As the pandemic shutdown has eased, invitations to in-person meetings have predictably begun arriving with greater frequency. And, I’m generally not accepting them.
This is zero about fear for my own health. It is somewhat about concern for public health, still. But even more, it’s about not being willing to go backwards, environmentally speaking and in terms of my own time and energy. Not just my time and energy either; everyone’s! Now that we’ve seen how much can be accomplished online, my tolerance for in-person meetings inside of air-conditioned buildings, and/or held in locations such that most or all participants have to use motor vehicles to get there, is approaching zero.
I do not miss riding my bicycle on unsafe roads (or rustling up fossil-fueled vehicle rides) to get to meetings. I do not miss all the plastic cups and other senseless trash produced by humans physically getting together in public spaces. And I do not miss the sheer amount of time it takes out of all of our days to travel to and from meetings.
Meetings that could be accomplished online just as well, or even better. Do I miss human face-to-face contact? No: I see my neighbors, essential merchants, and a steady parade of strangers in (social-distance) passing every day. I talk with geo-distant friends and family by phone; Zoom. I interact with clients by tele-technology as well.
I am just not willing to go back, now that I see it is possible to do things a different way. I am casting my vote for a new normal. My vote does not carry particular weight, and I do not flatter myself that I alone am going to precipitate some sort of shift. But I have one person’s worth of vote, and it feels good to know for sure where I stand.
I once read that in England, the electric company has to plan for a surge in demand during the halftimes of televised football games (or “soccer games” as we say in the USA). Why? Because of all those millions of viewers getting up during halftime to make themselves a cup of tea! No one organizes or plans this; rather, millions of individuals each decide to do it. And it adds up to a difference so big that even the power company has to plan for it.
This is how I see personal action. I’m only one person, but I get to choose. And who knows how many millions of other people may independently make the same choice. And it could even be that this blog entry will embolden you to cast your vote for a new normal as well. Be it deciding not to give so much money to big chain retailers, deciding to use a bidet bottle so you’re not at the mercy of toilet-paper hoarders, or putting your foot down about attending in-person gatherings needlessly.
During the pandemic I have attended multiple churches and lunch discussion groups; taken hours of webinars on stormwater management, promoting acceptance of native-plant yards in HOAs, and other topics related to my work as an eco educator; gotten to the root of my chronic back issues by taking a super effective core exercise class; caught up with old friends; done consulting sessions; and more … all online (or by phone). If I ever had any patience for the very limited viewpoint that “we just have to do this in person,” that patience is pretty much erased by the evidence of the past few months! (Particularly when it comes to environmental conferences, eco-minded organizations. Stop it stop it stop it, I say!!!!!)
As it happens, my neighborhood watch group is meeting this week — outdoors, in a park! This is partly because the building we use is undergoing renovations, and probably also a nod to lingering concerns over germ transmission. But an outdoor meeting is something I like from an eco-footprint standpoint as well. No lights or air-conditioning! Who knows, maybe enough people will accept meeting outdoors that we’ll end up making a habit of it.
I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this topic!
In the looming retirement-income crisis, I also see a silver lining. The economics of aging is forcing millions of us to live more frugally and to redefine what is enough. We’re cutting back, downsizing, and rethinking how we live, work, and play. But the problem right now is that, to most of us, downsizing looks like deprivation and loss. And we hate it. Small is not beautiful. It’s living in a shoe box without windows or Wi-Fi and paying $1,800 per month for the privilege.
Nobody wants that.
But what if we could flip the script? What if we could take the economic turmoil of forced downsizing and come out better—not because we accommodated the chaos but because we used the chaos to go where we needed to go in the first place? I call this idea “smalling up,” and it’s where the retirement-income crisis and the sustainability movement intersect. …
In other words, if we’re going to have to downsize, why can’t we “small up” and do more with less as a path to a more sustainable way of living? Why can’t we have more beautifully designed, space-saving homes and furniture made of eco-friendly materials? And why can’t they be affordable and available in the mass market?
The economics of aging may well force us in this direction. But isn’t this where we should be heading anyway to secure our futures and those of our children and grandchildren?
I stumbled upon this quote today, in Ms. White’s book, which I just today started reading. Stumbling on the book was itself a serendipity; I had never heard of this bestselling title til today.
My home state, Florida, has a “sales tax holiday” period for people to purchase hurricane-preparedness supplies. Goods qualifying for the tax exemption include tarps, bungee cords, radios (powered by battery, solar, or hand crank), and portable generators. Besides those commonsense items, the tax holiday also inevitably includes one of my top pet peeves, bottled water. (I won’t go into yet another tirade about how I hate seeing people waste money on this stuff when they could just fill up reusable containers in advance from their faucets.)
One item not listed as a tax-exempt good is rain barrels. That is a shame, since sky-water is great for plants and for the skin (as well as for the wallet, seeing as how it falls from the sky for free). Tax-exempt or no, rainbarrels are an investment that pays dividends throughout the year, and I encourage everyone, regardless of whether you live in a dry or a wet climate, to get rainbarrels if you don’t have them already. Even just a barrel or two is a great start, giving you 50 to 100 gallons of rainwater storage capacity.
I’ve been collecting and using rainwater for years. My favorite uses for it, besides watering plants, are clothes-washing, bathing, and cooking/drinking. (You may need or want to filter your rainwater before using it for drinking or cooking. It makes tasty coffee, by the way. I boiled some up in the kettle just this morning.)
To me, the difference between stocking up on bottled water and collecting rainwater is the difference between household preparedness (on a very superficial level) and household resilience. Collecting and using rainwater gives you options; makes you less dependent on modern conveniences. And that feeling of reduced dependence carries over into a general can-do state of mind that helps you get through hard times and come out stronger.
Suggested homework: 1) Calculate your monthly water consumption if you don’t know it already. 2) Look up the average monthly rainfall in your area and the average annual total, if you don’t know those figures already. I used weather-us.com, and input my city (Daytona Beach). 3) Calculate how much water can potentially be captured off your roof in any given month, and for the year. (Here is my favorite rainwater-catchment calculator. This website, watercache.com, has a lot of other valuable info as well.) 4) Notice any differences between your household water consumption and the amount of rain you could potentially capture. In most cases, if you were able to capture it all, the amount of rain that falls would be far more than you could ever use!* (Do not rush out and buy a huge cistern though. I really recommend just starting with one 40- to 50-gallon barrel, maybe two. Or even just line up a bunch of buckets or other containers–whatever you have handy–under your roofline the next time it rains, and enjoy the experience of collecting and using free water from the sky.) Let me know how it goes for you!
Example: Where I live, April is our driest month; we get 2.2 inches of rain on average. Using the rain-catchment calculator, I find that my 1,000-square-foot roof has a total rainwater collection potential of 1,370 gallons from that amount of rainfall. My water usage is 300 to 450 gallons per month (10-15 gallons per day). So if I needed to, I could meet my water needs entirely with rainwater! (I’ve only got 450 gallons of storage capacity in barrels right now, but that’s OK, because my yard itself is a “sponge” that collects most of the water it needs without my help. So most of the water I collect in barrels can be used for human needs as opposed to plant needs.)
Rainbarrels are like a bank account for water. You can catch the surplus during abundant times, and use it to get you through sparse times. (An even bigger, more capacious bank account for water is the ground itself; I write elsewhere on this blog and in my book about how you can engineer your landscape to capture and store rainwater, making it less vulnerable to both drought and flooding. As the folks at the Watercache site put it, “Some people install urban rainwater harvesting systems because they have found that rain barrels just don’t hold enough water. As an added benefit to having free water to irrigate your landscape with, you can solve some drainage problems that you may be having on your property.”
*According to rainwater-harvesting expert Brad Lancaster (who I often cite on this blog and in my book), even in a super dry place like his hometown Tucson, enough rain falls to meet the needs of every resident, if people were capturing it and using it wisely. Which Brad teaches people how to do! Check out his YouTube channel; I particularly recommend his 18-minute TED talk Planting the Rain to Grow Abundance.
One of the simplest ways to shrink your eco footprint (and reduce your financial overhead) in a hurry is to add people to your household. Even before the pandemic hit, a lot of households were going in this direction anyway. Student-loan-burdened young people making a U turn, aged parents moving in with their adult kids, and so on.
And of course, people who don’t live with their families often choose to live with housemates rather than alone. Not only young people, but seniors as well, are forming group households. Personally, I choose to have housemates not only to reduce my eco-footprint and save 60 to 80 percent on housing costs, but also because I enjoy the company.
Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve written tips on how to get along with housemates/roommates. (I’ll dig up the link and post it here for you later.) This post today is focused on the “hardware” aspects, so to speak. How to functionally expand your space to accommodate more people.
The other day I was reading an article about how family members who’ve been living apart are coping with being thrown together under one roof. Some are loving it; others are stressed. The article mentioned something about a family of four being stressed about suddenly being “crammed” into a 2,200-square-foot house. My first reaction was along the lines of “Jeez! We Americans are so disgustingly spoiled!” But then it occurred to me that a lot of houses, particularly newer ones with those “open plan” layouts, make it awkward for more than 1-2 people to share living quarters. A lot of times, when people think they don’t have enough space, what they actually have is a poorly designed space. Fortunately a lot of design issues can be addressed easily and inexpensively, with DIY improv solutions as opposed to expensive, high-footprint home renovations.
My house is one-story, 988 square feet. Because of its old-school, non-open floor plan, and how I’ve tweaked it, the house feels spacious and can comfortably accommodate 2-3 fulltime residents (plus a guest or two in a pinch). Actually I’ve had up to 11 friends staying here during special-event weeks. Before buying this house, I lived in a 1-bedroom apartment that I turned into a 2-bedroom in order to be able to have a roommate. Here are some of my tips:
• Eliminate special-purpose rooms, other than the kitchen and bathroom, and turn all other rooms into sleeping quarters. (Well, I still have a living room, but it doubles as a guest sleeping area.) By deploying a folding table, I can also use the living room as a dining room on those rare occasions when people eat together indoors here. What had been the laundry room is now my bedroom/office/studio. The room dimensions are 6 by 7 feet! By evicting the washer/dryer to create my micro headquarters (it’s like my own tiny house within my house!), I freed up the two big “official” bedrooms for fulltime housemates. (Where do we do laundry, you ask? I wash mine by hand in a small tub; housemates generally wash theirs at the laundromat. Everyone line-dries their stuff on the house clothesline.) And I created a third, tiny, “emergency guest bedroom” by evicting the table and chairs from what had been a very tiny dining room.
• Turn your garage into a cabana. A garage is way too good to be taken up by a car! Right now I have the luxury of getting to use my garage as my craft haven and “she shed,” but for a different household, the garage could just as easily serve as an in-law apartment, or as a sweet cabana for teenage or tween household members, or returning college students. Heck, when I’m a little old lady, I (and my husband, if I have one) will probably move into the garage ourselves and rent the main house out to another family.
• The more doors the better. My house has three exterior doors, making it easy for multiple occupants to have their own entrances. If I had not been so blessed, additional doors are one actual official reno project I might have considered.
• Creative room division. Not only folding screens, but tall bookcases or other tall furniture, can serve as privacy walls. In my old one-bedroom apartment, roommates always occupied the real bedroom, while my “bedroom” was a 4-by-6-foot “roomette” carved out of the living room. Bookcases served as its walls. Super cozy, and all my stuff was at my fingertips.
• Avoid storing huge amounts of food. Food for multiple people’s dietary preferences takes up huge amounts of space in the kitchen cabinets. Either do communal meals, or everyone get their own takeout meals, or each person has a tiny microwave or toaster oven in their room, and keeps their nonperishable food in their own room. Sharing a fridge is perfectly do-able as long as no one tries to store large amounts of refrigerated goods. One thing I’ve sometimes done is give each occupant a cooler to use. They can decide whether or not to use it, and they have to buy their own ice.
• Just say no to large clunky furniture unless it is multi-functional (i.e. can serve as a wall).
• Go vertical!! Shelves, closets, hangers make all the difference between a place seeming totally cluttered, “not enough space” — and being plenty of space.
• Screen a porch or balcony to add a funky rustic sleeping area to your place.
• Knock out part of a ceiling, and use the resulting upper “shelf” as additional sleeping nooks. Or if you have high ceilings, build lofts or bunks.
• Common courtesy: Use headphones when listening to electronic entertainment, unless you are listening to something together. Keep common areas free of personal stuff (each occupant takes their stuff back to their bedroom when leaving the common area).
• Minimize number of cars. OK here I go harping on cars again. But really, the thing that sticks out like a sore thumb when multiple people share a house or apartment is All. The. Damn. CARS. Cluttering the yard, squeezed into the driveway, or vying for parking space on the street. For some households, juggling cars around like puzzle pieces so this or that person can get in or out is practically a fulltime occupation. As well as being car-free myself, I actually seek out car-free housemates; it makes life so much easier. True fact: When houses with multiple occupants get labeled “undesirable” by neighbors, what usually sets them off is the number of cars (assuming the occupants are otherwise unobtrusive — don’t have loud parties, etc.).
Well, in this post I set out to offer you 7 ways to comfortably fit more people into your home, thus radically reducing your eco-footprint and your living costs. Looks like I came up with 11 ways. And I might think of more, in which case I’ll add them later. (My blog is sneaky timed-release like that.)
Can you think of any other tips to add? Drop me a line, and let’s help folks save money and boost their green quotient!
We teach people how to treat us, by how we present ourselves; how we carry ourselves. It’s true of people, and it’s also true of cities.
I love that my city is welcoming to large numbers of visitors. (It’s one of the things that drew me here: that spirit of acceptance and hospitality; that tolerant urban vibe as opposed to provincial snooty beach-hamlet vibe.) What I don’t like is that we have made ourselves dependent on mass crowds and large special events. It makes for a fragile economy. And it makes for a community that’ll put up with anything (be it a sprawl development or a noxious crowd) in exchange for the almighty dollar it (supposedly) brings.
A young people’s “invade Daytona” event yesterday started out seeming like just a fun party, but ended up with multiple shootings! And a whole lot of garbage on the beach.
By presenting ourselves as a wide-open place where anything goes, and by conveying our neediness, we invite things like this. If we raise our expectations, people will feel it.
On an individual level … “We teach people how to treat us” also translates into our employers, and the businesses we buy goods and services from. We teach them how to treat us, by what we are willing to put up with in exchange for that almighty thing we feel we can’t do without, be it a dollar or a gadget or what have you.
Reducing our dependency on people and institutions that treat us and/or the planet with disregard, is something any of us can do. And it’s an ongoing process.
In a few minutes, I’ll walk down the street to the Daytona Beach Boardwalk, where super-stellar community activist Rell Black of the Community Healing Project has called all interested folks to meet for a cleanup. Rell was born and raised in Daytona Beach, and he never stops working to make it better. I swear he works in his sleep!
If you want to teach the world how to treat you and your community better, my advice is: Find people like Rell, and support their efforts! Oh, and you can also connect with the Community Healing Project on Facebook.
If you happen to be reading this before 1pm EST Sunday May 24, and are in the area and want to join the cleanup, bring your mask, gloves, and trash bags to the Boardwalk at 1!
By coming together as a community, we teach the world that we respect our place and each other. We say, “Visitors, we welcome you, but you need to show respect. Our place is too good to be a raucous party dump! Anyway, we would rather be your friends than be your maids.”
The Kerrville Folk Festival is going virtual this year, with headliner concerts, late-night campfires, and brunch get-togethers all being streamed online. This is a beautiful effort to keep a festival going that started way back in 1974.
“During the live broadcast of this concert all donations will be split between the artists. This concert will continue to be streamed from our Facebook page, YouTube Channel, as well as our Website thereafter, wherein all further donations will support the Kerrville Folk Festival Foundation.”
If you are familiar with Burningman, KFF may be sort of the acoustic, folk, hippie-ish version of that. Or, maybe Burningman and other burner events are a techie version of a folk music festival. (On that note, I once remarked to a friend that Burningman seemed like the dot-com intelligentsia’s version of an Aggie bonfire. To which he responded, maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe the Aggie bonfire is a redneck version of Burningman.)
(This post started out as just some musings inspired by a Facebook convo yesterday/this morn with an old friend.)
A dear old friend of mine wrote a post addressed to all of us, her Facebook community: “I wish all good things for you – peace, enough money to pay your bills and buy chocolate, health OMG do I ever wish you health, happiness, friendship and food, and a working car.”
I wished the same back at her, but with the caveat, “Except don’t wish any kind of car on me, working or otherwise.”
She responded, “OK, no car for Jenny!” (She knows how I am.)
[Special note to you longtime readers who are already more than familiar with my “car”-guments: You might want to skip down this page to where it says TL;DR. Actually you might want to skip there anyway, since 1) I can be rambly (though I have at times aspired to be the Seth Godin of the green movement, as I so admire his gemlike posts that offer endless depths of wisdom and generous attribution in a tidy little package); and 2) the real prize of this post lies in the TL; DR paragraphs at the end. Unless you just get a kick out of hearing me spiral off yet again about the joys of automobile non-ownership, in which case, come on along for the “ride”! Read on, and thanks for your stalwart support.]
OK, so — You might ask, why would I say don’t wish a car on me? Why would I not want a car even if someone gave it to me?
Why? Because there are so many other things I would rather do with that $8,000 a year than spend it on a car. (I remember reading somewhere that’s how much a typical car owner has to spend every year, between insurance, repairs, regular maintenance, yadda yadda.)
But let’s say you’ve got a paid-for car, and your expenses are just $100 a month for insurance and $100 a month for gas. That’s still $2,400 a year! And of course, that $2,400 a year doesn’t include routine maintenance, or unexpected repairs.
My bicycle costs me a couple hundred a year in tubes and repairs, and I probably shell out another $100-200 a year in Uber fees, or paying a neighbor for rides. And once in a while I’ll rent a car. In 2018 I rented a car to drive up north for family reasons. For a person who likes to make $12k to 15k a year (and that’s before taxes), I live a lavish life, and part of what makes it possible is that I don’t have to deal with a car.
“Yeah, but!!” — I can hear people saying. “The car allows me to have a job and earn money, which makes the expense worthwhile.” That response usually shuts down argument. Not for me though.
First of all: For people making $8 or $10 an hour, which is a surprising number of people in the USA (at least people I know), a car ends up being a big trap. You need a car to get to your job, and you need your job to pay your car expenses (and of course, repair expenses go way up, on the kind of car you can afford at $8 or $10 an hour). One breakdown and you’re in the hole financially (and possibly in trouble with your boss for arriving late, needing to take time off, etc.). Better to just get a job you can walk or cycle to, or even better yet, create a home-based business you can really enjoy. Even if it’s less money than you’d be able to make at that job, you might end up with the same amount of disposable income, or even more. But even if it’s less — hey, you get to work at home, or close to home. Cutting out the commute: Priceless!
And second: Even if I were making far more than that $8 or $10 an hour (which I’m not, because I can have everything I want on $12k to 15k, and would rather have free time than more money), I would still always be able to find better uses for my money. (I have actually lived on 7K some years, but it wasn’t by choice, and I didn’t get to have everything I wanted/needed — though I lived much better than one might expect).
“Yeah, but!!!” I can hear some people saying: “Who would want to live on 12 or 15 thousand dollars a year?”
To which I have three answers: my personal answer; my answer for society as a whole; and my answer for you, the person who wants to live large, with the freedom to play and explore and do the work that makes your soul sing.
My personal answer: I want to, because that’s all I need to live a lavish life; and also because I have come to believe, through much reading of brilliant expert sources, and from my own direct observation, that extreme income disparities create too much ecological pressure on the earth, and financial hardship on people. By the way, in case you are curious, I am a libertarian, politically/fiscally speaking.
My answer for society: Although they may not want to, many many people are living on 12 to 15k right now, or far less than that. Yes, I am talking about people right here in the USA. And this was BEFORE the pandemic. Now, there are even more in that boat. In fact, layoffs in the USA have now soared to 39 million! That is a tenth of the U.S. population! People basically suddenly forced to live on zero. If you (or your family or friends) find yourself in these circumstances, the best thing you can do is learn how to be among the happy minority who can comfortably live on this. Because there are signs that it may become the new normal. And, as Henry David Thoreau put it, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”
My answer for you, the person who wants to live large, with the freedom to play and explore, and do the work that makes your soul sing: The less you can live on, the more you can afford (both time-wise and money-wise) to play and explore. With your overhead expenses radically lowered, making a living at your own cool little cottage business suddenly isn’t out of reach. Or attending a month-long French-language intensive in Paris, starting a Dada raga thrash band just for the heck of it, walking across America, publishing your manifesto on astrological composting, or whatever other aspiration you feel you don’t have money/time to fulfill.
(On that note: Earlier this week I purchased a garden box from a local couple who have started a business doing that. They advertise in the For Sale section on NextDoor. I paid $40 for a beautiful sturdy wooden box made to my exact dimensional specifications, and delivered to my door within three hours. From what I hear, this is just a hobby for them, but if they had to, they could probably turn it into a steady enough livelihood, if they lived by DEEP GREEN eco-thrifty living principles. They delivered it to my door for no extra charge. BTW the delivery vehicle they used was their car, but the box could just as easily have been delivered by a person with a large sturdy bicycle-towed cargo trailer — yet another of the micro-business ideas I’m always touting.)
Oh, one more note about cars: As I say in my book and elsewhere on this blog, one form of car ownership that isn’t too hard on your wallet or the planet is shared ownership. With more multigenerational families living under one roof now, car-sharing becomes more feasible. And a group of four or 10 neighbors could just as easily share a car (or pickup truck, van, etc.) and all of its related expenses. Once I even stayed at an eco-village where the whole eco-village (maybe 75 people) shared one vehicle.
TL; DR :
— Enjoy the philosophy behind my blog, but aren’t always up for a rambling soliloquy? Or, want more content, plus interactivity? Join my Facebook community DEEP GREEN BOOK BY JENNY NAZAK to see a steady stream of bite-sized posts (including links to super chewy articles and sometimes vids) and be able to add your comments and meet likeminded people. And buy yourself a copy of my book DEEP GREEN to get a slim, condensed how-to manual (written in my same light chatty style, but much more pared-down to nuts-and-bolts suggestions and numeric benchmarks), to speed your progress on your path to freedom.
— And now as promised, the real prize!!! As I see it, my highest role as a promoter of the “Grassroots Green Mobilization” is not as a writer or speaker per se (though I enjoy doing both those things, and feel pushed to do them). Rather, what I really am is a connector, hooking you up with the best-of-the-best resources for living large with an ultra-low footprint. The appendix of my book is a head-spinningly rich, yet ruthlessly curated, list of the best resources I’ve discovered to date. Today, I’m highlighting two bloggers who are listed there, in the subsection titled “Wizards of Prosperity and Thrift.” These two popular bloggers are financially well-off people, highly successful in mainstream USA-merican terms, who have radically reduced their financial overhead in order to enjoy economic and creative freedom.
1) Mr. Money Mustache: created wealth and financial independence for himself and his family by radically reducing their need for money and material goods, while still maintaining a comfortable lifestyle. His goals: “To make you rich so you can retire early”; “To make you happy so you can properly enjoy your early retirement”; “To save the whole Human Race from destroying itself through overconsumption of its habitat.” “Early retirement through badassity.”
2) Early Retirement Extreme: “a combination of simple living, DIY ethics, self-reliance, and applied capitalism.” He and his wife live on $10-14K a year, combined.
Do you ever read something that’s so good and to-the-point, that you are struck mute on the spot, and all you can do is point and sputter, and think to yourself, “THIS!! YES!!! THIS!!” Well, that happens to me quite a lot in the presence of my favorite books and blogs, and these are two of them. Both of them are very famous and have a kabillion followers, and given the quality of their writing and thinking, I assume they are both constantly invited to speak at high-level international conferences and such. So they don’t need me to promote them. But I need to promote them to get the word out to you, because they are a great resource to all of us who are pursuing a life of true abundance with an ultra-low footprint. Go delve into their troves of practical wisdom! The screenshots below will explain my insistence. The fact that I even upload images at all is an indicator of how much I want you to check out these blogs. (As you, my beloved and highly esteemed regular readers, know, I am a bandwidth-cheapskate, who tends to stick to plain text.)
I actually had not read either MMM or ERE for awhile. Definitely not since the pandemic, but even before then. (I stay pretty wrapped up in discovering and sharing resources, and sometimes the virtual pile gets pretty big). Now that I’ve visited their pages to snag the URLs for you, their lists of current posts are calling me with a siren song, and I have a feeling I’m going to be up into the wee hours tonight devouring the latest from two of my favorite Wizards of Thrift! Oh but wait, there’s more!! If you are as goofy thrilled as I am about dwelling in the terrain where eco consciousness intersects with purposeful cheapskatery, you will want to join the MMM-inspired Socially Conscious Mustachians group on Facebook. Hope to see you there!
Further Reading:
Bicycle boom in pandemic — more people using pedal power. (AP story by Olga R. Rodriguez in Daytona Beach News-Journal, May 25, 2020.) People craving exercise and sunshine, or seeking a more hygienic alternative to public transport, are turning to bicycle riding:
“The pandemic is proving to be a boon for bike shops, which have seen a surge in demand, with people waiting in line at still-open shops and mechanics struggling to meet the demand. All around the country and the world, bicycles are selling out and officials are trying to take advantage of the growing momentum by expanding bike lanes during the pandemic or widening existing ones to make space for commuters on two wheels.”
Very happy to hear this news, as I am sure that there is also going to be a trend toward more car use this summer, as a lot of people who can afford to do so will be using cars instead of Greyhound or Amtrak for their vacation trips. Hey, but what if we started to see a fad for long-distance bicycle travel!? People traveling long distances in groups for safety and companionship. (My ideal vision of the future has the whole USA crisscrossed with interstate bike paths. I know that long segments of bicycle path are already there in some places. But wouldn’t it be amazing to have a full-on interstate system, with numbered signs just like on the motor interstate highways. And with the bicycle version of “truck stops” for eating and tent-camping!)
