Author Archives: Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition

Water of Truth

Great article on promoting tap water instead of bottled water in Italy.

I find the continued prevalence of bottled water unbelievable.  For many parts of the world, especially the U.S., the idea that water in a bottle is better than water from the tap is one of the biggest scams that millions of people bought into and it continues unabated.

Green rule: keep a reusable bottle or cup with you at all times (stash one at work, one in your car, one you can grab on the way out of the house, you get the idea) and take advantage of the lovely, free, potable water flowing from the tap.

Not one of the seven deadly sins

But still.  Idleness, or more to the point, idling one’s vehicle, ranks right up there.  If your car is stopped, and will remain that way for more than 30 seconds, you will save money and increase your green cred by turning it off.  It is either a myth, or only true for much older cars, that it takes more gas to restart the car than to leave it running.  30 seconds is not very long, so once you get in the anti-idling habit, you will be turning your car off when you’re parked and waiting for the person you’re picking up to respond to your classy honking or when you and yours are both in the car, about to pull away from the curb, and you realize that somebody forgot the directions and without them you’re going nowhere fast.

You should not turn your car off if you are stopped in traffic, say, at a red light because the following might happen.  Light turns green.  You reach out to turn the key in the ignition.  But it WON’T TURN.  And you have a green turn arrow and there are 10 cars behind you, drivers getting impatient and starting to use colorful language.  And you start to panic because “Why won’t the key turn?  Why can’t I start it?”  And now someone is honking at you.  And then your husband helpfully points out that the car must be in Park in order to start, and you left it in Drive.  So you slam the car into Park, start it, put it back in Drive, and manage to get things together just in time to make it through the intersection before the light turns red, stranding all of the other cars that could have made it through the light if you had not turned off your car.  Not that I’m speaking from personal experience or anything, but you never know, I’m sure this has happened to someone, somewhere.

Idling is one of my pet peeves, and I go to great lengths (see above) to avoid it when I am at the wheel.  When I witness other vehicles idling, my blood pressure immediately shoots up, especially if it is something that spews really nasty stuff from its tailpipe, like a school bus.  Fortunately, some cities and states (including my city) are adopting anti-idling laws as part of clean air measures.  This means that I have the law on my side when I go up, knock on their window, and politely ask them to please turn their vehicle off.  Yes, this is really something that I do, and it is much more constructive, and sometimes rewarding, than saying nothing and waiting for my blood to boil out of my ears.

Ode to Incompetence

Sometimes my creative genius emerges while I’m riding my bike, as happened a few days ago when I composed this in my head:

[To be recited in a sing-song voice.]

Erosion, erosion, erosion.
That is what you get
When you are an idiot
And you build things like shit.
¡Olé!

I dedicate this piece of work to the brilliant minds who planned and engineered the new pedestrian and bicyclist underpass in my city in such a way to guarantee that an entire 6-foot long portion of the path on one side of the underpass will be a giant mud puddle any time that it rains.  These geniuses also failed to include any ACTUAL USERS of the underpass (i.e., pedestrians and bicyclists) in the planning process.

Bad Bikerz

The subject of bikers and traffic laws resurfaced recently  on an on-line neighborhood group to which I belong.  It was part of a larger discussion on how we can redesign streets to accommodate all users (pedestrians, bikers, and drivers), and the complaint against bikers was failure to obey stop signs.

I am absolutely one of those bikers.  I feel it is best to come clean with my lawless ways, as they may inform future posts.  And while I acknowledge that I am in fact breaking the law, I consider it quite justified, and, as my biker husband pointed out, our exercise in civil disobedience (ha, no pun intended).

Stop signs, like most other traffic control devices and traffic laws, are intended to control automobiles, which can move fast and cause a lot of damage due to their size.  Stop signs are typically found in residential and business areas, where speed limits are 20-25 MPH, and they function to slow cars down.  Most recreational and commuter bikers, on the other hand, would maybe reach 25 MPH on a good downhill with a tailwind.  At average bike speeds of, say 10-15 MPH, there is a lot more reaction time and no need to come to a stop EVERY BLOCK to keep speed under control, since we are not exceeding the speed limit in the first place.

My stop sign flouting is not done without caution.  This is another area where bikes are very different from cars.  On my bike, I am higher up and farther forward in relation to the intersection as compared to a car driver.  Combine that with the fact that my hearing is not obscured by a layer of metal and glass (plus whatever other noise distractions are present inside a car), and I have a better sense of what’s going on when I approach an intersection than most drivers.  If it’s an empty 4-way stop, or an empty 2-way that I can see clearly, I’m gone.

Stop signs are also much less of a disadvantage to automobiles, which are designed to accelerate quickly with a little tap on the gas pedal.  On the other hand, every time I have to come to a stop, I lose whatever momentum I had worked to build, and I lack that handy little gas pedal to get me back up to speed.  Although I have never timed it the slow way, I think my 5.5 mile commute, which I do in about 35 minutes, could easily take twice as long if I stopped at all of the stop signs (about 25 of them) and stop lights (that take a ridiculously long time to change, even when there is a huge break in traffic)  on the way to work.  Stopping at the stop signs does not cost cars anywhere near that amount of time.

Whatcha gonna do?