Train Girls: July
Meet Denali Star — our (slightly belated) July choice for the ongoing Train Girls calendar. Miss Star reminds us that train travel can be a luxurious experience; instead of taking a tiring road trip, she always takes a sleeper train so she can get her beauty rest.
Denali Star, July Train Girl
Megabus is Coming — and You Should Ride It!
I know this is probably old news to anyone reading, since WCAX and CarfreeBTV already jumped on it, but I am so ecstatic about Megabus‘ arrival in Vermont that I have not only already bought a ticket on the first Burlington-Boston bus, but I also have an indescribable urge to tell everyone I know to go to Boston this August.
As CarfreeBTV rightly points out, whether or not Megabus continues and expands service in Vermont will depend upon the public’s response to this first bus line. They’re reaching out to us — with $1 and $3 tickets to Boston, and buses running twice a day — and it’s up to us to respond.
There are currently only two real options for getting to Boston: driving a personal or rental vehicle, and taking the Greyhound bus. There’s little to no hope of train service between Vermont and Boston in the near future, with both the Vermonter and Ethan Allen Express Amtrak lines running more direct routes to New York. I’ve heard rumors that the Fung Wah and Lucky Star “Chinatown buses” will also run up to Burlington on request, but I have yet to see evidence of this. So for those of us who occasionally want to get away for the weekend and are fed up with Greyhound’s astronomically high prices ($44 Burlington to Boston) and poor service, Megabus is absolutely going to be the best option. At least, I hope. I’ll see how my ride on August 17th goes!
Why aren’t Americans biking to work?
New York Times and International Herald Tribune writer Elisabeth Rosenthal just put out this article explaining why Americans aren’t using bikes to commute.
“Until we start thinking of bikes as essential transportation and not just a hobby, all the small changes that will allow working people to commute along those beautiful bike paths won’t happen,” wrote Rosenthal.
“The 2010 interim report of the Understanding Walking and Cycling study noted that ‘Walking and cycling are often thought of as simple forms of travel which require little equipment or planning. In fact this is not the case.’ In truly bike friendly cities, the needs of bicycle commuters are taken seriously: The terminal stations in Bogota’s bus rapid transit lines have plentiful indoor bicycle parking. In Copenhagen, the European Environment Agency has 150 parking spots for bikes.”
Check out the whole article here: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/on_biking_why_cant_the_us_learn_lessons_from_europe/2425/.
For anyone who’s noticed that the Maplefields gas station on Route 7 slightly north of town has been all torn up lately, check out Andrew’s story in the Addison Independent from last month. The station has been shut down in order to clean up from numerous on-site oil spills over the years:
“The most notable spills have been an underground fuel release that was discovered in 1992 when tanks were removed, a 1998 above ground tank release and a 2006 spill that dumped about 1,000 gallons of diesel for reasons still unknown.”
Yummy.
Freedom of Transportation
During the winter and spring, I spent a lot of time focusing on logistical details of getting around in Vermont without a car (and all the inconvenience it entails), as well as some political happenings surrounding transportation in the state.
I rarely digressed into pseudo-philosophical or academic ramblings.
But today, something — maybe the three weeks I’ve spent working more than full time at an academic institution surrounded by studious types — is urging me to overanalyze things.
It all started with the previously-cited conversation I had with a teacher about transportation to New York and Boston . . . for the first time in months, I was again seeing my predicament from an outsider’s eyes. Her surprise at the lack of train and bus service reminded me of what it’s like elsewhere. I started thinking about Hangzhou again.
When I left my apartment to go to work on any given day in Hangzhou, I had at least four different choices of how to make the trip: by bus, by taxi, by bike, or on foot. You could even add driving a personal car to the list, since I potentially could have bought a car and gotten a Chinese driver’s license if I wanted to (as by British boss did). So make that five choices. Six if you count rickshaws as separate from taxis, and seven if you count the times I’ve hitched a ride on the back of someone’s electric scooter. That’s pretty good.
I’d usually bike, because was by far the fastest option in Hangzhou. Oh, wide-open bike lanes separated from automobile traffic by a huge landscaped median, how I miss you!
In Middlebury, I can still travel by bus, by bike, on foot, or by car . . . but that’s because I live incredibly close to where I work. My trip to work in Hangzhou would have taken about an hour on foot, while in Middlebury it only takes me ten or fifteen minutes. If I lived at a distance from my workplace more comparable to the distance between work and home in Hangzhou, I would be limited to biking and driving. And biking, for most people, is weather-dependent.
We have built a system that depends upon having a car. As a nation built upon the idea of freedom — freedom of choice, freedom of deciding how you want to live your life — this seems to me an absurdity. Any citizen of China in any locality has multiple transportation options available to them: bike, electric scooter, motorcycle, rickshaw, walking, subway, train, bus, taxi, and car. For most of us living in rural or suburban America, we have only one viable option.
I almost hate to say this, but America could actually learn a thing or two from China about freedom in this case.
Unfortunately, because of the way the world is, China is taking a page from our book. I mean this in a broad, cultural sense, not necessarily from a policy standpoint. The Chinese value car ownership because that is what prosperity means in America. That’s what they see on TV and in movies. That’s what they’re going to emulate. And there are 1.4 billion of them. They already represent the largest auto market in the world.
I know there will be many people who don’t agree with me, who feel that the freedom of having a personal vehicle and being able to go “anywhere you want, whenever you want” trumps the freedom of choice of different types of transport. They may have a point. But ultimately, the type of freedom we tend to think about in relation to cars – you know, the type of freedom that is artistically portrayed in pickup truck in the visual form of big wheels conquering mud and tough terrain – is transient. It depends upon a certain system being in place. It depends upon our ability to get oil, and to get it cheap. It depends upon our willingness to turn a blind eye as to how that oil is obtained. It depends upon our government’s ability to collect taxes and use them to pave roads and keep them in good condition. If any of these conditions disappears, where will we be able to go with our cars?
Doing what you want, when you want isn’t enough to mean “freedom” to me. Freedom of transportation means that my lifestyle is not so heavily dependent upon one mode of transportation that my worldview, politics, and morality are shaped to keep that one system in place.
It’s Been Too Long
Wow. . . it’s been almost two weeks since I last wrote anything. Ouch! In case you were wondering, I started working for the Middlebury College Chinese Language School last Monday, and it’s been a dead sprint since Day 1. I finally have a few minutes to decompress, so I figured I would touch on some vehiculessly-related things that have come up in the past week.
First of all, Middlebury had its first official Green Drinks on Tuesday evening, and I was luckily able to attend! Green Drinks is an environmentally-themed social networking event, held in cities and towns around the world. Middlebury’s first event focused on bicycling and bike commuting — community members hopped on the mike to share bike-related stories of their own, then mingled while sipping drinks and nibbling snacks subsidized by Little City Cycles of Vergennes. Other local businesses donated raffle prizes ranging from bike gloves to rear lights to biking-related books. It was a great kickoff event, and I am looking forward to future Green Drinks!
On Rail: During my mysterious disapperance from non-work-related life, a lot of news was rushing in from the world of rail! There is a lot of progress being made on the Western Corridor passenger line — Vermont Rail, the company who operates trains on the state-owned tracks, is investing funds of its own with the eventual goal of providing passenger rail service. There is a new website specifically for the Western Corridor project, and although the changes will certainly not all come at once, it does seem that both the state government and Vermont Rail are willing and ready to work toward getting it done despite the lack of federal funding.
In other rail-related news, a special train was run last Wednesday between Essex Junction and Burlington for the Chittenden County Metropolitan Planning Organization — while this was sort of a one-time stunt, it was a good show of willingness to discuss the possibility of passenger rail between the two locations. This is America, folks. We have to talk about everything for ages and make grandiose statements before making decisions, right?
On Working Vehiculessly: For the past six months, I have been working mostly from the comfort of my home, formatting away on my laptop while keeping my cats company. This, combined with my apartment’s convenient downtown location, made the vehiculess lifestyle undoubtedly easier. I had things to do and appointments to make around town, but I didn’t need to be somewhere every day at a certain time and place.
My summer life is turning out to be a bit more challenging! Working in the administration of the Chinese School, I am usually on the college’s campus. Part of my job is being available 24/7 for students’ and teachers’ various crises (language-related and otherwise), as well as running to and fro doing errands. On several occasions, I have had to drive a college vehicle: for example, I drove to and from the Burlington airport three times in one day to pick up teachers as they arrived. I consoled myself by thinking that my 15-passenger van is really more of a bus than a car, so if I just consider myself a bus driver, then this is sort of like mass transportation. Sort of.
Most of the time, though, I am able to get things done by biking or walking, though not without a little extra stress and planning. It will likely take me a few weeks to adjust to working full-time, even without the complication of my vehiculessness, so we’ll see how it goes. My office is, though, only a 15-minute walk away from work. Yay!
One more interesting tidbit to finish up my two-week annotations. I took a group of new teachers up to Burlington a couple of days ago to get Social Security Numbers, and I had an interesting conversation with a young teacher from Taiwan. Here’s pretty much how it went down:
TEACHER: Soo. . . if I want to go to Burlington on the weekend, how do I get here?
ME: Well, there’s a bus. It goes about four times on Saturday, I think. The earliest is probably 11 or so, and then you have to come back around 7.
TEACHER: What about Sunday?
ME: Uhhh.. sorry. It doesn’t run on Sundays. They’re working on it, though!
TEACHER: Oh. What if I want to go to Boston? That’s close.
ME: Yeahhh… you can come up to Burlington and catch a Greyhound bus from here. It takes… a long time.
TEACHER: Oh.
ME: Like, a really long time. You probably couldn’t go to Boston just for a weekend, so you could go… after.. the program is over. If you drive, though, it’s about three hours.
TEACHER: How about New York?
ME: You can take the bus to Rutland, and then take a train to New York.
TEACHER: Oh! Good! I really want to see New York!
ME: But… the bus to Rutland is only on weekdays, so you’d have to skip dinner and go to Rutland right after work on Friday, stay in Rutland for the evening, take the train to New York on Saturday morning, and come back on Sunday morning so you could get the Monday bus back in time for class. So really, you’d only have one night in New York, and it would cost hundreds of dollars.
TEACHER: Oh.
I had a chance to sit down with Chris Parker from the Vermont Rail Action Network last month, and amongst other rail-related things, we talked a lot about the proposed Western Corridor passenger rail project that would connect Middlebury to Montreal and New York. Although we were both pretty bummed that Vermont didn’t get federal funding this time around, Chris told me that there is a possibility that the state government might try to work it out on its own.
The rail line would pass close to the campuses of Castleton State College, Middlebury College, UVM, Burlington College, Champlain College, and several CCV locations, connecting students with each other, the greater Vermont community, and the greater world via New York and Montreal. Awesome, right? Unfortunately, though, a lot of the people who live along the Western Corridor and complain about Route Seven’s inefficiencies aren’t even aware that this is a possibility.
Governor Shumlin and the Democratic legislature are already, as Professor Bert Johnson noted in an interview for Vehiculess back in April, ready and willing to invest in transportation infrastructure. Before we can push our state’s government on the issue, though, we need the people who would be riding the train to know of its possible existence!
I sat down to brainstorm: how to best raise public awareness about the Western Corridor? Should I organize a 5k running race along the tracks? Eh, that might be dangerous . . . there are freight trains that carry who-knows-what running through the center of Middlebury every day. Maybe a historical tour of Vermont rail? Well, transportation might be an issue. Oh! A student group, perhaps? Wait, it’s summer vacation . . .
After running through a long list of semi-plausible and serious-sounding ideas, I decided that I had best start with one of the least plausible and least serious: a pin-up calendar with random railroad shots in the background. Nothing risqué, folks. Just some nice girls — all named after famous railroads in American history — who want to let you know about the Western Corridor. (Disclaimer: Christopher Parker and VRAN have nothing to do with this! It is my fault alone!)
Shasta Daylight
Our June Train Girl is Shasta Daylight. Look at that beautiful bridge right behind her — that’s right in downtown Middlebury! It’s part of the area they’ll likely renovate and upgrade if this project comes into being. Thanks to Shasta for bringing this to our attention.
Watch Vehiculess for new Train Girls every month.
Hangzhou’s Bike Share on Streetfilms.org
I know this is not exactly Vermont-related, but it is exciting! I’ve raved about Hangzhou’s biking infrastructure in the past, and Hangzhou’s bike share, the largest in the world, has reached new levels of (well-deserved) fame! Check out this video about the system here.
Memorial Day Weekend: The Rental Car Experience
Ahhh . . . Memorial Day Weekend. Andrew and I were greatly looking forward to getting out of Middlebury for a few days and heading down to Newport, Rhode Island for a family wedding. We had romantic visions of hopping on the train, relaxing a bit, and recording every vehiculess moment to share with you all. Then I checked out the Amtrak website. Unfortunately, it would take three buses, one train, and 30 hours to get there without a car — a distance that takes just under five hours to drive.
Nervously clutching the wheel and driving about 10 mph under the speed limit . . .
Since Andrew, like most people, can’t just take two days off to make Memorial Day Weekend into a week-long vacation (maybe the Europeans could pull this off, but not us), we ended up renting a car. I priced out the two options available in Middlebury — Zipcar and Enterprise — and with everything from gas to insurance accounted for, Enterprise came out ahead by about $20, so we went with that.
Now, we’ve already had some discussion here about whether or not renting a car should be “allowed” during our year of vehiculessness. If we were true purists, I suppose, we would either buy train tickets, taking the pay cut from Andrew’s missed days of work, or opt out of the family celebration. For obvious reasons, neither of these options was particularly appealing. In addition, we began this whole adventure in the spirit of discovering whether or not it is possible to live a relatively normal – that is, not hermetic — life in Vermont without a car. While I am fine with missing out on some social gatherings because I can’t get there, my definition of normal means going to work and attending important family events. Occasionally renting a car is quite different, in my opinion, from owning a car. If you still feel I’m a hypocrite, you are free to condemn me in the comments section.
For your reading convenience, I’ve condensed my thoughts on the Enterprise rental experience (and car rental in general) into three categories, which I have given (admittedly quite subjective) star ratings:
OVERALL VALUE 
Insurance, tolls, and gas -- oh, my!
If I pull up my email reservation from Enterprise, the 4-day total is $148.20. That’s not too bad, especially considering that this already includes the $60 “Under Age 25 Driver Fee” (ouch) and tax. But wait . . . do I really want to drive an uninsured vehicle that’s not mine all the way down to Rhode Island? No. Especially when I can’t afford to add on Andrew as another driver, which would cost an extra $9/day plus another $60 fee. So by the time I actually returned the car on Monday evening, I’d actually spent about $300 for the car, insurance, and gas. This is pretty comparable to what we’d pay for the train-and-bus journey. But I still give it two stars because either way, it’s too expensive. We obviously did not opt for the $7.95/day GPS.
The interesting question to me is how these costs stack up against owning a car. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2008 the average cost of owning a car in the USA was about $8000 per year. Statistics from the same source indicate that for the average American household, transportation (in the form of car ownership) is the second largest household expense after housing. It would take me 25 four-day trips with Enterprise — or one trip every other week — to equal the average cost of owning a car.
I was going to give it one star until I looked that up.
CONVENIENCE 
Dropping off the keys in the after-hours box
Clearly, driving five hours door to door is more convenient than switching from bus to train to bus for 30 hours. But with Shanghai’s seamless subway-to-train system in mind as the five-star benchmark, I really can’t give this experience more than three. The Enterprise office is two miles out of Middlebury, and while it is located at a bus stop, the buses stop running after 7pm. When we returned from Rhode Island at 7:30, we dropped our suitcases off at home, then threw (OK, gently laid) my bike in the car. I drove out to Enterprise, dropped off the key, and biked back on Route 7. This is not exactly convenient.
Another element of convenience that people often ignore (perhaps because they’ve never experienced it) is the ability to do something else while commuting. On a bus or a train, I can read, work on my computer, knit, or eat comfortably. To me, this is part of convenience — what’s the point of getting there faster if I have to keep my eyes locked to the road the whole time? Some drivers (mostly from Massachusetts) seem to think they can eat, talk on the phone, and select songs on their iPods while driving, but they’re wrong.
ENJOYMENT 
I will admit that this star rating was greatly influenced by the fact that I had to drive on I-93 through Boston. This was an extremely unenjoyable experience, fraught with assaults from terrible drivers on all sides and highways with far too many lanes. I had to request that Andrew turn off the music, stop whistling, and remain absolutely silent on more than one occasion.
My worst nightmare: tunnels in Boston
The things that were nice about driving myself were the ability to control the temperature and the chance to stop whenever I felt like it. We stopped in Providence on the way home to grab lunch with a friend, which was nice. But most of our stops were motivated by the gas meter and my impatience. I much prefer trains, where I can walk around without losing time, and I can look out the window without fear of being broadsided by some dude in a huge pickup cutting into my lane with mere inches to spare. All told, I find driving stressful, and my vocalization of this stress apparently makes my passengers also feel a bit anxious. (Sorry, Andrew.)
FEEL-GOODINESS AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT 
It felt good to get in the carpool lane to go over the bridge into Boston. We also chose a Toyota Corolla, the most fuel-efficient car available at Enterprise with about 40 miles to the gallon. But we used a full tank and a half of gasoline to get to Newport and back, and the smoggy haze over Boston was a visible reminder of our contribution to pollution.
OVERALL
The rental car experience was pretty much as I expected it to be: too expensive, slightly stressful, and guilt-inducing. But it did get us down to see Andrew’s cousin’s wedding in time, and allowed us to spend Saturday and Monday doing fun things, like doing the cliff walk in Newport or getting lunch with a friend, rather than sitting on a bus or a train. We won’t be doing these types of trips often, but once in a while, you’ve got to put the “extreme challenge” mentality aside. Next time, though, Andrew is driving.
I’ve got plenty of reasons of my own for not wanting to drive, but after discussing these reasons with friends, I was wondering what might motivate other people. Some people bike to work occasionally for environmental reasons, others to save money, others because they just don’t like driving. Whether or not you actually use other modes of transportation, go ahead and take a minute to choose what you feel is the most persuasive reason for not driving — for you personally:
