Introducing Jeff the Thinker
Ok loyal readers, I would like to present my cousin and good friend Jeff. He will be a guest writer for the next couple of weeks. He is an economics student and all-around inquisitive guy, and I know you will enjoy his musings on oil, ethanol and all the good reasons to ride your bike like Dawn (and not like a crackhead).
And to put in my own two cents ....
I would like to say that after almost twelve years of barely driving, except the 1.5 that I spent in California, I lost a bit of my driving mojo, meaning I find myself extremely non-skillfull when in charge of four wheels and a potentially lethal hunk of metal. That is not altogether a bad thing, given the price of gas, and the fact that I've found myself with an excellent set of reasons to use public transportation. I would like to say a word of praise here for the northeast, because even though it is as cold as he** here and we need a lot of fuel to heat our homes, there is pretty good public transportation in and around many of our cities. I am near Boston, and I've started to park my car at the T station nearby and take the subway into town. Another cool thing I can say about Boston is that since it is a port city, a lot of towns are accessible by boat, and I have been enjoying that option, offered by the MBTA, our local transit authority. I can think of no cooler way to commute to work than in a cozy heated shuttle boat and it might be enough to make me give up my dreams of San Francisco.... Forgive me, oh shining little Western City, center of beatnik-inspired coolness and Dawn-like imaginings, I'm sure you've got cool commuter boats too!