Sometimes Ideals are Just Ideas

Time for a little moaning and groaning today. As I read stories about others and how they have been able to get rid of their cars, live more environmentally friendly, etc. it becomes inspiring and really gets me thinking about what I can do. I commute to work by bicycle most days. We still own 2 motor vehicles, though. Last weekend we (me, my wife and 2 kids) decided to go to a little holiday street festival in a nearby town. I thought this would be a great opportunity to take our friendly neighborhood trolley. It is a great system, except it rarely goes where you need to go. Luckily, it takes us right to the holiday fair. However, it is about 2 miles from our house to the nearest station. Unfortunately this means driving our car to the station. OK, it is still better that driving the nearly 10 miles to the fair and looking for parking. We get to the station and my wife and I each pay our $4.50 for fare. That’s 9 bucks for us to travel less than 20 miles round trip. This is minus the kids, since kids ride free on weekends. Again, I know that public transit is better overall for the environment and traffic congestion, but 9 bucks for a simple trolley ride? We could drive nearly 100 miles in our car for that! Now I guess if we had to pay for parking that would make up for it somewhat, but I think in this situation we could have found free parking without much trouble. The other thing is time. This 10 mile trip took at least a half hour. By car would have been about 10 to 15 minutes. Coming home was worse, as we had to transfer once and the wait was about 20 minutes. It was probably about 45 minutes to return. Plus, we are waiting out there at night, there are a few teenagers messing around, and my wife is obviously getting very nervous about the whole thing. We had no incident and made it home OK, but I know this has turned her off from the whole “take the kids out on public transit” thing.

OK, the following morning I plan to take the kids in our bike trailer down to the grocery store a few blocks away to pick up bagels for breakfast. They get ready and I get them all buckled in the trailer. They are OK at first, but then start bickering at each other. By the time we get ready to return home my daughter does not even want to ride with her brother. She says she does not want to ride in the trailer with him anymore. Well, there is another one of my bright ideas shot down in flames. Maybe by next time they will have forgotten about the bickering and enjoy the ride.

I try to do the right thing, and the ideas sound really good in my head. Putting them into play seems to be quite a challenge sometimes, though. It looks like we still have a long way to go.