Have you heard of Playing For Change? Their goal is bring peace to the world through music. Below is one example of the powerful message they are sending out by uniting artist all over the world to create a cohesive whole from many distinct parts.
As you watch one of the videos, you can see and hear each individual’s contribution to the song. It is very interesting to listen to how the musicians play off of each other even though they are entire continents away.
We all need to unite to solve many of the problems facing us today. I hope you enjoy this video as much as I did and find encouragement in the message.
One Love, One Heart
Let’s get together and feel all right
Hear the children crying (One Love)
Hear the children crying (One Heart)
Sayin’ give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right
Sayin’ let’s get together and feel all right
They currently have over 500 members and a waiting list of commuters who want to be able to park their bikes. The facility makes it very easy to:
Ride to the garage
Park your bike in a double-tier rack
Shower
Use locker rooms to dress
Go to work
The bike parking garage cost just over $3 million to build and is proving to be extremely popular. The roof features solar panels that power the building. There is also a bike repair shop on site to provide a tune-up while you are at work or emergency repair by their staff mechanics.
Commuters share the facility with the 400 plus members of the lakefront police bike patrol. This is great base for the police and really provides an extra level of security for bike riders. The facility also has bikes for rent and guided tours of different parts of the city.
I hope the success of this operation provides inspiration for other cities. This addresses many of the major concerns of bike commuters including parking, locker room access and security. Maybe this will become a growing trend and provide commuters everywhere with a very workable option for bike commuting.
These seem to be the leaders in this emerging market, but I am sure there are many others. I applaud each of their efforts to increase ride sharing by building online communities. Take a look at one or more of the sites to see the many benefits of carpooling and how they address our fear of strangers.
So what is missing? Convenience.
While they each help facilitate ride sharing, there is a lot of planning involved. Most of the shared trips are either normal daily carpools to work or one time trips to another city. I think as these communities grow, we can move toward more on-demand ride sharing.
My dream is that we could harness much of the unused capacity of passenger vehicles on the road today. If more people continue to get involved in ride sharing, then there will be more available rides and passengers to fill them. I know it will take time, but online ride sharing communities are a big step in the right direction.
Is it possible that we are actually changing our driving habits? In a recent Esquire story, Nate Silver makes a convincing argument for “The End of Car Culture”. A bad economy and high gas prices are not the only factors fueling this change.
According to the Federal Highway Administration, Americans have driven less for 15 consecutive months. Now, I can understand the decline in driving when gas prices spiked last summer, but the trend has continued even after the gas prices fell. This is a dramatic adjustment from our past behavior.
The bad economy and high unemployment can also be credited with a decline in driving, but there seems to be more at work here. We seem to be trying to wean ourselves from our car dependency. For further evidence, just look at the decline in auto sales over the last 18 months.
One other trend to follow is housing prices. In the last 4 years, cities equipped with superior alternate modes of transportation have seen large gains in the price of housing while cities that are highly dependant on cars have seen sharp declines.
I have been reading a book by Chris Balish entitled “How To Live Well Without Owning A Car”. Click on this link to read the book through Google books. It is a good read and he raises some excellent points:
Save money, breathe easier, and get more mileage out of life.
You may be surprised at the actual monthly cost of owning a car and how much you could save without one. Maybe you are a multiple car family and could get by with one less car?
Well, I hope this trend continues. Reducing the miles driven has so many positive effects on our daily lives. Are you driving less than a year ago? Do you have plans to reduce your driving in the coming months? I hope so, let me know.
Earth Day was started almost 40 years ago as a wake up call to our environmental problems. There is an interesting story on Newsweek entitled “Every Day is Earth Day?” that argues it is time to give up the one-day-a-year celebration:
The first Earth Day was like the sounding of a bullhorn for the people to unite and get moving, which worked. But this year, 39 years later, the original intent has long eroded. The one-day demonstration that started a movement lost most of its luster decades ago. Yet we still have it—and that has alarming implications for our environmental progress. What was originally intended as a sounding alarm has been reproduced each year in the exact same way. The problem is, it’s hard to be motivated by a screeching alarm when you’ve been hitting the snooze button for the last four decades.
The last line of this quote makes me crazy; we’ve been hitting the snooze button since 1970! When will we wake up to the reality that we can not continue to consume the earth resources like we are at an all you can eat buffet?
I agree that people need to make this a priority every day, not just a once a year celebration. We also observed Earth Hour last month to increase awareness of our energy consumption. One day, one hour is just not enough. We all need to do our part each and every day before it is too late.
I missed posting this week’s song over the weekend, so I am putting one up tonight. My blogging during the whole month of March was seriously lacking. I have been swamped with work and struggling to find the time to write here. It is not for lack of inspiration, just lack of energy right now, which seems kind of ironic. Anyway, I will try to do a better job this month and catch up on the backlog of posts that I have accumulated.
My good friend Scott runs a live music venue in Asbury Park called The Saint. So last night he booked a band from Ireland, Guggenheim Grotto. I have heard a few of their songs on the radio, watched a couple of videos on YouTube and like their sound. Well they greatly exceeded my expectations with a brilliant live performance.
You see, I typically work on this blog at night, once my kids go to sleep. It can take me a few hours to catch up on my news feeds and find a story that I want to write about. Next thing I know it is after one in the morning and I need to sleep or I will never get up in the morning. So the line in the chorus of this song, “I just can’t seem to get out of bed anymore”, seems very appropriate.
Well, I hope you enjoy this video by my favorite new band. I picked up their cd at the show last night and it has been on heavy rotation all day. Thanks again Scott for bringing great original music to the Jersey shore.
she used to say about love,
that it should come from above
and it should come from below
she used to say my love
wear the lips of a saint
and the hips of a whore
and when we’d walk along the street she’d say
if it rains now, I hope to God it pours
and with her beautiful ideas,
she’d cut me in half, clean this broad sword.
and now I~
I just cant seem to get out of bed anymore..
yeah and now my~
my heart hangs worn and weak like an old wire door
and now I~
I just cant seem to get out of bed anymore~
This is a long clip (12 minutes) from Live Aid and it is a little spotty during a few points, but a very powerful performance. To continue the celebration of Earth Hour I wanted to feature a song that shows the spirit of people coming together. If you watch the clip, let me know what you think.
To let it go! And so to fade away
To let it go! And so to fade away
I’m wide awake
I’m wide awake
Wide awake
I’m not sleeping, oh no, no, no
I saw the image below on Treehugger today and thought they made an excellent point for the power of an image. We can talk and talk about the differences between transportation types, but these pictures clearly illustrate the advantages.
In the comments, a few readers have made a good case for a fourth image to represent walking, which I agree, is a very valid position. Wouldn’t that be nice, a clear street with just people?
Obviously, I would argue the first picture would look much different with Passenger Energy. If each car carried 3 passengers with a driver instead of the typical single occupancy vehicle, then we could remove 75% of the cars.
The story goes on to mention an article that the author, Michael Graham Richard, wrote 4 years ago. The story titled: Have You Reduced Your Dependence on Cars? is a very good read, again with some great comments.
We all need to make a concerted effort to move away from cars as our primary source of transportation. Car pooling, mass transit, biking and yes, even walking are wonderful alternatives. You don’t have to sell your car, just use it less.
photo credit: Press-Office City of Müenster, Germany
My wife’s car was in for repair’s this week, so we were down to just one car. On Tuesday, we both needed to go to the office, so I made arrangements with my neighbor John for a ride in the morning to my parent’s house. He works in the same town where I use to live and from there I could borrow my Mom’s car for the rest of the day.
Well, it could not have gone better. John picked me up at 6:30 in the morning, in a nice warm car on a cold morning. We had a great conversation during the ride and the 45 minute trip passed very quickly. It was too bad I could not pick up another ride for the second half of my trip or found a ride for my trip back home.
Now, I did not pay John for the ride, but I gladly would have. He didn’t mind giving me a ride since he was just making his normal every day commute anyway. So it did not cost him anything and he enjoyed having the company.
While we were driving north on Route 9, we could see that the majority of the cars were single passenger vehicles. All this unused capacity is just going to waste. I think the bulk of our daily trips are on major highways and we would need to provide our own transportation for the first and last 10% of the commute. Imagine driving your car to a commuter lot where you could get a ride or pick up some paying passengers. If you then were dropped off near your work place, could you text a coworker for a ride the rest of the way? What if you sent out a tweet?
Well since I picked one of my son’s favorite bands last week, he is back this week with another selection. He recently downloaded this song from iTunes and it is now on heavy rotation on his iPod.
This song seems like a good fit considering there is so much fear and uncertainty going around right now. The passage of the new stimulus package earlier this week brings with it much hope for an economic recovery. We’ll look back in a few years to judge the wisdom of this decision.
I’m waking up at the start of the end of the world,
But its feeling just like every other morning before,
Now I wonder what my life is going to mean if it’s gone.
The cars are moving like a half a mile an hour and I,
Started staring at the passengers waving goodbye,
Can you tell me what was ever really special about me all this time?
But I believe the world is burning to the ground,
Oh well I guess we’re gonna find out,
Let’s see how far we’ve come
Let’s see how far we’ve come
Well I, believe, it all, is coming to an end
Oh well, I guess, we’re gonna pretend,
Let’s see how far we’ve come
Let’s see how far we’ve come
