New Scirroco

It looks like this is a car week for me, I just came across the new Scirroco from VW.



What a looker. Too bad that it will likely never be sold in North America.

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Another new All-Electric

From Popular Mechanics and Hybrid Technologies, this one comes in two flavors: All-Electric, or 220+ MPG Hybrid.



I like this trend. I like it a lot.

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Matt Taibbi Undercover with the Christian Right

Growing up in a pretty normal Episcopalian diocese, I don't have a strong distaste for religion. I usually see it as a lifestyle choice, and for the most part it is harmless in my everyday life. This is one good thing about living near a major metropolitan area in a fairly liberal state, there are lots of churches, but they are all pretty tame. I get incensed when I hear about some of the more unconstitutional acts going on in the upper reaches of government in the name of Christianity, but for the most part is has little to no effect on my daily life.

I wonder how different things would be if I had been raised in one of the Southern MegaChurches? I have always been fascinated by the overt show of it all, and ate up this excerpt from Matt Taibbi's new book. Here's a quote, it is a fascinating read:

"Some weather we're having, with this rain," I said.

"Tell me about it!" she said, introducing herself as Maria. "It truly is an act of God that I even made it here today." She told a story about having to drive down from Austin in bad weather. God had helped her four or five steps along the way. "It just seems like God really wants me to come on this trip," she said. "Otherwise, I would never have made it."

"It looks like God is going to give us a rainstorm all the way to Tarpley," I heard a voice behind me say.

This oddly uniform style of dialogue ringing all around me made me shift in my seat. I felt nervous and unpleasantly certain that I was about to be found out. When Maria asked me why I'd come on the retreat, I bit my lip. When in Rome, I thought.

"Well," I said, "since the new year, I've just been feeling like God has been telling me that I need to get right spiritually. So here I am."

I paused, wincing inwardly. An outsider coming into this world will feel sure that the moment he coughs up one of those "God told me to put more English on my tee shot" lines, his dark game will be instantly visible to all, and he'll be made the target of one of those Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style point-and-screech mob scenes. But nothing could be further from the truth. You simply cannot go wrong praising God in this world; overdoing it is literally impossible. I would understand this better by the end of the weekend.

Maria smiled. "I feel the same way. Have you ever been to one of these Encounters?"

"No, I haven't," I said.

"Me neither," she said. "I'm really excited."

"They're wonderful," said the matronly Mexican woman in front of me, turning around. "They really change you forever."

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Parking Lot Solar

From the "Duh" department, Envision Solar has begun installing photovoltaic canopies over parking lots. Great idea.

Parking lots are possibly one of the least visually attractive aspects of the automobile-centric society, and though I still don't think that this is as attractive as underground parking, it is at least making good use of part of the modern wasteland.

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The Morgan

Came across a new fuel cell car called the LifeCar by Morgan Motor Corp. It is pretty nice lookin' though a bit too stylized for my style (heh heh, get it?)

It is good to see more attractive alternative-energy cars, but that is not really what this post is about.

No, this post is about the other Morgan cars that I have come across. This Roadster is something of a dream to me. I love the style of old roadsters, but the technology was so primitive that they are un-drive-able by today's standards. Hoo-wee, not this one. The chassis is comprised of 21st century technology, and the body is styled from the 1900s. I love it. Perhaps I am just a sucker for anachronisms, but this thing has my fancy, it has it in its clutches.

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Nothing is really going on.

I'm spending most of my time driving dangerously in virtual cities. Paying off debt in real life. Trying to get the garden to grow. Hoping that I will be able to bike more this year than last.

This is as close to Twitter that I will ever get.

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Traction

I really like cars. I really like some trucks, even. I love the artistry and engineering aptitude that goes into making (some of) them.

I hate, however, the way they are overused.

Indeed, I am a contributor to this problem, largely due to a lack of other options. I have made my contributions to the daily rush-hour mess, and I have not felt good about it. Commuting to work is a real issue, and one that I do not take lightly. I have been able to abate that feeling of guilt significantly of late, but I have to jump through a series of seemingly arbitrary hoops in order to create my current peace of mind.

The highway is alternatively boring and stressful. When it is boring, it can be interminable. When it is stressful, it can be vein-popping. The insular mindset that prevails there is singularly maddening, made ever more so because one cannot simply ignore the other drivers on the road. No, you must actively engage them, lest you move slightly too ponderously and a hick with red white and blue plastered all over his truck thunders past with his Finger held high.

So we abide, and some of us try to game the system. We value our freedom of movement so much that we are willing to trade away hours every day so that we can drive ourselves home on our own schedule. Our lives morph into a series of distinct elements, punctuated by these solitary drives. We gain nothing significant from them, and often are so exhausted after a particularly bad trip that our whole night ends up in shambles.

Perhaps I am reading too much into it. After all, we don't have much choice in the matter. As referenced by my previous post on TCRT, it is clear that our city has very few mass transit options available to us. The bus comes and goes very rarely from St Paul to Eagan, so I have three chances in the morning to bike down into St Paul, catch it on the way out, and three chances in the afternoon to come back. Much better would be a rail system that goes out to the major suburbs, Eagan included, and let me catch a bus out to Thomson from there.

I guess I shouldn't complain. Instead of concentrating on driving to avoid assholes, I now have 35 minutes each way to sit and relax, sleep, draw, or read (the chairs on the express busses are quite comfortable). I also should be able to get in better shape now that I am biking from the river up into the bluffs every afternoon. Maybe within my lifetime we'll have some kind of a serious transit infrastructure, because this whole freeway commute business could drive me nuts after a very short time.

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Hyper-miling

If you read Fark or Digg you have probably come across the recent spate of articles about Wayne Gerdes and the recent expansion of the hypermiling movement.

I have been trying it out pretty seriously the past week and a half, and boy, let me tell you. My Grand Prix gets 20 MPG if I am lucky, it is so heavy, it usually does more like 18 under normal conditions. I usually fill the tank about once every eight or nine days. The last seven days, where normally I would go through almost an entire tank of gas, I have thus far only used about half a tank. That means that my mileage at present is sitting at about 35MPG. That's better than my wife's VW Golf. I'm sold.

• Drive slowly (I don't go over the speed limit, and try to keep it below 60 at all times)
• Accelerate slowly (the slower the better)
• Don't accelerate up hills
• Do accelerate down hills, or coast.
• Coast in neutral as often as you possibly can
• Using the brakes is essentially turning gas into useless heat. Do it as little as possible.
• Never idle the car (it starts up quickly enough, idling is completely useless)
• Conserve momentum, don't slow to a stop unless you absolutely have to.
  

I have thus far saved about 5 dollars. If I can keep this up, I will save about 30 bucks every month. That is enough for a brand new video game every other month.

W00t.

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Color me impressed

What color that would be, I am not sure. Probably a Turquoise of some sort.



I urge you to watch the whole thing. It's long, but it gets more nuts as it goes on. I never even knew what a Hurdy Gurdy looked like.

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Twin Cities Rapid Transit

Being in Europe, and in Düsseldorf specifically, has prompted me to do a little bit of research. I have heard more than a couple of times some history regarding the USA's cable car systems of the 20s and 30s, and about how they were removed in favor of the automobile. I heard that the Twin Cities had a pretty well developed cable car system, and have seen the museum pieces from that era. What I did not know was just how large and well maintained the fleet was, and how sad the dismantling of it had been.

The Twin Cities streetcar system was called "Twin Cities Rapid Transit" or TCRT. It was a wide ranging bunch of trolleys and cable-cars that even included a few ferries and riverboats. The company was privately owned, and from the first rail line that was built in 1890, it was primarily concerned with re-investment in its own infrastructure, as any successful rail company need be. All the way through the second World War the lines were very successful, and the company was able to expand operations all the way out to My old stomping grounds in White Bear Lake.

After WWII, automobiles started gaining a lot of traction on the roads, and I had usually assumed that Americans simply stopped using the rail lines in favor of their cheap cars. In fact, TCRT was in the process of successfully upgrading its transit lines to a newer, faster standard to compete with the automobile when it was bought out. A Wall Street investor named Charles Green purchased the company and expected to turn an immediate profit, which of course went against the ingrained re-investment strategies of the company. He had the president ousted, took over control for himself, and started ripping out the rail lines in favor of bus routes, since they were cheaper to maintain in the short run.

As if this weren't enough of a forced death knell for the trolley system in MN, GM aggressively pursued its own bus sales, and rewarded the Twin Cities investors grandly with cheap buses for taking out rail lines. In the end, the rail system in the Twin cities was completely dismantled by 1954, only 5 years after Green took over.

This was not a gradual, natural decline that would have signaled a organic market-based move away from urban rail, this was a practiced aggressive move to destroy the rail system in the state. The controlling partners were so greedy when they took over TCRT, they even went as far as to burn all of the trolley cars as a quick way to dismantle them and get at the steel underneath. Their greed was eventually called to light, as they were convicted of various crimes for the actions, but not until well after the damage was done.

Wikipedia has a full-color painting of the TCRT's rail system from its peak in the late 1930s, which shows just how pervasive and well integrated the system was. Take a look at it. It is extremely frustrating to me that this infrastructure was removed, I can only imagine how useful such lines would be in the modern age. We are just now starting to rebuild our rail capacity in the Twin Cities, and the success of the new light rail line cannot be denied. Think about how much easier it would be to get around if we had been maintaining and expanding the system for the past 100 years, instead of starting from scratch only now.

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