Anything But The Car II

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...