Commuting by Car

Houston: Walkable?

2013-05-17T16:11:00.000-05:00

A recent article in the online magazine Culturemap Houston declares "Houston dubbed the No. 1 most walkable city: No, really".

Does that set off a bunch of question marks in your head? The article says it's based on a ranking by the website walkscore.com. Reading only a paragraph in, you realize that there are caveats. The sentence that belies the article's title is "Houston was named the most pedestrian-friendly large city in Texas."

That's two caveats: 1) It says "in Texas," and 2) it says "large city." It turns out that Houston, with a walkscore of 50, is number 23 in the nation, and only number 5 in Texas, behind some smaller cities like Dallas suburb Farmers Branch, and even the city of Bellaire, formerly adjacent to but for 40 years completely surrounded by enormous Houston.

Walkscore breaks Houston down into neighborhoods, each with their own walkscore, and I can see how some of these places are quite walkable.

I have a Baytown address. Baytown, with a walkscore of only 30, is a former small town turned Houston suburb. Technically, though, I live in unincorporated Chambers County. I would imagine a walkscore of something like 10 for my neighborhood.

We're a typical modern cul-de-sac neighborhood. It's actually more walkable than the first neighborhood we lived in, where you really could not get to any retail establishment on foot without some danger. The road leading from the neighborhood was a 2-lane, high traffic and high speed road with no shoulder. You wouldn't walk or ride a bicycle out of the neighborhood.

My current neighborhood borders a state highway. The highway has wide shoulders, and there are convenience stores at the entrance to the neighborhood, and across the highway. I can walk on a sidewalk to the "Stripes" store. Unfortunately, even though they cook tacos there and sell lots of canned and boxed foods, they don't have any fresh produce or meat.

Just up the road, and the entrance to the neighborhood next to ours, is a combination Taco Bell / KFC. I could walk there, but never have.

Now there's news that they're building a WalMart at the intersection of I-10 and Texas 146. This would count as walkable if they would build sidewalks all the way there. (I have no idea whether there are any such plans.) At the very least, it will reduce our fuel bill, as we must drive at least 5 miles to get any sort of groceries today, and further for any other shopping. It seems that "Unincorporated Chambers County" will soon be a bona-fide suburb.

And that last mile of my commute on the way home in the afternoon? It's getting slower. The speed limit is still 60 mph, but typically it runs at 40 mph in the afternoon, and once the WalMart is open, it may halve again. But that's no big deal: It's the speed of the 32.6 miles of Interstate that's important to my commute time.

We need this. I would prefer a Whole Foods Market or even a Kroger, but of course WalMart is more than just groceries... that's only their sideline. We will now have nearby clothing, auto supplies, sporting goods, and everything else we might need.

I also like the combination we're offered. Nearby shopping, but access to fast travel on the Interstate. It's the best of both worlds, really: Easy mobility on one hand, and nearby convenience on the other.

Ride to Work Day

2012-06-15T11:41:00.002-05:00

The 21st annual International Motorcycle and Scooter Ride to Work Day event is Monday, June 18th, 2012. This event takes place the third Monday in June each year, and I've participated each year that there's been a motorcycle in my garage. The organization's website is here.

The purpose of the event is, obviously, to promote commuting on two (motorized) wheels. It seems that the annual "bicycle to work day" in May is better publicized, as I've seen it mentioned on the local news. I managed, a couple of years ago, to get the KHOU traffic person (Channel 11, the Houston CBS affiliate) to mention it on the "Beat the Traffic" blog, but as far as I can tell only about 3 people ever read that blog, and nobody mentions it on the evening news. In fact, last year it seems like I saw fewer motorcycles on the road that day than usual!

I'm not one for slogans anyway, and the "Work to Ride | Ride to Work" slogan doesn't really appeal to me. It's a play on the often-seen "Ride to Live / Live to Ride" slogan that some motorcyclists herald (usually those who call themselves "bikers"), but either one seems silly to me. I may ride to work, but my main goal in working isn't to support riding! As far as living to ride, well, no. I enjoy riding, but it isn't that big of a part of life.

But riding to work, well, I do wish more people would do that. The RTW organization's stated benefits of riding are as follows:

Riding to work is fun
Riding to work reduces traffic and parking congestion
Riding to work uses less fuel than an automobile
Riding to work leaves me alert and energized
Riding to work results in less pollution than commuting in a larger vehicle
Riding to work is less destructive to road surfaces, bridges, etc.
Riding to work gets me to work (and back home) faster
Riding to work demonstrates motorcycling as a social good

Most of those I agree with. The "less pollution" argument is debatable, as motorcycles (in spite of superior gas mileage) may have higher unburned hydrocarbon levels coming of the tailpipe, and high-rpm sportbikes will probably be producing more oxides of nitrogen, which are the smog producers, because they run at higher compression than car engines.

I'm going to have to psych myself up for it this year, though. The last time I rode the motorcycle to work was June 1st, and the ride home was hot. If I were one of those people who rode without a jacket, it might be different, but even my super-light and airy jacket was too hot that afternoon.The event used to be held in July, but too much of the world is unbearably hot that month. I wish they would hold it in May, but I suppose there's still snow on the ground in many places at that time.

I read of a recent study suggesting that if 10% of the vehicles on the highways were two-wheelers, traffic jams would be almost completely eliminated. I can believe that, but I can't imagine ever having 10% of the cars on the road replaced by motorcycles and scooters. Rain, heat, cold, and quite frankly, safety, are big reasons people stay in cars. Cars are convenient — you don't have to put on a helmet or special clothing, you just get in and go! In this country, Henry Ford's moving assembly line shifted the balance in favor of the automobile almost 100 years ago. As of now, the price of gasoline is headed downward and expected to dip below $3.00/gallon soon. Maybe in a couple of years, if that $5.00 gasoline finally materializes, people will really shift back to small-engined bikes, but more fuel-efficient automobiles (and better electric cars) will very likely prevent that.

I'm still convinced that for the foreseeable future, as a society we will continue to be "Commuting by Car".

Update: Checking the weather forecast, I saw that the prediction is for a rare for June high of only 88°F and a 20% chance of rain, so I rode the motorcycle. On the way, one motorcycle passed me going my direction, and I saw two coming from the other direction. It isn't a very popular form of transportation, is it? It's looking like that 20% chance of rain may change to 100%, though!

BATTERIES!

2012-05-09T17:18:00.004-05:00

In the 1970s and 1980s, radio personality (and "Flying" and "Car and Driver" magazine contributor) Gordon Baxter did a television ad for an auto repair shop in Beaumont, Texas. Near the end of the ad he said you'd recognize the place, because on the top of the building it said "BATTERIES", his voice creating a series of virtual exclamation points. Indeed, in large letters across the top of the barn-like structure, giant letters spelling "batteries" were displayed so that folks traveling on U.S. 69 couldn't miss it.

Car batteries have improved since those days. There was a brief period in the late 1980s and early 1990s where a new battery might last only a year, because the load put on them had increased, and possibly because the heat under the hood of the automobile had increased as well. That's been fixed. In my recent experience, batteries last four to six years.

As of late, some cars have multiple batteries. A car may have two or three if it's designed to shut the engine down while the car is stopped at a red light. This keeps the climate control running, and enables the car to re-start in a barely perceptible fashion. Of course, the electrical loads are still increasing.

And, of course, there are now many hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles on the road, requiring a large battery, and a few electric cars that are entirely powered by a large battery. Spelling it in all caps — "B-A-T-T-E-R-I-E-S" — and perhaps adding an exclamation point or two, might be the appropriate way to emphasize how important improved battery technology has become.

I've often predicted that we will one day, in the not-all-that-distant future, look back and laugh about how we used to fill our gasoline tanks up every week, because by then we'll simply be charging our cars up about once every four weeks. If we can ever get 1000 miles on a single charge at highway speeds while running the air conditioner, the internal combustion engine powered automobile will find its replacement.

In a step toward that future, Envia Systems now claim to have developed a battery that stores 400 watt-hours per kilogram. That's more than twice the energy density of the lithium cells currently being used in the Nissan Leaf. This could give a compact car a range, according to the article, of perhaps 300 miles. My guess is that 200 miles is more realistic, comparing it to about 85 for the current best EVs. That's still not enough to go on vacation, but it would do all of the duty that my "work car" currently does, that is, driving to work, and occasionally going to my parents' house. For anything longer, we already use our other car.

You may be familiar with Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. That rapid pace hasn't yet arrived with electrical storage, but we are having some rapid advancements, and may be amazed in the next couple of years.

Many car nuts become angry at the idea that the internal combustion engine should ever be replaced with an electric motor. They believe the move toward electric to be an attack on the car.

Many environmentalists get angry at the idea that personal transportation may one day be powered by cleanly-produced electricity (say, from Thorium reactors?), because they've already decided that the only way to a "green" future is for all of us to live in multi-family housing near city centers where we only move faster than bicycling speed while riding public transportation.

I'm a car nut, and I want to be "green". I'm an optimist. I see us being able to always enjoy the freedom that comes from personal transportation, moving about freely in cars that make artificial sounds, perhaps like George Jetson's flyer. The car culture is here to stay, and it will only get better.

Would You Rather Be Walking?

2012-04-20T20:34:00.001-05:00

I've lately thought that it might be nice to live within walking or bicycling distance from work. For various reasons, that just isn't going to happen, but even of it did, on a day like today I would have taken the car to work. If I normally used public transportation to get to the office, today I would have taken the car. Why? It's simple: I hate being miserable. I knew it was going to be raining when I left work -- storming, in fact, because sometimes the weather forecasters are right. With a car in the parking lot, I can walk out under cover of umbrella and get into my enclosed vehicle, which will take me directly to my house. Are there reasonable alternatives? Certainly. Living close enough, if we only had one car, my wife could pick me up. But that assumes she is in town. Many people wouldn't even have that luxury... With only one car they would be stuck.

And many people are stuck, living in many places. You have rain gear with you for those days, and you walk to the bus stop and wait in the rain. I even saw three motorcycles on the road this afternoon. I must admit that I've been thinking about getting some really good rain gear to make it easier to ride in bad weather, but the truth is that I don't like being miserable. (Yes, I know I already said that.)

That points up the fallacy of the one of the arguments about living close to work or taking public transportation: they say you can get by with one car, or possibly no car at all. Yes, you can, but most people will regret it eventually, and go back to having two. My parents even did that in the fifties, and for quite awhile, but along about 1967 it became impossible.

So it really isn't much of an argument. If a person really wants to make it work, they can, but I doubt that most people would be that committed for long.

Advantages and disadvantages of motorcycle commuting.

2012-02-27T17:51:00.001-06:00

There are advantages to riding a motorcycle when the weather is right. First, of course, it the fuel efficiency. If you already have a motorcycle, why are you still driving a pickup truck to work? (I've seen you in your F150 with a Harley-Davidson sticker on the back window!) The second advantage is that you can potentially get to work a few minutes quicker. You know how those 18-wheelers seem to get further and further behind when traffic is heavy? Cars fall behind motorcycles for the same reason. It's like pouring sand into a jar of rocks... the sand filters through. A third advantage is being able to see over the cars. This may not be true if you're riding a cruiser, but standard style motorcycles and sportbikes are tall, so your head is up there with the pickup-truck drivers. Finally, and most importantly, it's just fun. Riding a motorcycle turns your commute into a recreational activity. Now I get to have an hour-and-a-half of fun every day!

Riding a motorcycle is generally not considered a "green" choice, despite the exceptional fuel economy. Motorcycle emission standards allow more unburned hydrocarbons and higher levels of oxides of nitrogen, and most motorcycles are tuned for power, which means they do pollute more. They have higher compression ratios than car engines, and they turn at (often) much higher revolutions per minute. Carbon-dioxide emissions are lower by virtue of burning less fuel. As for the Royal Enfield, it has only an 8.5:1 compression ratio and turns slowly, so I suspect it isn't bad on the NOx scale, but that's not why I bought it anyway.

I did the math on the fuel savings, and can see that if gasoline goes to $5.00/gallon (which is prognosticated, but which I truly doubt) that riding the motorcycle full-time would save $129.97 in fuel cost per month. But notice my first sentence: "... When the weather is right." The weather isn't ever right in August, to be honest. And today, I got rained on. That was okay, as I pulled off of the freeway before it really got going and pulled on my rain pants. That has me thinking about ordering some better rain gear, though. I could ride in on rainy days, as long is it isn't too hot.

The disadvantages are fairly obvious. It's supposed to be fun, but cold and heat and rain can make it not so. And while the freeway commute practically eliminates the risk of cars turning in front of you (except for the few miles of surface streets), cars can come across several lanes to attack, as happened to a fellow in Colorado last week. Perhaps the most inconvenient thing is that you cannot simply hop on it and go like you can with a car. You have to get ready, put on a jacket, a helmet, perhaps some rain gear, and stow the stuff that you normally keep in your pockets (or else risk losing it). I once lost a watch while riding, so now I put my watch in the tank bag. For this reason, I tend to avoid going out to lunch on days when I ride.

I suppose this gets back to the reason I started this blog in the first place. The idea is that the commute can be enjoyable. It doesn't have to be a stressful drive or ride, and people who commute using personal transportation needn't be laden with guilt over their anti-environmental choice. Living close to work may be nice, but the quality of life in the city isn't necessarily higher than in the suburbs. If it were, people wouldn't have moved out to the suburbs in the first place.

I've been watching the computer-calculated gas mileage in my car lately, trying to keep it as high as possible. I can get about 29 mpg (computer estimated at nearly 32) if I'm careful, versus about 27 mpg if I don't pay attention, and I find that when I drive that way I'm more relaxed. You have to drive in a relaxed fashion to improve the mileage. Try it sometime! And by all means, enjoy whatever you choose to drive, and wherever you choose to live. There are legitimate reasons you made those choices. Try to include some environmental concerns in your choices in the future, which generally will help your own finances as well. It's little changes made by all of us that will improve all of our quality of life.

...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 realized 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.