Emotionally Break-even

Kelley Blue Book has a nifty new green section of their site. I normally don't dig web based calculators, but they have a nice tool where you can enter your current car, your desired green car and it will tell you how long it will take to break even. Even better, they let you input additional dollars per month that you'd like weighed towards breaking even, emotionally.

This is going to blow my green cover (yes, I drive an SUV), but here's a calculation I did.



This again points out to me that I don't drive enough miles to make fuel economy my #1 vehicle decision point. I guess that's why I still have an SUV :)

Goodbye Yellow Phone Book

I've posted about this long ago, complaining about how wasteful it was to get multiple phone books each year that I won't use.

I see today that others are starting to get behind this cause as well. Do we really need these paper beasts any longer? Aren't online directories and smart phones making this all obsolete? I can only hope so.

If you're having trouble finding it, here is the direct link to specifically getting off of phone book mailing lists.

Slick new bike

I recently saw an article on the new Ultra Motor A2B electric bike. This looks like a pretty slick bike. It's not too traditional looking, but it has a sorta Mad-Max, utilitarian look to it in my eyes. If I didn't already have a motorcycle, this might be a nice option for commuting and around town errands. Heck, with the 20 mile range, I'm pretty sure some of our contributors would be able to get to work on one of these. Recharge at work and have a fresh charge for your ride home. Sure, it costs around $2500, but if you had a 20 mile one way commute, it could pay for itself in 2 years in saved fuel costs alone, figuring you cut out 10.4k miles/year at ~$0.12/mile(figure from AAA for Medium Size Sedan). Plus you'd be helping out the environment.

--JOsh

EDIT: This article is the one that originally got me thinking about this entry.

Carpooling on the Rise

After catching an article on carpooling, I decided to give a couple of the links in the article a try to see if there was anything local showing on them. Imagine my surprise when both CarPoolWorld.com and eRideShare.com had some local entries. I've long since relegated myself to the fact that, living in Iowa, we generally don't get much participation in these sorts of sites. Glad to see that even locally people are trying to get into the ride sharing.

--JOsh

Trip Home: Looking Back

Some final thoughts from our recent trip from the Midwest to the east coast and back.

Not all train stations actually have a train. I'm still confounded by this one.
Buses are not for me.
Power is everywhere!
Regional trains are a level or more above long distance trains.
Comfort is in!

A few things you may want to bring on a train:

Blanket – You can buy one on the train for $15, but I would just bring something if you know you'll be cold.
Food – You can buy it, but it's expensive and could run out.
Entertainment – Books, iPod, laptop, DVD player, and chargers. I don't mean you should bring all of these, and it should be tailored to your trip, but the options are wide open. We read through all of the books we brought and I was able to write posts as we went along without being cutoff by my battery. I really appreciated that.

Improvements:

Provided entertainment – It could be a nice perk to have “in route” entertainment like planes provide. There is plenty of space in the back of the seats to provides a nice size screen. The Acela train did have headphone jacks in the chair arms, but I didn't check them out to see what was playing.
Speed it up – No question, we need high speed trains for long distance train travel. We may take a train from the Midwest again if we find an option that doesn't include a bus, but it won't be our only mode since it does take so long.


U.S. train travel isn't for everyone right now. Our bus mishap could have been a lot worse if we were traveling with anxious kids. I don't want to deter anyone from this mode of transportation, but I also don't want to paint the picture too pretty. Give Amtrak a chance or at least compare it to other options when you plan your next trip!

Trip Part 5: Sold Out!

Well, we have visited all three of our locations for this trip and are settled in on the train taking us (closer to) home. We boarded at Union Station in D.C. and the train is sold out! We had to wait a bit to find seats because every one of them was going to be filled. This brought to light a great benefit of train travel. If the train is full or, I imagine, over booked, you can still get on and will eventually find a spot from conductors reshuffling people, or people getting off at the next stop. With planes, you don't have the option. You don't get to go if there isn't a seat and the plane doesn't move if it is taking longer to seat people. So far the train is on time so there is hope that our trip back will be better than the Indi-Philly trip out. This will be my last “during trip” write-up, but I will pull together some final thoughts about our trip once we are home.

Trip Part 4: Acela, King of the Rails

Our trip from New Haven to D.C. was on the Acela Express business train. It is a "high speed" train that runs from Boston to D.C. and it was definitely the nicest train we rode on during this trip. The train cars were more modern and had almost a futuristic feeling, and the dinning car was more organized than the first train we were on. The trip took about five hours, but it didn't feel like it. Other than watching some of the sites as we pulled into New York, Philly, and D.C., I took a nap and arrived rather refreshed.

After dropping off our things at my friend's house in Arlington, we ventured toward the city and watched how our capitol does the 4th of July from the Iwo Jima park (thanks to marzipan9 for uploading that video from almost exactly where we were). It was a good show and other than the firework smoke blocking some of the view, we had great seats. The Metro trip back to the house was quite the experience, but didn't take at all as long as I had planned. The D.C. Metro is more of what I expect public transportation to be like in a big city. We used it most of Saturday to visit the few attractions we left time for, one of which was the botanical gardens. We didn't make it in time to go inside, but the outdoor gardens feature two areas highlighting solar and Seattle's eco ratings for new building structures. It's free to see and great to read about some of the specifics being added to city building plans. D.C. was a great way to end our east coast trip.