Tag Archives: cars

Here’s one more thing you can share: Kids

by bvds34dfsg Posted on February 12, 2013

Here’s one more thing you can share: Kids

By Lisa Hymas

We’ve written a lot over the past month about the sharing economy — how people are using apps and technology that make it easy to share cars, bikes, homes, couches, offices, tools, pets. More sharing = less resource use = all-around goodness.

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Kid-sharing: so much better than kid-hoarding.

And now the latest addition to the list of shareable items: kids. Yes, people are using websites and Facebook pages to find like-minded people with whom to share children. From The New York Times:

[A] new breed of online daters [is] looking not for love but rather a partner with whom to build a decidedly non-nuclear family. And several social networks, including PollenTree.com, Coparents.com, Co-ParentMatch.com, and MyAlternativeFamily.com, as well as Modamily, have sprung up over the past few years to help them.

“While some people have chosen to be a single parent, many more people look at scheduling and the financial pressures and the lack of an emotional partner and decide that single parenting is too daunting and wouldn’t be good for them or the child,” said Darren Spedale, 38, the founder of Family by Design, a free parenting partnership site officially introduced in early January. “If you can share the support and the ups and downs with someone, it makes it a much more interesting parenting option.”

The sites present what can seem like a compelling alternative to surrogacy, adoption or simple sperm donation.

The article highlights a few brave new parenting pioneers, including Dawn Pieke, a straight woman, and Fabian Blue, a gay man, who met on a Facebook page for Co-parents.net and now share parenting responsibility for their daughter Indigo, who was born last October. “[T]hey never drafted any kind of legal agreement, which they both agree was unwise,” the Times reports, but I’m sure that’ll all sort itself out. Right?

Having a kid is by far the most carbon-intensive activity a normal person is ever likely to engage in. Think of the climate benefits if more broody singletons shared those munchkins instead of each having their own. And why just singles? Couples could get in on the fun too. And parents who already have kids and want to dump them at someone else’s house for a few days generously share them with other nurturing adults.

Good news for kids: Coming next is a site for parent-sharing. Not fully satisfied with yours? Find another couple down the street!

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Here’s one more thing you can share: Kids

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Biggest cities with biggest transit systems still face biggest congestion

by MayeskiLatouf679 Posted on February 7, 2013

Biggest cities with biggest transit systems still face biggest congestion

By Susie Cagle

Congestion is gross whether it’s in your sinuses or your city. Urbanists spend a lot of time complaining about clogged up city roads and all the cars full of only one commuter that contribute to the traffic.

But here’s some good news for a change: Public transportation takes a huge chunk out of that congestion in dense cities. Transit saved drivers nearly a billion hours of potential car-driving delay in cities nationwide last year, according to the new annual congestion report from the Texas Transportation Institute.

“The 2012 Urban Mobility Report makes clear that without public transportation services, travelers would have suffered an additional 865 million hours of delay and consumed 450 million more gallons of fuel,” the American Public Transportation Association said. “Had there not been public transportation service available in the 498 U.S. urban areas studied, congestion costs for 2011 would have risen by nearly $21 billion from $121 billion to $142 billion.”

The biggest winners by these metrics were not necessarily the most transport-heavy metros, but the most congested ones: New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. I mean, duh, right? But the study misses a lot of other salient factors that contribute to congestion, such as where people live in relation to work and how long their commute times really are. Take those into consideration, and big metros, while super-congested, still win at public transit (because, you know, they at least have some). Diana Lind at Next City pretty much sums it up:

I guess the bad news is that we don’t have more transit, in these places and elsewhere, and that the stuff we do have doesn’t necessarily run super well and on-time, which is the most alienating thing for would-be riders.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Biggest cities with biggest transit systems still face biggest congestion

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Good news for peer-to-peer car-sharing

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on January 30, 2013

Good news for peer-to-peer car-sharing

By Susie Cagle

It’s a good news day for peer-to-peer car-sharing, and those hideous and somewhat disturbing furry pink mustaches I keep seeing around San Francisco.

lizasperling

The detachable pink mustache alerts ride-seekers that this ride is a Lyft.

Today the California Public Utilities Commission said it has reached an agreement with Zimride, the parent company of fast-growing California ride-share purveyor Lyft, to suspend a cease-and-desist notice and $20,000 citation against the company. The PUC is still reviewing its regulations on car-sharing programs in the Golden State and hasn’t yet reached similar deals with Uber or Sidecar, which are technically still outlaws, though they don’t have the creepy mustaches to match.

This was good timing for Lyft, which announced this morning that it would be expanding to Los Angeles neighborhood by neighborhood in an attempt to cover all that concrete sprawl. And it’s not just Lyft that has its sights set on bigger and better car-sharing markets. From Techcrunch:

The move into L.A. marks the first expansion market for Lyft, which became available to riders in San Francisco last summer. To expand into Southern California, the company sent a team to recruit drivers and build the initial community infrastructure in the city. That means interviewing drivers, inspecting their cars, and generally attempting to instill the Lyft culture into the new market. …

Lyft isn’t the only ride-sharing service that is looking to broaden its footprint. San Francisco-based competitor SideCar recently launched its service in the Seattle area, and is looking to expand even more aggressively in the coming months.

The more car- and ride-sharing companies prosper, the more pressure they can put on regulators to let them go about their business, especially if they aren’t clearly and directly taking a bite out of established taxi cab business.

Assuming car-sharing can stay, you know, legal, there are encouraging signs that smaller, peer-to-peer companies can compete with the big boys. For all the hand-wringing car-sharers did over Avis’ purchase of Zipcar earlier this month, peer-to-peer car-share start-up Getaround has twice as many cars on the road in Portland as does Zipcar.

“Anybody who’s been sort of watching the company can see that we’ve been pretty focused on building supply,” said Steve Gutman, a spokesperson for Getaround.

When Avis bought Zipcar, it emphasized that the deal would bring more cars into its network. But with peer-to-peer sharing, supply can be ramped up all the more more easily.

Peer-to-peer sharing still has a ton of untapped potential, so long as regulators let the cars keep rolling. I’d prefer to take mine without that hideous mustache, though, thanks.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Could the sharing economy kill public transit?

by johnsmithwindows Posted on January 24, 2013

Could the sharing economy kill public transit?

By Susie Cagle

Ken Schmier is a Bay Area transit guru. He’s essentially responsible for the limitless Muni Fast Pass in San Francisco, and created the NextBus application in the 2000s to help people catch those ever-elusive city buses. But now Schmier is thinking transit may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

“Frankly,” the Bay Area attorney and businessman told Next City, “I think transit agencies are obsolete.”

Blame that damn sharing economy.

Schmier is now all about what he calls “Micro-Transit” — in other words, ride-sharing, or turning regular cars into taxis.

The Bay Area already has Casual Car Pool, a long-standing ride-share project that relies on a vintage website and message board instead of the smartphones and big money of new ride-sharing ventures. It’s kind of an organized form of hitchhiking, and it really works.

Schmier wants to make this general idea more efficient, scalable, and tech-savvy. From Next City:

His vision, detailed in a white paper shared with Next City, is to put radio-frequency identification chips into the hands of passengers — in key fobs, transit cards or even driver’s licenses. Willing drivers, in turn, would be equipped with readers. When a potential passenger comes within scanning distance of a participating car, the driver’s picture would appear on an external display, and the rider’s on an internal one, confirming that both have gone through a background check.

Making the moment ripe for Micro-Transit, concludes Schmier, is that the technology is newly affordable: About $2 for the chip and $200 for the reader.

As for passengers getting where they need to go, drivers might opt for a signal showing the direction the car is heading. Longer trips could require hops between cars.

The program is good for cities, says Schmier. Tapping private cars’ “excess capacity,” i.e. empty seats, cuts down on underused public transportation, creates feeder lines to high-traffic trains and buses, and saves gas.

As for providing incentive enough to make drivers willing to let a stranger in their car, Schmier envisions a small fee — 50 cents or a dollar — that would be deposited in their Micro-Transit account for each rider picked up. Or, drivers might opt for high-occupancy vehicle credit.

Schmier’s plan might make sense for less dense regions full of cars, like the Bay. And in a lot of ways, it’s more in the spirit of the sharing economy than many of the new ride-share start-ups driven by a profit motive. But if our goal is more dense, livable, transitable cities, cars ain’t gonna cut it, no matter how many of us we try to cram into each one.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Cash for Clunkers program drove right into a brick wall of waste

by kowalski099 Posted on January 3, 2013

Cash for Clunkers program drove right into a brick wall of waste

By Susie Cagle

Hey, remember back in 2009 when President Obama was saving the American car industry by whatever means necessary, including offering cash incentives for trading in old cars for newer, more efficient ones? And remember how a lot of people used that incentive to buy cars that were only marginally more efficient than their junked clunkers?

cynthia_leigh

Billed as stimulus both for automakers and the environment, the Car Allowance Rebates System, better known as Cash for Clunkers, turned out to be clunker itself. Besides fueling more unsustainable new-car-buying consumerism, the program also destroyed thousands of older, functional vehicles — vehicles that, according to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA), were almost 100 percent recyclable. Through Cash for Clunkers, about 690,000 vehicles had their engines destroyed and many were sent to junkyards, bypassing recycling companies altogether.

E Magazine reports:

The ARA issued a report when the CARS program was announced saying that a much more efficient program would have been to encourage recycled parts usage. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration explained at the time that the engines must be destroyed to prevent the vehicles from being resold and taking the road again. For any dealer that did not follow that law, there was a hefty $15,000 fine per infraction against them.

CARS claims to have had a positive environmental impact by taking these old vehicles off the road, yet it required destroying the traded-in vehicle’s drive train and engine. The engines were destroyed with a sodium silicate solution, also known as liquid glass. The silicate causes the engine’s parts to freeze and ensures it never runs again … Many of the clunkers ended up at auctions where parts dealers bid on them. By the time all reusable parts are salvaged, the material left is the car’s frame. CARS mandated that the clunkers be crushed or shredded within 180 days, regardless of whether all the usable parts were salvaged or not. …

The Department of Transportation reported that Cash for Clunkers was an environmental success. The clunkers averaged 15.8 mpg, compared with the 25.4 mph for new vehicles being purchased, for an average fuel-economy increase of 61%. In general, drivers traded in inefficient SUVs and trucks for more efficient passenger cars. However, it’s quite easy to negate this small difference in gas mileage purely by the fact that people will be more likely to drive a vehicle that takes less money to fill up with gas. It’s an efficiency paradox: as we get more efficient at using energy, the overall cost of energy goes down, but we respond by using more of it.

So, H&M, about that clothes recycling program …

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Please don’t be thankful for America’s unsustainable love affair with big-box retail

by Myrna Posted on November 21, 2012

Please don’t be thankful for America’s unsustainable love affair with big-box retail

By Susie Cagle

If you’re reading this on your phone from a line outside an electronics store, congratulations — you’re a real American! And you’re probably way more excited about the 50th anniversary of big-box retail in this country than the rest of us are.

Fred Watkins

In 1962, when gas cost about 28 cents a gallon and the suburbs were growing faster than you can say “sports utility vehicle,” Walmart, Target, and Kmart were all born.

NPR’s Morning Edition talked to retail historian Marc Levinson about their rise to prominence and dominance.

One of the prerequisites for the big-box was the car. Everybody had to have a car because the big-box was sitting out in a parking lot somewhere. The big-box made shopping into a family experience. Mom and dad and the kids all piled into the car, they went out to this big store, and they could spend several hours there because there was, by the standards of the day, an enormous amount of merchandise.

Today’s stores are about four times the size, but hey, so are our cars!

Since ’62, the big boxes, especially Walmart, have grown like an infectious pox upon our nation. Even Friday’s planned worker strikes at upwards of 1,000 Walmarts across the country may do nothing to slow the monster’s growth. From The Daily Beast:

The company is huge enough, as the world’s largest private employer, to weather this storm of protests, whether it’s a trickle of malcontents or a hurricane of workers all over the country. With 200 million customers visiting 10,300 stores in 27 countries every week, even if 10 percent of its customers decided they’d never shop there again, the company would survive.

The only way to strike big retail where it hurts is to just stop shopping. But that’s hardly the American way, even in financially fraught times. When big boxes cry “sustainability” and try to up their green cred, our response tends to be to buy more crap from them.

At stores that sponsor battery and gadget recycling programs, more than half of would-be recyclers end up buying more than just replacement gadgets, according to a study commissioned by Call2Recycle, “a product stewardship organization.”

Of those surveyed, 54% in the U.S. and 45% in Canada consider retailers a key source for learning about recycling programs where 18% of the U.S. population and 24% of the Canadian population participates in retail “take back” programs for the collection and recycling of batteries and cellphones.

Does it seem counterintuitive and kind of gross that we’d be learning how to recycle from the very same people who are selling us all this junk that we need to recycle? Does it make you want to soothe your conflicted feelings with some retail therapy? Well resist, damnit, resist!

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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