bicycle is better than fuel-dependent machine

New Canaan Advertiser Thursday, July 26, 2007 Page 5A

Eco-man
Bio-fuel won't cure addiction to the machine

By Richard Stowe

Its not oil Americans are addicted to - we may be experiencing the inflationary effects of diverting grain harvest from food to bio-fuel.

Directing an increasingly larger share of corn production to make bio-fuel at ethanol distilleries may have led to a doubling of corn prices in the past year.

The outlook for converting palm oil, which as a bio-fuel is four to six times more efficient than corn, to bio-diesel is even worse.

Indonesia may set aside forty percent of its future palm oil production for bio-fuel. That’s a plan a healthy planet cannot afford.

The scale of today’s oil of palm industrial monoculture (eighty-four percent of palm oil is harvested in Indonesia or Malaysia) has created significant and unavoidable adverse environmental impacts.

In Indonesia oil palm acreage has increased thirty-fold since the 1960’s (that growth primarily was driven by the use of palm oil for food and cosmetic purposes) and in Malaysia oil palm monoculture accounted for eighty-seven percent of the deforestation between 1985 and 2000.

Tropical forest loss in Indonesia and Malaysia is eliminating critical habitat for Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae – one of five tiger subspecies remaining), two orangutan (Malay word for man of the jungle) species - the Bornean (Pongo pymacus) and Sumutran (Pongo abelii), Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) and Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumertrensis).

What we’re really addicted to is the automobile. Once an Americans steps outdoors, he or she invariably steps into a car or truck (150 million Americans had 49 million motor vehicles in 1950; 300 million Americans had 237.7 million in 2003).

Record levels of motor vehicle ownership in the United States (771 vehicles per thousand people in 2000) and record air travel (witness the FAA’s plan to accommodate more flights in the New York metropolitan area) have created an insatiable appetite for liquid fuel – whether its petroleum or ethanol; the average American household consumed 1067 gallons of gasoline for vehicle travel in 1994. That’s the conundrum we face – our economy, our lifestyle seems to depend on cars, trucks and planes - significant contributors to climate change, pollution (motor vehicles are responsible for 55 percent of cancer contaminants in America) and biodiversity collapse.

Recently while shopping for organic, local produce at the Westport Farmer’s Market I saw a solution - when Westport resident, Shawn Liprie, - a single mom with three children, rolled up with a BOB trailer (http://www.bobtrailers.com/) – which carries up to 50 pounds - attached to her bicycle.

Shawn is fit – she plays quarterback in the women’s professional football league and plays golf, tennis and kayaks. Ms. Liprie who gardens, even cuts her lawn with a push mower. And she is a proud mom who put me on notice that a front-page photo of her daughter, Amber Coutermash, at the 2007 Staples High School graduation ceremony, had just appeared in a Westport newspaper.

The trailer, she explained, enables her to shop at Super Stop & Shop, Stew Leonard’s and Wild Oats or carry out multiple errands by bicycle. That day, aside from going to the Farmer’s Market, she would bike to Fed Ex, the bank, Longshore Country Club to sign up for tee times and to a football game. Shawn even hopes to find or design a trailer to carry her kayak down to Long Island Sound by bicycle.

At Shawn’s home her car mostly sits in the driveway. That’s quite a feat in Westport, the heart of the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk-Danbury CT sprawlopolis, which ranked number seven in a list of the ten worst cases of urban sprawl in a 2002 report released by Smart Growth America, Rutgers University and Cornell University.

Other options for hauling goods while bicycling exist. One is the gonzo-California designed, but built in Taiwan Xtracycle (http://www.xtracycle.com) “Sport Utility Bicycle”, which extends your conventional bicycle frame by 15 inches. Frame extender, racks and panniers add only nine pounds to an existing bicycle, but enables cyclists to carry up to an extra 150 pounds and that 150 pounds can include a passenger. Another is a made-in-Iowa Bikes at Work (http://www.bikesatwork.com) trailer available in three lengths, weighing between 27 and 43 pounds, which carry bulky items, such as refrigerators, up to 300 pounds.

Two organizations, each with different constituencies, currently advocate for cycling as transportation in their respective locales in Connecticut. Both hold bicycle to work events on the last Friday of the month. Hartford based-Central Connecticut Bicycle Alliance (http://www.wecyclect.org/) has advocated for bicycle racks on buses and is reviving the Discover Hartford Bicycling and Walking Tour on September 8, 2007.

New Haven-based Elm City Cycling (http://www.elmcitycycling.org/) has advocated for bicycles-on-trains on Metro-North. ECC disseminates information about New Haven’s monthly critical mass and this summer is the national host of Bike Summer. On June 23rd I rode one hundred miles in the crown jewel event of Bike Summer– the New Haven Century. I can attest to the back roads beauty of Woodbridge and the crystal clear coastal views in Madison, Guilford or Branford. On Thursday, July 26th at 5:30 p.m. ECC hosts a Bike Summer Art Reception at Fuel (516 Chapel Street New Haven.)

Fairfield County would certainly benefit from a cycling as transportation advocacy group to support cyclists, such as Shawn.

Fifty-four percent of Americans live less than five miles from work. Many errands and activities are within that distance, too. At five miles or less car engines are cold. Cold engines are fuel thirsty and release considerably more pollutants on a per mile basis than warm engines.

In terms of energy efficiency, bicycling is the clear winner over competing modes. The calories required for a ten-mile roundtrip by car is 18,600 (1/2 gallon of gasoline); by bicycle it is 350; bus 9200; train 8850 and walking1000.

In terms of water consumption, or space requirements, bicycling is even more efficient; forty gallons of water are used to refine each gallon of gasoline a car burns and twelve bicycles fit in the space required by one car in the parking lot, or street.

Yes, Shawn is a role model for moms wondering how to save the earth from global warming (and burn off extra calories) - one mom at a time.

School bus parking fiasco

New Canaan Advertiser Thursday, July 19, 2007 Page 8A

Bus parking, new lot will harm Waveny

Editor, Advertiser:

Nearly a year ago Ditte Reifsnyder made a bombshell announcement: the School Bus Facility Task Force, which she chaired, had chosen the playing fields at Saxe Middle School as the preferred location for the school bus facility. Fortunately, Town officials and the public resoundingly rejected that plan.

Plan B, the plan to park the school buses at the high school, was quickly set in motion.

Park & Recreation chair Jeb Walker offered a plan to sacrifice Waveny Park property for the school bus facility, but was outmaneuvered by Ms. Reifsnyder, when she proposed placing the school bus facility in the parking lot east of the high school and shifting the attendant loss of student parking on the high school campus into Waveny Park.

Plan B, it turns out has significant and unavoidable adverse impacts not only on the limited usable outdoor areas at the New Canaan High School campus, but also on New Canaan’s crown jewel – Waveny Park.

It constitutes a gross incursion into the Waveny Park with a 800-foot long, 80-foot wide double-barreled, tiered, sprawl-like, mall-like 266-space surface parking lot, which stretches nearly all the way to Waveny Park Road and with the high school back entrance creates a continuous, uninterrupted corridor of impervious, asphalted surface from Farm Road to Waveny Park mansion.

On Tuesday July 10, 2007, P & Z summarily granted the request for an 8-24 referral and special permit to relocate the school buses, construct bus facilities and a fuel station on the New Canaan High School campus. At that meeting I stated that there were better options for parking school buses, such as a bus company proposal to park the buses in Wilton or developing a plan to park the school buses at the transfer station.

Below are some statements commissioners made at the meeting and my response to each statement.

Commissioner Scannell wondered what was the reasoning for the commission to not grant the 8-24 referral. Well I think Chairman Papp described it best last summer when he said: “The aesthetic impact of parking buses (along) the most important route to New Canaan. South Avenue is really the calling card of the town and to spoil it substantially may not be considered compatible with the Town plan, which also calls for aesthetic and appearance consideration.” Mr. Papp was referring to the Saxe proposal, but the high school parking plan is directly across the street, thinly veiled only by the Waveny Woods.

In response to my suggestion to park the school buses at the transfer station Chairman Lazlo Papp said that it had been determined that there was not enough room for the buses at the Transfer Station to around and it was directly adjacent to parkland.

But what if they built a Town Park and nobody went to it? That is exactly what has happened with the unnamed Town Park at the Transfer Station dedicated under First Selectman Bond and built under First Selectman Neville’s oversight. No one to date has acknowledged the disutility of this dedicated parkland.

Furthermore town officials have failed to grasp the opportunity to trade this Transfer station land out of park status in exchange for dedicating the Michigan Road Dorothy Clark property as a woodland preserve.

Commissioner George Wendell’s commonly held assertion that a school bus parking lot at New Canaan High School “(This) is about as centrally located as possible,” But that statement is predicated on the unproven presumption that less fuel will be used by siting the buses at the high school.

A counterargument is that by locating the buses at the high school, the bus routes first have to travel though no school bus pick-up zones. School buses will waste a significant amount of fuel driving through these no pick-up zones adjacent to South, Saxe and New Canaan High School. Mr. Wendell’s statement also does not account for the fact that the school bus drivers work two separate shifts - morning pick-up and afternoon drop-off and drive off somewhere else in their personal vehicles during the break in between those two shifts.

Finally, Commissioner Scannell’s point that reducing another Town’s green areas for school bus parking is not a good argument for protecting New Canaan’s green areas discounts the reality that New Canaan doesn’t have industrially zoned land, but adjacent towns and cities such as Wilton, Norwalk and Stamford do.

Now is the time to put the brakes on Plan B and come up with a plan that will not further deface the New Canaan High School-Waveny Park corridor.

Town officials are currently engaging in a Safe Routes to School study to enlarge or optimize the no pick up zones. Truly a worthwhile study, it ultimately may reduce the number of buses the Town contracts. Each bus that is not needed saves the Town $75,000 per year, and the cost of removing one bus for one year equals the savings town officials boast are accrued by using the existing 20,000-gallon fuel tank at the high school.

Richard M. Stowe

New Canaan Advertiser Thursday, July 19, 2007 Page 4A

Clarifications

Richard Stowe said the following statement reported on page 1 of the July 12th New Canaan Advertiser contains factual errors

Richard Stowe, a local environmentalist, said the plan would create light pollution, “adversely effect every high school students’ school yard,” and the 125-space parking lot designated for students and park goers where the buses are currently being parked predicates plans for an ice rink and is “gross incursion” on green space.

What was actually said:

Mr. Stowe said that the 120-space parking lot designated for students and park goers in combination with an asphalted back entrance to that dual-use high school parking lot via Waveny Park road is a “gross incursion into Waveny Park.”

Mr. Stowe also made a point that additional parking conjoined with asphalting a back-entrance to New Canaan High School (not the dual use parking lot by itself) “will likely induce further development in the area.” When Mr. Stowe was asked for an example, he cited the ice rink proposal.

Live Earth rocks Meadowlands

Went to Live Earth yesterday. The fact there wasn't a train into
Giants stadium turned out to be a disaster on the way back to the
city. Concertgoers crowded shuttle buses as one bus after another
lined up to pick up the post-concert throng in order to drop them off
at Secaucus Junction, the closest NJ Transit train station. Once we
arrived at Secaucus Junction we had a 50-minute wait to the next
train.

Shortly after we arrived, Alicia Keys joined Keith Uban belting out the Rolling Stones hit Gimme Shelter. The Poliice played the fnal songs of the evening.

rain on the 4th of July

Went to Twins v. Yankees game at Yankee Stadium (http://mlb.mlb.com/news/gameday_recap.jsp?ymd=20070703&content_id=2064446&vkey=recap&fext=.jsp&c_id=min) last night. Took the 5:14 p.m. train from New Canaan to Fordham, then walked over to take the 4 train to 161st Street. The culinary opportunities at Yankee Stadium are limited so I settled for a Heineken, but it was a great opportunity to experience Yankee Stadium before the 'House that Ruth built' gets unceremoniously demolished. I took a 10:32 p.m. from 125th Street back to New Canaan.

In the morning I didn't feel fresh when I got up to participate in 'Four on the Fourth', which started on Oenoke Ridge in front of St. Mark's Church and finished on the New Canaan Nature Center driveway. It was my first four mile run. Learned that 'Family Fourth' was canceled today and rescheduled for Sunday.

Weather headed south as the afternoon wore on.