Things To Help The Environment

if you havnt noticed, these resolves have arisen more than 20 or 30 years ago. what we need are not more ways and ideas to save the earth, but more people to follow along with the ideas theyve come up with decades ago. if the world somehow gets a wild hair up its ass, and we all decide to carpool to work, recycle more, not drive their car 2 blocks to pick up milk (helps out the fat people too), the world will be a lot better off. its just that we need to come together and do this as a whole, not just groups of tree huggers all around the world. no single group like that will help out the world. TEAMWORK

well i see acouple of ways to help the enviroment. for one thing we need more efficisant things to be AFORDIBLE. not many can actualy afford to buy new devices that are more efficiant. especialy when it come to things like apliances and vehicles. for many a "new" one is realy about 10-20 years old. even the newwer "green" lightbulbs for example, they cost up to 5 times more, and then don't last nearly as long as the old style, or the brightness is greatly reduced. personaly i had to give up on them as they were costing way too much to constantly replace.

with cars and trucks. there is a couple of factors that have a lot of people buying "suvs", one is the fact that they tend to be viewed as safer, simply put they survive accidents better. an suv for example can end up with minor damage that does not render the vehicle undriveable in the same circumstance that a "smaller more efficiant" car gets destroyed in. my mother once had an accident in our minivan that caused a small dent and one tire should have been replaced, the car was compleatly destroyed in that collision. in the same van i hit a deer at speeds over 130kph. two doors needed work as well as the fender undented. a car in the same circumstance would have been destroyed and a good chance of severe injury or death to occupants. also just for fun take a 1970, mid-sized car and see how much force it takes to put a dent in them. a new lighter car can be dented with very little force. an suv on the otherhand still has some streagth in their pannels.

then you have the "size"factor. a suv is more usable for many tasks. you should see some of the fun that people have trying to transport objects in a newwer car. objects that easily fit into an suv. also most cars tend to have very small rear seating in them even front seats are a bit crampted. this is why minivans have sold so well. frankly they are usefull to have. when i owned my van i hade people always needing my help , because their car could not handle what they needed. we need to have decent sized efficiant vehicles that actualy have room in them. what has been going on in the last 25 or so years is "lightening" cars to use a smaller moter, this means reduceing weight by downsizeing, as well as useing thinner materials and inferior metals such as aluminum which is very easy to damage.

now lets talk about transit. frankly put here takeing transit actualy COSTS MORE than driveing my old truck. why would anyone want to spend more to put up with the inconveinance of transit? then there is the differance in travel times. just for example driveing to work takes me 1/2 hour- 45 min. takeing transit to the same place takes over 3 hours. then you have to always keep scheduals and last/ first bus times in mind. cars are just so much more conveiniant.

what needs to be done to make transit more viable? well the first thing is to majorly reduce fares. just think if it is cheaper to drive an inoficant vehicle while alone that a second person involved means that you are now paying twice as much. a third is three times as much ect. so for any family transit is MUCH more expensive then driveing. hecki once decided that driveing to my grandparrents (over 4 hours away) was going to be stuipid just because my parrents were stayin a couple of days longer. then i priced out the train ticket one way. whoops gas for a round trip was about $40, trainfair ONE WAY was about $80 guess what i drove. (and at that time i had an even more innificant engine installed than was called for, guess why? it was CHEAPER).

now we have a subway here, this make transit a bit more viable IF you ONLY have to take it. it still takes about twice as long though, but is a little more liveable. if they were to MASIVLY expand the subway then it would drasticaly cut down times though it will still take longer then driveing. also ther would need to be transit available 24/7 with decent intervals between busses. if you have tried takeing a bus at night you learn quickly that for every time you need to transfer busses you may wait half an hour at each stop. that in itself can cause my trip home from work to a nasty 4 1/2- 5 hours if i get stuck on a night shift. i mentioned 24/7, well some transit systems don't operate on sundays. even saturdays you may have masive waits at transfer points as only dureing rush hours is there realy good service times. and lets not forget that many busses don't run much after 8 or 9 at night. now how much can you take on a city bus as compared to a car? on a bus you are pretty much limmited as to what you can carry. again this is very inconveiniant as you may have to make 3 or more shopping trips (and remember that each trip will cost more than driveing ).

[edit on 5-5-2005 by drogo]