How to enjoy a major automotive tune-up

Nice view from the top

I had to bring the WRX down at some point, and usually that means a Friday on which I am off.  This was the 30k overhaul, which most people apparently do at 2-3 years. In my case it was 4.5 years thanks in part to a Salsa LaCruz being my primary commuter vehicle.

The friendly folks at Premier Subaru of Santa Fe told me it would take most of the day to do the work, which involves emptying, flushing, fiddling with, and refilling just about everything in the car. In past times when a major tune up was in store for one of my cars, I brought a bike and rode home. This time I decided to take a bike along and ride down the Turquois Trail on NM 14 for a 50-60 mile ride to kill time constructively. That is a beautiful ride. Heading south on NM14 from Madrid for the first time on a bicycle, I discovered this involved a five mile steady climb to a pass through the Ortiz Mountains. But the view along the way, and from the top looking South is to die for. I suppose if you do the full Santa Fe Century, this is not news to you.

I rode down the other side of the pass for a ways, looked around, and started back up over the pass as the water bottles were draining fast. The five miles from the summit back to Madrid, where someone is filming another movie, went fast. I was reaching speeds over 40 mph. Stopped at Java Junction for a smoothie and to refill the bike's water tanks (shoulda left the milk out of the smoothie in my case). Then back to Santa Fe and...the bill.

If you have to drive your sorry hind end somewhere to do a major time kill, bring a bike. There's a lot of fun to be had around here. And make sure you buy some gatorade at the Lone Butte General Store, about 10 miles south of Santa Fe on Rt 14. Nice place, nice people.

A Zen Master asks, “Why ride a bicycle?”

Got a request from People for Bikes, aka Bikes Belong, to answer some questions about how and why I ride a bike. Perhaps because I'm distracted today, I filled it out. But that led me to recall a much simpler explanation.

With thanks to Commute Orlando for reprinting this:

From One India comes this little gem:
Five students of a Zen master was back from the market on their bicycles. As they dismounted, their master asked : Why are you riding your bicycles ?”
Each of them came up with different answers to their master’s query.
The first student said “It is the bicycle that is carrying the sack of potatoes. I am glad that my back has escaped the pain of bearing the weight”
The master was glad and said : ” You are a smart boy. When you become old you will be saved of a hunch back unlike me”
The second student had a different answer. ” I love to have my eyes over the trees and the sprawling fields as I go riding”
The teacher commended : “You have your eyes open and you see the world”
The third disciple came up with yet a different answer : ” When I ride I am content to chant ‘nam myoho renge kyo’”
The master spoke words of appreciation ” Your mind will roll with ease like a newly trued wheel”
The fourth disciple said : “Riding my bicycle in live in perfect harmony of things”
The pleased master said ” You are actually riding the golden path of non-harming or non violence”
The fifth student said ” I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle”
The master walked up to him and sat at his feet and said “I am your disciple!”

Why We Desperately Need Four (or Maybe Even More) Lanes on Trinity

What happens when, in a state of denial, you cut down the last tree? What happens when you build a road to worship the car-culture of the nineteen-sixties?

Some compelling reasons we need a wide, fast, multilane road on Trinity.

1. Evacuations off the Hill will proceed faster with four lanes, even though Trinity bottlenecks to two lanes at the Airport.We didn't really need to exit through the San Ildefonso Pueblo (Rendija Canyon) back in May, 2000. After all, Trinity was four lanes through town.

2. Traffic is always slowed in a storm if a road is two lanes, but never slowed if it is four lanes. Diamond Drive in a snowstorm at 8 a.m. on a bad day, when traffic is sometimes backed up from town to the Golf Course entrance, notwithstanding. Gimme decent drivers with snow tires on a two laner any day. I did that for years growing up in Western New York.

3. Gasoline will get cheap again, many predictions notwithstanding. Oil will remain abundant and accessible. Everyone will drive single occupant cars on and off the hill in five to ten years. We will not have more carpooling, vanpools, or public transit. Conservation is for commies and Europeans.

4. Traffic tieups in blizzards are always caused by lack of lane capacity. Never by individuals tying up traffic because they are driving on worn all season or summer tires or can't see out the windshield because their wipers are five years old or because the motorists are just plain terrorized by snow on the road.

5. LANL will greatly expand its work force, and we will diversify the economy to bring more people onto the hill with high paying jobs. Combined with cheap gas, traffic loads will increase well beyond 1% per year as workers and shoppers flood the hill with cars.

6. One or two (or even five) minutes of delay on a really bad traffic day really will ruin your life forever.Or, perhaps the consultants have it all wrong and our local traffic modeling amateurs (since there are no roundabouts on Trinity, any estimates of how the road will behave with roundabouts are models, i.e., hypotheses) are right. Hence all the Sturm und Drang in the Monitor.

All sarcasm aside,  there are some very real concerns.

Regarding function. Roundabouts move traffic continuously and effectively, as long as they don't clog up and fail. That's why you can move more traffic on two lanes with roundabouts without a level of service degeneration. Until it clogs. So one question is: what will be the real world, not "model" peak capacity? Does MIG have it nailed? What are the uncertainty estimates on their models? I suspect, though, that we will likely see future declines in peak vehicle loads at rush hour as gasoline costs make the convenience of the single occupant vehicle inconvenient to the paycheck--especially for those making long commutes from Rio Arriba or Santa Fe Counties. The present may be the worse case.

Regarding safety. Frankly, we don't kill or maim a lot of people on Trinity but one has to ask if this will change as we continue to build on its south shoulder. Is pedestrian safety as straightforward as some roundabout enthusiasts proclaim on a roundabout-equipped Trinity arterial, especially in roundabouts lacking positive ped crossing controls?  If such controls are present, they could affect roundabout efficiency at heavy load times. The devils are in the details.  Bike lanes and roundabouts may not make the road safer or "friendlier", as I discussed earlier. Here is a recent Transportation Research Board paper on bikes and roundabouts. The jury was not in yet, at least in 2008..

The converse problem, adding pedestrian crossing amenities to the present or a new multilane design, is not trivial. Examples include adding more, closely spaced traffic signals or building pedestrian overpasses (flyovers). The problems with these are that more signals will slow traffic down while conversely, each pedestrian flyover is a multimillion dollar endeavor and no traffic calming for other modes would exist. Pity trying to cross between a couple rare and expensive flyovers.

So there is no free lunch when you screw up planning and zoning, i.e., add commercial and residential space to the wrong side of the main highway through town and then try to retrospectively make the highway "friendly" to all competing interests.Council will have to make someone very unhappy or everyone a little unhappy.

Furthermore, two other things to consider. One, we overbuilt Diamond Drive for the same reasons we hear so much about now--fear of too much traffic on Diamond. Diamond is now a super-arterial that is lightly used, even at peak rush hour. We aren't building more housing, we are using the Atomic City Bus, and we have an overbuilt, expensive arterial. Two, if we keep a wide multilane road, we are building for two hours a day (ok, maybe three) to get into and outa Dodge or grab a burger at lunch. The rest of the time, that overbuilt road will not benefit residents. Perhaps we need to divert more commuter traffic onto Truck Route and Pajarito Road or stagger work hours rather than throw money at motorist convenience to all show up in one big glut.

As I said before, we need to move Los Alamos forward, not backwards. Stop building as though peak oil is a myth. Its not--its an urgency. The last century was powered on the backs of several hundred million years worth of dead bugs compressed and heated into oil deposits. The future, depending less on fossil fuel and more on ingenuity, may not be as easy.  Building a highway to worship past auto-dependence is short sighted and for the home of a national laboratory, downright silly. But even labbies are human--with human limitations. But I wonder if a reconstructed multilane road through town will be be our last expensive gesture to the age of cheap and abundant gasoline. Why not put up a few Easter Island Moai along the curbs while we are at it? With the short-term thinking I see in the Monitor editorial page lately, the fate of the Easter Islanders may be our own**. 

** Arnold J. Toynbee in A Study of History (1934–1961) also studied the collapse of civilizations. Diamond agrees with Toynbee that "civilizations die from suicide, not by murder" when they fail to meet the challenges of their times. However, where Toynbee argues that the root cause of collapse is the decay of a society's "creative minority" into "a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit", Diamond ascribes more weight to conscious minimization of environmental factors.

Bus and Bikes: Safely Sharing the Road

Nice 12 minute video put together by The Chicago Department of Transportation and the Chicago Transit Authority. I suggested it as required viewing for bus drivers (Atomic City, LA Schools, LANL). And for cyclists, too.  Full size version is at the Youtube link. I've downsized the video to fit here.

Please note that where the Chicago video suggests a three feet overtaking minimum, in Los Alamos County we have a five foot overtaking minimum. There are no magic distances--what really matters is using good judgment and allowing a margin of safety. Also, there are bicyclists shown doing some daft things here. Not all are marked WRONG in flashing block letters. See if you can find examples.

Acknowledgements to Tom Ezell, LCI #1853 for sending me the link. Also, thanks to Jon for his comment and link to John Allen's bike/bus page.

The One Mile Solution

Nah. Nothing to worry about

"...The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling..."

 I thought about my last post after riding in to work this morning and if you read it, you will see its changed considerably. Morning LANL traffic was backed up quite far beyond the actual construction zone on Diamond, snarling well past North Road and backed up approximately to the Pueblo Complex. There was a lot of that "sitting in the car while it stands idling" out there on Diamond Drive.

Meanwhile, the bike lane was open and yours truly and another rider sailed through the mess unimpeded. I did feather the brakes and coasted down from my usual 25-30 mph pace through there to ride a little more cautiously.  There are intersections in that section of road and one has to watch for conflicts developing. One doesn't need nasty surprises to ruin an otherwise nice morning. I used Jerry Merkey's suggested detour to avoid breathing auto fumes while doing the "stop and go shuffle" once the bike lane ended and the construction zone began. The other rider, who was ahead of me, stayed on Diamond. Hope he didn't try to filter along the jersey barriers. Its not too nice in there.

Andy Cline speaks of the One Mile Solution, to wit, if your destination is a mile or less from your start, leave the car home. I wonder how much shorter that snarl would have been, how much fuel could have been saved, and how much good exercise been accomplished, had those who live roughly a mile or two from work (i.e., Western Areas to TA-3) had not driven their cars. I suspect the bike lane could have handled it and they would have gotten to work a lot faster. Even better--once this last segment of Diamond is rebuilt, there will be bike lanes all the way to the Dept. of Energy site. Now, if the DOE could get off its own duff....and read some of its own literature: Peak Oil Is Extremely Real And Extremely Risky

Peak Oil, some estimates of production

Bicycles are faster than cars...

Toss this one out on this side of the pond. From Copenhagenize.


""...The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.   

The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry..."

Of course,  its easy for those snooty Europeans (who, as a snooty American, I usually agree with) to ignore the profound changes that occurred in the U.S. since the building of that first suburb, Levittown. We sprawled and they didn't. It made sense to most people back then. It only dawned on (a few) Americans as the century wore on, OPEC started tightening the screws, and more folks read corollaries of Hubbert's paper on Peak Oil (here is a second link) that this lifestyle is not sustainable over the long haul.

But frankly, most Americans still lull themselves into thinking that somehow we can just keep feeding gas into Old Belchfire and do so without negative consequences to the environment or our balance of trade. How else can you explain the evolution of modern cars? Modern family cars and Shopping-Utility Vehicles can almost match the acceleration of '60's muscle cars. A zero to sixty time of 10 sec. is considered unacceptably slow in Consumer Reports. We traded environment-friendly fuel efficiency for ego-boosting raw power.

But the financial and energy costs of car+oil dependence discussed in the Copenhagenize blog are pretty accurate-and getting more troublesome all the time. I did those same calculations a decade ago in Honolulu and they were pretty much the same, corrected for inflation.  So while our love affair with the car paid the salaries of a lot of auto workers and "drove" the U.S. economy, even that is moot as much of the auto industry has gone elsewhere. Nowdays, auto-dependence helps fuel the national debt.

The handwriting is on the wall. The One Mile Solution is the least we can do on the short term. Over the long term, anyone who fantasizes about continued car-dependence as we know it is living in a dream world. Those who start replacing short car trips with non-auto trips right now will at least have a leg up on the rest of Americans in thinking about how to adjust to an oil-frugal world.

Life is more complex than a blog post, but one cannot ignore reality.The reality is, change will be hard. We better get started on it pretty soon.