrong with society today, parasite.
Seriously, what? I’m glad some people are in a situation where they can happily ride a bike to work. Other people work in the mountains or in the South and have to wear suits. Not to mention a three-quarters term fetus.
