Mission: To promote driving less so all may live more.
My ride in a driverless taxi confirmed my thought that machines are safer than human drivers. I had arrived in San Francisco to visit a friend in December, 2024. While walking through a neighborhood, I was encouraged when a driverless taxi stopped at a crosswalk (“Hallelujah!”).
A couple of days later, I hailed a ride using the “Waymo” app and enjoyed the ride (whose video is embedded below).
Waymo was spun off from Google and has made deals with Lyft and Über to work in partnership. The cars, modified Jaguars, are very expensive and currently operate in a couple of cities in California and in Phoenix, AZ. China and Singapore are also among the first countries to develop and use driverless taxis. Tesla plans to have two models available in 2027.
For anyone concerned about pedestrian and bicycle safety, these are a big step forward. Removing the human element greatly increases the precision of the driving. The taxi will drive at the speed limit or under, monitor sidewalks and crossings for pedestrians, (usually) avoid bicycles, and never engage in road rage.
Mission: To promote driving less so all may live more.
May, 2024, Gary Robinson, a seasoned bicyclist, was hit from behind by a Ford F-250. Gary was thrown 60 feet and yet survived without a broken bone. He was rushed to the hospital with bruises, blood loss, and road rash.
All that was bad, but soon Gary learned he was being defamed by the driver of the truck on social media. That hurt worse than the physical pain of the accident. Worse, still, was the vitriol from many of those who commented on the post. This distress was compounded when Gary read several comments to an unrelated Douglas County sheriff’s Facebook post on bicyclists. The reaction of the driver reminds me of an earlier post in which the man was hit by a motorcycle in Spain. After the man recovered from a traumatic brain injury he was unsuccessfully sued by the motorcyclist for damages to the motorcycle!
By some kind of grace, however, Gary turned this bad mojo around. Already, Gary was fully invested in the bicycling community, having founded the comprehensive web site Colorado Avid Cyclist in 2022. This site shows the depth of his passion for riding, replete with useful articles on many topics, including buying used bikes, the best bike locks, and making great meals.
Situated as he was and finding himself an object of hate in an accident that could easily have killed him, Gary reached out to the sheriff’s office in Douglas County, Colorado. He initiated a partnership with the sheriff’s office to educate both drivers and bicyclists ways to respect and not hate each other. The partnership is called Colorado Avid Cyclist Community Outreach Program. On that web page are three videos that report on both the accident and the partnership.
Gary refuses to allow hatred to poison his world and is glad that his purpose in life has been expanded to promoting not just bodily safety but social safety among the biking and driving communities.
The “versus” in the title of this article, then, is not fully accurate. Instead of focusing on revenge or self-vindication, Gary chose and chooses to negotiate the tricky and sometimes brutal interface between automobiles and people. Yay!
Mission: To promote driving less so all may live more.
Today is the very popular Peach Festival in Lafayette, Colorado. Our main street is closed to cars and is instead lined with booths where vendors sell anything from tee-shirts to peaches. The peaches are a product of the Western Slope, most famously from Palisade.
It’s a happy and busy day. Living, as I do, a few blocks from the main street, I open my door to see more pedestrians at a glance than I generally see in a week. They have parked in every conceivable slot in my neighborhood in order to spend time at the Festival.
As I step outside, I’m a bit dizzy, having been in bed for almost four days with COVID. Today, I must continue to stay away from people, but I’m well enough to go for a drive in the mountains, a rare treat. My street is packed with cars. I step into the street, unable to see any traffic because someone parked an SUV so closely behind mine.
Suddenly, a white pickup truck flies by me, horn honking, driver cussing up a storm. Shocked, I want to find out why he’s so upset, so I beckon him to stop. Not sure that was a good idea. He thought I was flipping him off.
Stop he does, with a skid. Well, now I’ve done it. I’m relieved he’s getting out of the truck because that means he’s not going to slam his truck into reverse and run over me. But of course he could have a gun. I know, I write a web log about such events. Recalling Coach Carter from seventh grade, I choose offense as the best defense and walk toward him. He stops walking but not swearing. Then I learn I’m an idiot for walking in front of him and, worse, a *@9%@* for flipping him off.
I attempt to explain that I had no intention of upsetting him. Yes, call me conciliatory. It turns out that when people are in the throes of anger, they are really bad listeners. He didn’t hear a word, and I stood my ground, one sick man looking down the block to another. What was his sickness? One cannot be sure of much except that he was definitely sick of me.
I didn’t take it too personally. He was, after all, scared. Mothers and fathers yell at their children all the time when they think the children are doing something dangerous. The children are sure the parents are mad at them. It’s only concern in emotional overdrive. Same with him. He hated the idea that he almost hit (someone as valuable as) me as he sped down the narrow street.
Perhaps he’s not filled with mother-love for me. Still, as he drives away I believe he will be thinking at some point in the day about the power differential between his 2-ton truck and my 180-pound body. That, at least, is how I envision him.
Skyline on peak-to-peak highway, unruffled.The Peach Festival (photo from The Denver Post).
Mission: To promote driving less so all may live more.
Last year, the young biker Magnus White was killed while training in Boulder County. This year his death was memorialized by over 3,000 bikes following a course that included the location of his demise: Ghost Bike (Memorial Ride for Magnus – Sunday 11, 2024, from The White Line)
While this post gives a personal perspective, the web site dedicated to work being done in honor of Magnus (and all bicyclists) provides information and opportunities for involvement for all who are concerned about auto-related deaths and injuries in this country. The site’s name, The White Line, echos both the last name of Magnus and the terrible consequences of crossing the white line on the shoulder of a roadway. (The site is worth visiting—the banner photograph of the white bike and the rainbow is remarkable, let alone the content.)
Among The White Line’s valuable resources are a series of videos documenting Lives Worth Remembering. The first video, “Episode 1: Christian and Michelle Deaton” demonstrates the sensitivity and relevance with which this series focuses on the humanity of the victims.
The ~13 mile ride signified for the moment the triumph of self-propulsion. It moved slowly and with only one significant hill (up Folsom to the CU Campus), so that nearly anybody could participate. This participation included at least two penny farthings, along with some cargo bikes, e-bikes, countless road bikes, mountain bikes, cruisers, gravel bikes, and the bikes I didn’t notice.
Afterward, a ceremony included talks by Magnus’ parents, Michael and Jill, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, and others (listed in Boulder ReportingLab”).
For me (and likely thousands) the memorial ride was like a dream…imagine it, riding down Diagonal Highway, the wrong way, without a moment of worry!
Pre-ride staging in a parking lot at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Photo taken by a guy named Don.Map of the out-and-back ride. The sky was wonderfully overcast the duration of the ride!
These two brothers and their radio show transformed the American automobile experience into a humorous discourse. The most practical advice I picked up from the show was this: in order to teach someone how to use a manual transmission, park the car on a level, empty parking lot and have the person depress the clutch pedal, put the car in first, and slowly engage the clutch without touching the accelerator pedal. It works (I tried it)!
The brothers referred to their merchandise as “shameless commerce,” including this cute mug, “No Factory Recalls. So far.”
Now, onto my shameless commerce! As my previous post declared, I reserved a car that I’d like to see on the road: Aptera home page
The reservation costs a refundable $100 and purchases a place in the queue in order to obtain an Aptera when they are produced (starting 2025). My friend, Marc, is #800 in the queue. I’m #70,000. I’ll let Marc debug the car so that mine is perfect when it rolls off the production line in Carlsbad, California.
Aptera sent me a link to share with you if you, too, want to reserve an Aptera. You get $30 off, and I get something like $100 credit toward my Aptera if I end up buying one. Deal? Click away—it’s simple. It’s fun, even if you back out before you include a form of payment. At least you get to see a well-designed web site along with the options available with every Aptera. https://lz953.isrefer.com/go/preorder/a124831
The Aptera is not in production but the prototypes assure me that it will look similar to this: Aptera — not sure the oceanside parking spot comes with it.
Trust me, it’s not the space-age look that excites me…the look is largely the result of the wind-tunnel design that allows the vehicle to get incredible mileage. The Aptera is solar powered, so if you park it in the sun one day (easily done in Colorado), the battery receives 40-miles worth of power. That’s nearly free driving if the car’s already paid for (or if you steal one). The battery you charge can provide 1,000 miles before it needs a new full charge (preferably with a charging station unless you want to leave the car in the sun for 25 days). The gasoline equivalence of the Aptera’s efficiency is approximately 350 miles per gallon.
How do you buy one? There’s a waitlist. I’m in that queue: #78,145, expected delivery, 2025 (prob. Dec. 31 at 11:59). The reservation requires a $100 refundable deposit. I’m tempted to reserve a second one for reasons I cannot find. The car will cost me ~$33,000 according to the current estimation. I selected the 400-mile battery because I don’t want to drive 401 miles or more in one spell. Also, I ordered a custom color so that I could get a brightly colored car to help the huge pickup trucks see me.
I’ll end this post with a list of advantages and a couple of optional videos:
The Aptera is classified as a motorcycle/autocycle and therefore requires…
a motorcycle license tag (cheaper)
motorcycle insurance (cheaper)
But doesn’t require…
a motorcycle driver’s license
Furthermore…
It seats only two people but the lengthy aerodynamic tail provides comfortable sleeping space, better than most automobiles (I feel like a salesman at this point)
It has an electric motor on each wheel which has advantages that I don’t understand
The plan is to put a QR code on almost every part of the vehicle so that you can scan and order a replacement part, installing it yourself or taking it to a local garage
It uses the Tesla charging hardware (which has now been adopted as the US standard)
It has a 5-star crash rating
It has all that smart-car stuff that will drive me crazy since I buy only manual transmission cars until now… but if you knock on the door or the trunk it politely opens automatically, etc.
It has a very convincing CEO as the following 49 minute video will show. Although my son thinks all CEOs are convincing, he never worked for some of the ones I have, but this one is:
Here’s a fluffier video (21 minutes with a test drive at minute 12):
