Anything But The Car II

It seemed like a normal drive, sailing up the hill above West View on my way to the Park & Ride lot at 6am. The eastern sky was brightening but the sun wasn't up yet. The weather was dry; in fact it hadn't rained in days.  I'm rounding the curve by the Water Authority building, going approximately 25, the posted speed. It's uphill at that point, so I could not have been exceeding 25 by much, as if I'm going to exceed 30 in the first place.  A few feet ahead was the remnant of some small critter, possibly a squirrel or rabbit. Unrecognizable, probably driven over 500 times by this point. Hardly a bump. I'm not even sure I recognized it as roadkill in the dimness of the dawn. Whatever, I managed to cross it with both wheels. No big deal, right? But I was in a curve. On two wheels. OK, I didn't slide much. The whole spot in the road was maybe a one-foot square. Each wheel covered it in a tenth of a second. But in those tenths of a second, leaning as I was, ...

I figured it would happen eventually: A couple of problems cropped up that caused it to fail inspection. For one, the right front turn signal cover, a piece of clear plastic, had cracked and had a hole. It might have been that way a year earlier and the inspector didn't notice. Maybe it was that way when I bought it. Maybe I got nailed by a rock last week. I don't remember. Regardless, with that hole there, it was not going to pass. A bigger problem that I did not realize was that the brake light was stuck in the "on" position. This was serious, since nobody following me would be able to tell if I was applying the brakes. I have no idea how long this situation existed, but that grounded the machine until I figured out a fix. Starting with the lens, I reached out first to eBay and Google, then to the scooter Facebook group, for replacement parts. This proved elusive, then fruitless. I became aware that these machines were being scrapped whole, without removing potentia...

More than a couple times, I've nearly stranded myself by running the battery nearly empty. I've only needed to call for help once, though, that being when I made a trip to the grocery, not quite a mile away, with only 5 miles left on the range indicator. Got there OK, but the machine would not start with only 4 left. Fortunately, my wife could drive my spare battery to me in a matter of minutes. Swapped out, drove home, and everything was fine. Lesson learned; don't expect the machine to start with 5 or fewer miles left on the range indicator. Downtown is about 10 miles from the house, by air. Inbound on the scooter, since it's primarily downhill, I use about 7 miles of range getting downtown. The return trip, though, uses double that, typically 13 to 15 range miles, depending on the path taken. With any diversions on the way in or back, that results in having only a couple of miles left. At least twice, the range indicator read 0 when I pulled in the driveway. I've...

 One thing the Scoobi does not have is a parking brake. This makes it necessary to take some care when parking on a slope. If I'm pointed uphill, usually no problem, as I have to roll it back a few inches to prop it up on its kickstand. But if pointed downhill, I run the real risk of it rolling off its kickstand. There is a simple solution: I carry a brick in the storage compartment under the seat. If I have to park facing downhill, I place the brick in front of the rear tire, et voilà, problem averted!

While I am not a native Pittsburgher, I have acquired some of the native accent after living here for over four decades. "Slippy" = slippery, "aht" is how o-u-t is pronounced in these parts. Regardless of accent, though, lots of conditions can result in one's tires having a tenuous relationship with the pavement underneath. I have bicycled, unicycled, motorcycled, driven a car, and of course, motor scootered in non-ideal conditions. Four winters on the SUNY Geneseo campus, often on unicycle, provided me a wealth of experience being able to read and understand the surface conditions of what I'm approaching, and so be able to predict what might happen once my tires (tire!) get there. This cannot be taught; it's literally seat-of-your-pants learning. Not all snow acts the same, and not all dry-looking pavement can be trusted.  To date, over 4,500 miles of usage, I have dumped the scooter only twice. Once on dry pavement, once while barely moving but on wet ...

 Blog post 7:  Rolling down Liberty Ave in the Strip District one evening, I ran over something that put a moderately fast leak in the rear tire. I didn't notice it immediately, only when I got to a red light a mile later and wobbled as I started off. A flat front tire on a bike is immediately a problem and a danger due to loss of steering, but a rear flat can be ridden for miles. Since I was downtown, I merely pushed it to my usual parking spot under the Crosstown Blvd bridge and parked it. There was no way I was going to try to ride it 10 miles home. Even if I could, I would likely damage the rim. Replacing a tire should be a simple, straightforward affair. Should. Operative word there. Ha. The immediate problem was getting it home or to someplace I could work on it. Ideally I'd find a shop that could pick it up and fix it for me. But after a series of phone calls and emails over a full week's time, I had struck out on a simple fix. Nope, this was going to be a self repai...

 Blog post 6: Replacing our own cars We have two cars, my wife's 2010 Kia Rondo with 142,000 on the odo, and my 2011 Nissan Versa with 133,000. Myself, I also have the 250cc gasoline motorcycle, and the electric scooter, as well as the bicycle and a bus pass. All get regular use. I might employ two or even three of the above in a single day, while my wife uses exclusively her car. Both cars are at the age where replacement is within reason, but since both are in good shape, we have some time to decide what to do. This essay is about that thought process. It does help that we've used the same mechanic for over 25 years, and he knows both of our cars, and the several which preceded them. If there's any serious problem developing, he would let us know. At this point, there are no major issues for either one. On mine, as noted elsewhere, it gets little use, so if need be we could scuttle that one without major inconvenience. Our family had only one car for 18 years, living in t...

Blog post 5: The scooter and the big picture Unless you walk or pedal-bike everywhere you go, your personal movements have a carbon footprint. Your car burns petroleum. Your EV, though powered by electricity, ultimately is powered from some source, most likely coal or natural gas. The size of your footprint, and the 300 million other people in this country who need to get around, form the transportation segment of the nation's carbon footprint. Scooters, though, and e-bikes, use way less electricity than an electric car. My scooter, when recharging, draws about 600 watts for four hours. That works out to 2,400 watt-hours, or 2.4 kWh. At 10 cents/kWh, that costs 24 cents of electricity. Since I get 25-30 miles on a charge, that means a day's travel costs about a quarter. If that electricity was coal-fired, that would add 0.86 pounds of CO² to the atmosphere. Compare that to a gasoline car which gets 20 mpg. Thirty miles would be 1.5 gallons of fuel, which works out to about 30 p...

 "There is no bad weather, only inadequate clothing." So goes the saying of many experienced cyclists. Obviously when on two wheels, one will have to ride in the rain from time to time. How to deal with that?  Myself, having thousands of rides in all manner of weather, I opted to invest in some good rain gear. I spared no expense, obtaining shoe covers, pants, jacket and a hood, purchased from Showers Pass, a leading trusted brand of cyclist outerwear. I had already bought the set for the motorcycle, but a major drawback to that set of wheels is absence of storage space.  In Pittsburgh, the ride into work will be dry but the trip home at 6pm will be in the rain. With the scooter, though, I can store the rain gear in the hatch and only don it when needed. It does take a couple minutes to put it all on and to take it all off, but when I'm in motion, I'm dry.  So how about some details? Having grown up on two wheels (or one!), I am experienced in getting caught in a pas...

In the first couple weeks I owned the scooter, I started to wonder, how much will using this add to my electric bill? Every mile on the scooter is a mile not on the car, which (even though I don't drive it that much) sucks down gasoline at the rate of at least $50/month. Turns out, not much. After charging it a few times, including once all the way from totally drained, I noticed that it takes about four hours to charge. I can tell it's done charging when the light on the side stops blinking and stays on steady. The specs say it draws 600 watts during the charge cycle. Simple math, 600 watts x 4 hours = 2,400 watt-hours, or 2.4 kilowatt-hours. At the current residential rate of about 10 cents per kWh, one charge thus equals 24 cents. Since this machine goes 30 miles on a charge, that means I'm spending under one cent per mile to operate it. My car, in fuel alone, cost about an order of magnitude more to operate, per mile, than the scooter. How much does this compare with ot...

 "Anything but the car" has been my mantra for decades. Regardless of the difficulty or distance, my commute and regular travels have avoided use of the car if at all possible. Mainly transit through the 1990s and 2000s, the bicycle through the 2010s, occasional use of a motorcycle after 2010, even use of the unicycle to supplement the bus commute a few times. In 2022, though, I added yet another item to the fleet, an electric scooter. Why did I decide to purchase it? Include or discuss the test drive, the purchase, the acquisition, the ride home. To begin: August 3 2022: Bought myself a new toy today. Well, toy isn't the most appropriate word here. Capital expense, transportation, rolling stock, addition to the fleet. It's an electric mini-motorcycle, one of the former Scoobi scooters. Scoobi was the electric bike rental in Pittsburgh. They are not simple e-bikes. These more resemble small motorcycles. They are strictly urban machines, 30 mph top speed, about a 30-mi...

Index to this and, hopefully, all prior blogs This will be updated as time progresses. Not much to see here yet, but I thought it wise to make the second post the index. Much easier to plunk it here than wedge it in later.  https://anythingbutthecar.blogspot.com/2023/06/anything-but-car-take-ii.html https://anythingbutthecar.blogspot.com/2023/06/my-new-to-me-e-scooter.html https://anythingbutthecar.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-scooter-part-2-electric-bill.html https://anythingbutthecar.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-scooter-part-3-rain.html https://anythingbutthecar.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-scooter-and-big-picture.html https://anythingbutthecar.blogspot.com/2023/11/replacing-our-own-cars.html https://anythingbutthecar.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-flat-tire.html https://anythingbutthecar.blogspot.com/2024/11/hey-its-slippy-aht.html https://anythingbutthecar.blogspot.com/2024/12/why-i-carry-brick.html https://anythingbutthecar.blogspot.com/2024/12/is-30-mile-range-enough.html https://anythingbutth...

Welcome to my latest reimagining of an idea I have held for a long time, the concept that the average American will be able to get life accomplished without use of an automobile, at least as Choice A.  This blog will focus on that idea alone. I do not intend to retire my previous blog, Bus15237.blogspot.com, which has always been known as Anything But The Car, but until the dust settles, I will simply adopt that name for this one, a move I should have made in late 2010 when I set up that one. Prior to that, I had a blog going for several years on the MySpace platform, which I called Unicycle In Transit. I saw the demise of that platform coming, and so ported all 200-odd posts to a similarly named blog on this platform, UnicycleInTransit.blogspot.com. But where both of those drifted off into other topics that interest me, this one will stick with the single concept of alternative transportation. At this writing, toward the end of June 2023, I have already composed the first half doz...