Ahhh, the good ol' days of film
***Rambling post alert!*** ***with videos***
Airplanes are great for traveling long distances (long being 1,000+ miles) but for shorter distances, trains can't be beat. I know you're thinking clickety-clack
I haven't blogged for a bit, so today turns out to be a good day to blog. We had a great time this weekend with our friends, Steve, Liz, and Nash (and Lexi too of course), that finally joined us up in Salt Lake. Cornia even showed up at their house! He's got a great reggae band, "Carlos Cornia" that I actually have yet to see in person, but want to really bad. We went to eat at Settebello, mmmm, that's all that needs to be said about that :-)
But the main thing that spurred me to post was the movie that Gina and I just got done watching, A Crude Awakening. My favorite part was hearing about Hubbert's Peak because I have learned about it in school already and could relate to it. I highly recommend the movie if you have not seen it
The movie is very well researched and follows along very well with what scientists like Hubbert have been telling us since the 60's and 70's. So far, they've been very close to perfect with their estimations about oil reserves and our obscene exploitation of those reserves. For those of you that remember the 70's gas crunch, that was only a drop in production of crude oil by about 5%. Royal Dutch/Shell announced in 2004 that it really knew of 20 percent fewer oil reserves than they had been reporting up to that point. At the time, 20 percent of just their reserves equated to 3.9 billion barrels of oil valued at $136 Billion at that time. Today that same amount of oil equates to nearly $254 billion at current ~$65/barrel prices. Evidence that our oil reserves are limited is all around us. Many countries are now importing more oil than they are producing and it's not far off for the U.S. either. At the rate we're using it, even all of our "untapped" reserves would not sustain us for very long in a crisis. It's an interesting movie and shows how dependent we are on oil. A change is needed, and there is no silver bullet. No matter the mechanisms that you use (even my beloved biodiesel) we will all have to use less of it and promote sustainability and conservation. Go out and rent this movie, if nothing else, to simply be aware of what is to come in our future.
I've heard many excuses for not riding mass transit, but the one I hear the most is that there is not a convenient bus route that matches where the person wants to go. I thought this was the case for me personally for a long time until I discovered deadheading buses. Imagine the typical US city with a downtown in the center (generally) surrounded by suburbs. Buses run in the morning carrying the throng of people from the suburbs to the city center. Because there are fewer people going away from the city center in the morning, they run empty (what is called a "dead head run") from the city center back to the suburbs to then pick up another load of passengers. Any bus scheduler will tell you that it is almost impossible to avoid some dead head runs, but the good news is that most bus companies will still let riders travel on the dead heading buses. In my example, I travel from near the city center against the majority of traffic. I never thought there was a fast bus that traveled in that direction so I would either drive or wake up obscenely early to ride my bike or take the combination of TRAX and the 811.
If anyone is familiar with the 811, you know what it's like. It's a 93 series bus generally, which means that it tops out at 55 mph on the freeway and wasn't even built for the freeway to begin with. It's generally packed with people (most of which wouldn't be riding it if they knew of other options) and stops every few yards as it lumbers along it's route. Not to mention that air seems to seep right through the windows as well as through the floor and doors... and roof and everywhere. This provides the opportunity to get the sauna feeling in the summer and the ice cream isle feeling in the winter. I thought the above were my only options that I could ride until I saw a dead heading bus one day completely empty. You can imagine the situation... me, standing on the 811 (because there's no where to sit) huddled next to the most pleasant people in the world and as I gaze out the window at the mountains, I see a nice commuter bus (see pic below) cruising by completely empty! So I said to myself, "Self, I REALLY need to be on that bus!" I emailed UTA that day and they informed me that I could ride those dead heading buses. The next day I caught one.
After way too long, Salt Lake City and the adjoining areas of the Wasatch Front are finally getting a commuter rail line. When all is said and done, it will run from Davis County (up North) to Provo (and maybe even further South). After Salt Lake City killed the two amazing train stations that it had to it's name, it was time for another one to take the place of the other two (Rio Grande and Union Pacific). 
The new inter-modal hub is just the ticket and is pretty cool although if somebody was thinking straight they would have converted one of the existing train stations in all their glory and turned it into the inter-modal hub. Oh well, I can always dream that someone might think in the long-term, right?
Anyway, I was riding out to eat lunch with Gina out at Franklin-Covey and as I was riding over the 400 railway overpass, I looked to my right towards the inter-modal hub and saw a gathering of people around a new Frontrunner train car! They weren't supposed to have those cars for another year! I quickly turned around (dodging traffic of course) and headed over to "investimagate" with the trusty point and shoot camera in tow. 
Once I got there I saw that it was a small press conference for the Proposition #3 "Rails and Roads." It was exciting to see and I got to go inside and take a look around the two story rail car. It was quite comfortable and will even be equipped with Wi-Fi capability! It's planned that it will travel at about 85 MPH, so that will help lure people to it because it will be faster than driving. The section from Davis County should be done sometime next year from what I hear with the SLC to Provo section being completed by 2010 or so. Proposition #3 will help speed this along. 
Finally, I gotta throw in a couple of pics of the bike and the ride. 
Today when I was riding to Sandy to pick up my car and finish the commute to work it was a beautiful morning and as I was riding along watching the gorgeous sunrise I thought how great bicycle commuting is. I saw quite a few other bicycle commuters making the trek into work, school, etc. and as each passed, we exchanged friendly waves of understanding and comraderie. It was a nice feeling. Yesterday when I was sitting waiting for the train at the TRAX station I saw quite a few people cruising around on bikes in Downtown. This may seem like a normal thing in other cities, but Salt Lake still needs to grow up and seeing a handful of cyclists in a 10 minute time span is pretty good. It's nice to see more now than I used to.
Most trips that people make are under a mile or two long which means that at just 14mph you could travel 2 miles in just 8.5 minutes and you get to ride straight to the front at traffic lights. Now think about how long it takes you to pull your car out of the garage, drive through traffic (sometimes the worst part), and then you still have to find a parking space. While the parking space issue might be quickly resolved just outside the city, it can get much more difficult (not to mention expensive) in and around Downtown. The bicycle is the perfect solution for most of these short trips. If you haven't started using a bike for transportation, you should try it, you just might remember those early days of freedom that came from learning how to ride.
