Clay and Wattles

Well, summer is here again. That means we’re leaving tomorrow on another sustainable vacation. This time, my wife Roberta and I are traveling from Yellowknife to Prince George, BC by bus, on to Prince Rupert by tandem bike, over to Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) by ferry, and down to SGang Gwaay Llnagaay at the south end of Gwaii Haanas National Park in a double kayak. We’ll paddle back up to Sandspit or Skidegate, possibly bike to Port Clements or Masset and back, then take the ferry to Prince Rupert again and the bus home.

The reason I call this trip “Origami Tour 2009″ is because we have a folding bike, a folding kayak, and a folding house (i.e. a tent) that we’ll be using on the trip.

The map below shows our planned route. The little sailboat represents our kayak, which actually does have a sail.

Rough distances for the human powered parts of the trip (assuming we don’t take any shortcuts):

• Prince George to Prince Rupert by bike: 721 kms
• Moresby Camp to SGang Gwaay and back by kayak: 340 kms
• Skidegate to Masset and back by bike: 204 kms

View Origami Tour 2009 in a larger map

We’ll try to update this map and post our adventures when we can.

If we return to a human scale of building, there’s a good chance that our new urban quarters will be more humane, which is to say beautiful. The automobile era proved that people easily tolerated ugly, utilitarian buildings and horrible streetscapes as long as they were compensated by being able to quickly escape the vicinity in cars luxuriously appointed with the finest digital stereo sound, air conditioning, and cup holders for iced beverages.

-James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency

City dwellers and suburbanites can continue to drive everywhere, hoping that the ever-progressing society will deliver hydrogen cars or solar cars or whatever other kinds of cars soon enough to save the atmosphere. Or they can begin to use existing technology – the bicycle, for instance. It’s every bit as technological as an electric car, and as a significant minority of people have discovered, it’s endlessly more elegant. On a bicycle you see the world around you – you notice hills that a car obliterates; you see neighborhoods at a pace that makes them real, not a blur. You save gas, of course, but you also hear your body again.

-Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

The title of this post is one of my favourite sayings. I suspect it is a quote from someone, but I can’t find any references to it. Perhaps it is a Buddhist koan. It is especially apt when the thing you are doing is travelling, especially by inter-city bus.

After spending so much time on the bus (roughly 46 hours) during my trip last week, I’ve learned a bit about how to travel.

Firstly, I should point out why bus travel is among the best long-distance travel alternatives (along with rail, and, for the really patient, walking and cycling). The other alternatives, private automobiles and airplanes, produce vastly more greenhouse gasses per distance travelled under most circumstances (click here for some figures). A compact fuel-efficient car with three passengers may begin to approach the efficiency of bus travel, but most vehicles generate many times more emissions, especially with only one or two passengers. Air travel isn’t even in the same range as other methods of transport, though I was suprised to learn that long-distance international flights generate fewer emissions per unit of distance than shorter domestic flights. This is based on CO2 emissions only and doesn’t consider the other greenhouse impacts of burning aviation fuel high in the atmosphere.

There are many variables and ways to measure, but it seems clear that bus and rail are usually the best environmental choices for long-distance travel. Bus travel has the additional advantage of being cheaper than air, allowing us to work less and find the extra travel time we need. The direct trip costs may not be cheaper than automobile travel, but the overall cost of car ownership is much more. When I mention bus travel, people often balk at taking so long to get to their destination, yet these same people don’t hesitate to travel by car the same distance, generally taking even longer.

Long-Distance Bus Travel Tips

• bring one of those inflatable neck pillows, an eyeshade, and earplugs; an extra pillow or thin blanket may also come in handy
• bring good, healthy food along so you aren’t at the mercy of greasy spoons
• get off the bus for at least a minute or two at every rest stop and stretch
• consider breaking the trip into multiple day-long segments and stay in a hostel, campground, motel, or with friends for the night – it costs more, but might make the trip tolerable and even fun

After proving to myself that taking the bus from Yellowknife to Edmonton is quite practical, I plan to do so for all my southern travel from now on. A lot of northern destinations are only reachable by air, so I may still find myself flying sometimes, but I will take the bus or train whenever possible. This is another example of a lifestyle change that reduces convenience a little, but seems like the only choice.

I’ve been thinking a lot about cycling this week. I have just discovered an amazing source of stats on the costs of motorized vehicles versus bicycles: the Bicycle Universe Almanac.

Some cool examples:

It costs about $50 to build and maintain one space in a bike rack and $500 for a bike locker, yet one car parking space in a parking structure costs about $8,500.

95% of a car’s energy goes towards moving the car itself, and only 5% to moving the passenger. Contrast with a 30-lb. bicycle: 83% of the energy goes towards transporting the rider, not the vehicle

The energy and resources needed to build one medium-sized car could produce 100 bicycles.

While you’re at it, check out BicycleSafe.com from the same author. It is the best summary of urban cycling tips I’ve found.

I attended a great workshop/open house today at City Hall. The topic: cycling routes in Yellowknife. It was organized by Ann Peters in conjunction with the City and Ecology North.

I’m sure that the information Ann collected was useful, but, for me, the best part was having an excuse to spend an afternoon hanging around and talking about cycling. We all had the chance to talk about our pet peeves and be in the company of like-minded folk. Spring cycling season feels like a long way away right now, but today I was reminded of what I have to look forward to.

I haven’t been on my bike at all this winter, but, after today, I’ve decided I will make the effort to start riding again this week. I had planned to ride all winter and acquired studded tires and an old beater bike last fall, but somehow I never got around to it. Now I’m going to do it!

Every two miles, the average driver makes four hundred observations, forty decisions, and one mistake. Once every five hundred miles, one of those mistakes leads to a near collision, and once every sixty-one thousand miles one of those mistakes leads to a crash. When people drive, in other words, mistakes are endemic and accidents inevitable…

-Malcolm Gladwell, “Wrong Turn: How the fight to make America’s highways safer went off course.”

Part I, Part II

Of course, there are always going to be situations when it makes no sense not to accept a ride in someone’s vehicle. For example, if I am leaving someplace for the same destination at the same time as a driver — assuming that he or she is unwilling to get in a taxi or on a bus with me — it would be perverse not to hitch a lift.

That is why I think a change of attitude is also required: instead of feeling like the driver is doing us a favour, we must establish that we are doing him or her the favour. It isn’t our weakness, but the other person’s, which we are helping to mitigate by accepting that ride. People who own personal vehicles are wrongly taking more than their share of the world’s resources and creating far more waste and emissions than non-drivers. By helping them share and dilute that enormous environmental impact (which they, perhaps arrogantly, have decided they are entitled to), we are doing them a huge favour.

This attitude change is analogous to what has happened with smoking over the past thirty years. At one time, smokers ruled public spaces. They were in the majority and any non-smoker with the temerity to object was in a socially inferior position. Once there was a significant minority of non-smokers (and the health costs of smoking were accepted), the tide turned: smokers were now in the ones who (usually gracefully) had to admit that their personal pleasure was a health hazard to others. Smoking in shared spaces was not a right, but a privilege which could only be granted in certain strict circumstances.

Likewise, now that the dangers of personal vehicle use (environment, health, safety, economy, etc.) are becoming better known, and more and more people are becoming non-drivers, the social tide needs to turn again, so that drivers are on the defensive. Personal vehicle owners, like smokers, endanger the health of others and the environment for their personal convenience. I dare say we don’t have the critical mass for such a major social change yet, but someday we will.

Part I

So, how should carless people deal with the guilt we feel about accepting rides? One possible solution is to look at a “full-cost” accounting of the transaction that takes place when someone gives us an automobile ride.

I think that the guilt and obligation we feel arises because of faulty logic. If you accept the premise that everyone needs a car, then it looks terribly expensive to take a cab and time-consuming (another sort of cost) to take the bus. It costs $10 to take a cab and zero to drive in the car sitting in the driveway.

This is wrong both from the point of view of the recipient and that of the giver. If we look at our car-free budget in isolation from everything else, it seems obvious it is much cheaper and more environmentally sustainable to “just say no” to car rides. Accepting a ride reduces those costs even further, saving us even more money over cabs and buses (savings that can help us exit the rat race and/or benefit us in other ways). The problem is that we pay several costs we don’t consider:

• the actual greenhouse gas and pollution cost of the ride, which, although small in isolation, produces more than riding a bus and about the same as taking a taxi
• the cost in viability of alternative transportation services – more riders equates to better assurance that those services will be there when we want them
• the psychological cost to ourselves that comes from feeling dependent
• the cost of a missed opportunity to educate and set an example for the people around us
• the long-term cost of encouraging others to feel good about owning personal vehicles (“it’s okay because I share”)
• the personal cost of false convenience, of having less incentive to arrange your life to be sustainable – maybe those long bus rides will help you discover where you really should live

As a result of my thinking on this, I plan to be more adamant about refusing when I’m offered rides and of sticking with alternative transportation. I also feel that we need to change our attitude about vehicle ownership – more on that in Part III.

One challenge that arises from car freedom is that we sometimes end up accepting rides from other people, and cannot help feeling a little guilty about it.

The Tyee has an interesting article about carless parenting. The author points out that ride exchanges are the social currency of inter-family relationships. Without a car, you have nothing to exchange. Ideally, you can find other ways of living up to your end of the informal bargain rather than withdrawing altogether.

When our kids were young, we didn’t have a car. It was, in fact, our guilty feelings about accepting rides all the time without reciprocating that drove us (pun intended) to get our first vehicle many years ago. This is less of a problem for us now because our kids are more independent, but it still comes up from time to time. My sons are away at university, so they solve their own transportation problems. Luckily, my teenage daughter is old enough to walk most places and can take a taxi on her own (with precautions), so we don’t have to rely on others very often.

This gift economy business applies to adults, too. We were visiting friends in Old Town last week. Before we left home, we carefully decided to walk to their house (about 20 minutes) and take a cab home. That was a perfectly logical and acceptable compromise for us, especially considering the money we save by not owning a car.

When the time came to leave, our friends offered to drive us home (using the logic that the taxi would be expensive and they didn’t mind – plus they had a car sitting right there unused). We reluctantly accepted, in part because these particular friends understand the dilemma completely and we know them well enough not to feel bad about imposing a little bit. It would have seemed rude or even willfully obstinate to refuse. Even so, I felt a certain psychological pang over it. Why?

I can think of several reasons:

• Social Stigma – We associate taxis and buses with indigence and poverty. Having to rely on public transportation implies a lack of economic clout and social status (as in the shameless automobile ad on the right). Taxis also have a “welfare day” stigma as the transportation of choice among people who are not successful enough to own cars, but splurge on taxi rides to the liquor store when they get their social assistance cheques. This is a ridiculous stereotype, of course, but it still lurks in our collective subconscious. Accepting a ride feels like accepting this undesirable identity.
• Self-reliance – North Americans, in particular, are afflicted with a strong desire for independence. Did this create our car culture or vice versa? We don’t want to feel dependent on other people because that creates obligations which much eventually be paid back. If we never owe anybody we have to look in the eye, we don’t have to let anyone tell us what to do. Banks and credit card companies, of course, are an entirely different matter: we don’t mind being in debt to banks because, at the bank, we feel anonymous. Accepting a ride makes me feel like I’m in debt.
• Friendly persuasion – Car-owners do not accept the logic that car-free people use to justify walking and taking taxis. If I don’t compromise my principles in the face of well-intentioned kindness, I am at risk of sounding like a humourless crank (or at least more like one than usual). I don’t like compromising my principles.
• Convenience – This is another situation where doing the wrong thing, accepting an unwanted ride, is easier and cheaper than doing the right thing, calling a cab. Of course, I know this and feel bad about it.
• Ego – I hate to admit this one, but it is true. I don’t enjoy being a passenger. When I’m in a car, I want to drive! I don’t want to be condescended to as the problem family who always needs special arrangements (we get that enough already as vegetarians). Cars are powerful, potent, manly, forceful! Accepting rides reminds me of all this and, irrationally, makes me feel like a wimp.

I’ll have more on this topic in part II.