RIDE Solutions has registered the following new rideshare opportunities in the Roanoke and New River Valleys. To see if you are a potential match, register online and we will send you a match letter with contact information for all potential carpool partners. You can also view of map of all current carpool origins in the Carpool section of the RIDE Solutions website.
- Roanoke (24018) to Roanoke (24012), Sat 7am to 1pm.
- Within Blacksburg from 8am to 5pm.
- Pembroke to Blacksburg from 8am to 5pm.
- Fairlawn to Christiansburg from 8am to 5pm.
- Roanoke (24019) to Clifton Forge from 8:30am to 5pm.
RIDE Solutions offer free carpool matching and Guaranteed Ride Home benefits for everyone who carpools, bikes, walks, takes the bus or telecommutes to work instead of driving alone. We are a free public service of the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission and the New River Valley Planning District Commission.
By providing transportation alternatives in the Roanoke area, RIDE Solutions improves regional air quality, reduces traffic congestion, and helps create a sustainable transportation infrastructure.
Want instant updates? Follow us on Twitter or become a Facebook fan.
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Tags: Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Clifton Forge, fairlawn, roanoke
RIDE Solutions has registered the following new rideshare opportunities in the Roanoke and New River Valleys. To see if you are a potential match, register online and we will send you a match letter with contact information for all potential carpool partners. You can also view of map of all current carpool origins in the Carpool section of the RIDE Solutions website.
- Roanoke (24018) to Roanoke (24012) from 8am to 4pm.
- Roanoke (24016) to Roanoke (24012) with variable sched.
- Roanoke (24105) to Roanoke (24019) from 8am to 4pm.
- Wytheville to Radford from 3pm to 11pm.
- Radford to Roanoke (24019) from 9am to 5pm.
- Within Blacksburg from 9am to 5pm.
RIDE Solutions offer free carpool matching and Guaranteed Ride Home benefits for everyone who carpools, bikes, walks, takes the bus or telecommutes to work instead of driving alone. We are a free public service of the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission and the New River Valley Planning District Commission.
By providing transportation alternatives in the Roanoke area, RIDE Solutions improves regional air quality, reduces traffic congestion, and helps create a sustainable transportation infrastructure.
Want instant updates? Follow us on Twitter or become a Facebook fan.
Filed under: Carpool Opportunities | Leave a Comment
Tags: Blacksburg, Radford, roanoke, wytheville
RIDE Solutions has registered the following new rideshare opportunities in the Roanoke and New River Valleys. To see if you are a potential match, register online and we will send you a match letter with contact information for all potential carpool partners. You can also view of map of all current carpool origins in the Carpool section of the RIDE Solutions website.
- Blacksburg to Christiansburg from 8am to 4:30pm.
- Christiansburg to Blacksburg from 6am to 2:30pm.
RIDE Solutions offer free carpool matching and Guaranteed Ride Home benefits for everyone who carpools, bikes, walks, takes the bus or telecommutes to work instead of driving alone. We are a free public service of the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission and the New River Valley Planning District Commission.
By providing transportation alternatives in the Roanoke area, RIDE Solutions improves regional air quality, reduces traffic congestion, and helps create a sustainable transportation infrastructure.
Want instant updates? Follow us on Twitter or become a Facebook fan.
Filed under: Carpool Opportunities | Leave a Comment
Tags: Blacksburg, Christiansburg
Reading Material
Just to spend a moment to cross-promote: If you want a little reading material on the bus in the morning (particularly if you’re riding one of the beautiful new Smart Way buses), or if your carpool partner doesn’t mind you catching up on a chapter on the commute home, why not join The Big Read Roanoke Valley in reading A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines? And in case reading this blog isn’t enough, you can catch my occasional forays into literary criticism on the Big Read’s very own blog.
Book suggestions aside, I think the “saving time” part of transportation choice is often overlooked, or too narrowly defined as “getting there faster.” Sure, getting cars off the road does increase the efficiency of the transportation network by reducing congestion and travel times, though the impact of that benefit in the Roanoke region is minimal, since we really don’t have that much congestion. However, saving time in the sense of spending your time doing something more productive with it shouldn’t be discounted. Reading time, for example: a 20 minute commute on the bus is 40 minutes a day you could be reading a book, or business magazine, or studying from a textbook, or listening to an audiobook. Whatever you’re doing, you’re not driving, which frees up your attention for other things.
One of my favorite things to do is take the bus on shopping trips with my daughter; not because it’s quicker, because it’s not, but because the time spent waiting for the bus and actually riding with her is time we get to spend together without me worrying about paying attention to the road, and without her strapped into her car seat. I may spend a little bit more time getting where I’m going, but I’m doing something much more valuable with that time.
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Tags: big read, bus, commute, quality time, reading, shopping, transit
RIDE Solutions has registered the following new rideshare opportunities in the Roanoke and New River Valleys. To see if you are a potential match, register online and we will send you a match letter with contact information for all potential carpool partners. You can also view of map of all current carpool origins in the Carpool section of the RIDE Solutions website.
- Princeton, WV to Blacksburg from 7:30am to 4:30pm.
- Newport to Radford from 7:45am to 8:30pm.
RIDE Solutions offer free carpool matching and Guaranteed Ride Home benefits for everyone who carpools, bikes, walks, takes the bus or telecommutes to work instead of driving alone. We are a free public service of the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission and the New River Valley Planning District Commission.
By providing transportation alternatives in the Roanoke area, RIDE Solutions improves regional air quality, reduces traffic congestion, and helps create a sustainable transportation infrastructure.
Want instant updates? Follow us on Twitter or become a Facebook fan.
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Tags: Blacksburg, carpool, newport, princeton, Radford
You’re Not the Boss of Me
As one might imagine, I get into discussions of public funding for alternative transportation infrastructure quite a bit – online and offline, though the online conversations tend to be some of the most frustrating (and perversely amusing). As the debate moves back and forth and I make my case for funneling dollars towards bike lanes, transit service, park-and-rides, or whatnot, I am amazed at how often and how quickly the opposing argument boils down to, “Well, you just want to control my life.”
Take, for example, a recent thread on Facebook, where River Laker (Roanoke’s Car Less Brit) shared this Roanoke Times article about a VDOT plan, currently unfunded, to spend $20 million adding travel and turning lanes to the Elm Avenue Bridge, Roanoke’s hotspot for congestion (as modest as that congestion is). A few folks, myself included, commented that $20 million to alleviate congestion for a small number of drivers during rush hour on one tiny span of road might not be the wisest use of money, particularly when the same $20 million could complete the entire span of unfinished Greenway between Green Hill Park and Explore Park. Yes, I understand that, in reality, government spending doesn’t work that way – the money is broken up into pots and can’t be transferred from project to project, but it’s the principle that’s the point here.
A proponent of VDOT’s plan (we’ll call him K.B.) stepped in to argue against the cyclists and others who were criticizing the proposal, and after engaging him in discussion it took only 7 posts before K.B. shot back, “What you’re really trying to do is force your way of life on me, admit it.”
This response amazes me on several levels. First, it’s just a dumb argument (I’d like to be more diplomatic than that, but I just can’t): not funding a road improvement does not equate to denying someone the ability to keep driving as they always have. At worst, it reinforces the consequences of their choice – choose drive alone everyday, deal with the traffic. To be fair, the same can be applied to cyclists and bus riders – choose to ride a bicycle, accept that the trip is going to be more dangerous. Not providing additional service does not equal taking away service.
Second, I don’t get how providing a bike lane for someone else to use forces the driver to change his behavior. Now, TDM professionals like myself would love if this were actually true – if putting down a bike lane forced drivers to switch to bicycles (or to adding buses forced them to ride, or HOV lanes to carpool), then our jobs would be much easier. We’d all be engineers instead of marketers. Of course, that’s not how it works: building out accommodations serves as one piece of a complex puzzle of infrastructure improvements, incentives, market pressures, and education to get people to use them. Almost always, though, there is a built in audience – maybe small, maybe large – who would use the accommodation with little to no prodding.
More important is this: TDM is about transportation choice – that is, we’re not against cars or driving alone, but we’re for using the right mode for the right trip and educating commuters about the benefits of doing so (significant dollar savings, environmental benefits, health benefits, and so forth). In fact, surveys in Virginia have shown that commuters who choose to drive alone each day, or do so out of necessity, appreciate other commuters having the option to bike, walk, take the train or bus, etc., as it gets those cars off the road and allows the single-occupant-vehicle drivers to move along more efficiently. Giving people the widest variety of choice helps the entire system move more efficiently.
In terms of where public money is spent, we take a view of investment equity; that is, public money should be spent in a way that benefits all users of all modes in some respect. The idea that that spending money on bike lanes, greenways, and other accommodations now is a waste of tax dollars is a bit ridiculous given the number of cul-de-sacs, limited-access-highways and, yes, congestion mitigation projects that have been built over the last several generations. If the measure of success is the number of people who use it, is a cul-de-sac really that much better of an investment? Given the lopsided way we’ve spent transportation money the last few decades, we have a lot of catching up to do to reach some level of equity.
But let’s accept for a moment, just for the fun of it, this “you’re controlling my life” argument has some validity to it. How, precisely, is the reverse not therefore true? If adding a bike lane is controlling his life, isn’t adding additional driving lanes controlling mine? So, even accepting that it’s got weight behind it the argument is pretty silly – the two cancel each other out, and we’re back to debating which is the better way to spend public money.
I’m not sure what causes drivers to retreat to this point – are they threatened? Is it guilt? Maybe they think they should be riding that bike to the store, but have rationalized not being able to do so because of the lack of a bike lane? Whatever the case, it’s an unfortunate position that shuts down the important conversation we should be having about public investment in transportation infrastructure.
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Tags: bicycle, Car Less Brit, congestion, elm avenue, greenway, taxes
RIDE Solutions has registered the following new rideshare opportunities in the Roanoke and New River Valleys. To see if you are a potential match, register online and we will send you a match letter with contact information for all potential carpool partners. You can also view of map of all current carpool origins in the Carpool section of the RIDE Solutions website.
- Boones Mill to Roanoke (24018) from 11am to 9pm.
RIDE Solutions offer free carpool matching and Guaranteed Ride Home benefits for everyone who carpools, bikes, walks, takes the bus or telecommutes to work instead of driving alone. We are a free public service of the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission and the New River Valley Planning District Commission.
By providing transportation alternatives in the Roanoke area, RIDE Solutions improves regional air quality, reduces traffic congestion, and helps create a sustainable transportation infrastructure.
Want instant updates? Follow us on Twitter or become a Facebook fan.
Filed under: Carpool Opportunities | Leave a Comment
Tags: boones mill, roanoke
U2’s Bono jumped on the New Year bandwagon, using his op-ed space in the New York Times to pen a Top 10 list of sorts. It covers the kinds of topics you might expect from Bono – Africa, intellectual property rights, and so forth. However, for a list that purports to look “forward, not backward,” Bono starts off with a strange and regressive idea: “Return of the Automobile as a Sexual Object.”
After some innuendo and Freudian word-play, Bono gets to the point: Cars are ugly, he says, and goes on to suggest that car companies employ artists and designers to make them beautiful, to resexualize the automobile and make them objects of desire and envy.
I don’t understand this at all.
First of all, it’s not that automakers have stopped considering design elements when producing vehicles, it’s just that the focus has changed from beauty to intimidation. SUVs in particular, with their towering height, maw-like grills, and muscular bulk, are clearly designed not only to make the driver feel safe (feel being the operative word here; SUVs, with their high center-of-gravity, are more prone to rollovers and are more likely to kill their passengers than an average car) but powerful and aggressive. Yes, this is one part of the automobile market – other lines like the Prius and Volkswagen have succeeded in clever, effective designing concentrating on coolness and quirkiness. The point is that design is alive and well in auto development, it’s just that the market has changed in what it want to feel when we’re sitting in the driver’s seat.
I suppose this would be much better if they were all Aston Martins
More importantly, though, Bono’s creepy festishization of the automobile is part of the core psychological problem that has led to the country’s transportation, energy, and urban design mess. Despite the problems we’re currently suffering from too many people being in love with their automobiles – air pollution, suburban sprawl, skyrocketing gas prices and the outsourcing of our energy development to hostile foreign powers – Bono suggests that, in the coming decade, we need to love our cars more, we need to make them prettier, we need to want to spend more time in them and invest more money in them (yes, more money; the one example he gives of a beautiful car is an Aston Martin, not a Prius, so he’s thinking high-end art here – Pollock, not Kinkade). Even qualifying, as he does, that “the greener, the cleaner, the meaner on fossil fuels,” the more he’s aroused, he misses the point that gas mileage is only one small component of a vehicle’s energy and environmental impact. Even a fleet of zero-emission electric Aston Martins need someplace to park and roads to drive on They still get into car accidents, and require expensive maintenance and production.
Automobiles – which, really, are simply one of a number of tools that helps you get from Point A to Point B, the set of which includes thinks like your own two feet – are hardly lacking in obsessive attention. Bono’s strange assertion that we should reverse the admittedly small gains we’ve made in separating ourselves from our dysfunctional love affairs with our cars is exactly the wrong way to go. The last thing we need are deeper ties between our cars and our reptile brains.
Bono would have been better off, if he insists on his bizarre fetishization, to emphasize beautiful and “sexy” urban spaces. If the idea is to sexualize something so that people want to spend more time with it, why not emphasize our cities and downtowns? Why not take the artists and designers he wants to work with automakers and instead put them on city planning commissions and in city engineering departments? In essence, concentrate design and beauty on where and how we live, not on the tools we use to go to the grocery store.
Filed under: RIDE Solutions | 4 Comments
Tags: automobile, beauty, SUV, urban design
RIDE Solutions has registered the following new rideshare opportunities in the Roanoke and New River Valleys. To see if you are a potential match, register online and we will send you a match letter with contact information for all potential carpool partners. You can also view of map of all current carpool origins in the Carpool section of the RIDE Solutions website.
- Blue Ridge to Downtown Roanoke from 7am to 3:30pm.
- Salem to Roanoke (24014) from 7am to 5:30pm.
- Roanoke (24017) to Roanoke (24015) from 8:30am to 3pm.
- Roanoke (24108) to Salem (24153) from 10am to 6:30pm.
RIDE Solutions offer free carpool matching and Guaranteed Ride Home benefits for everyone who carpools, bikes, walks, takes the bus or telecommutes to work instead of driving alone. We are a free public service of the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission and the New River Valley Planning District Commission.
By providing transportation alternatives in the Roanoke area, RIDE Solutions improves regional air quality, reduces traffic congestion, and helps create a sustainable transportation infrastructure.
Want instant updates? Follow us on Twitter or become a Facebook fan.
Filed under: Carpool Opportunities | Leave a Comment
Tags: blue ridge, downtown roanoke, salem
RIDE Solutions has registered the following new rideshare opportunities in the Roanoke and New River Valleys. To see if you are a potential match, register online and we will send you a match letter with contact information for all potential carpool partners. You can also view of map of all current carpool origins in the Carpool section of the RIDE Solutions website.
- Blacksburg to Hollins from 7:45am to 4:45pm.
RIDE Solutions offer free carpool matching and Guaranteed Ride Home benefits for everyone who carpools, bikes, walks, takes the bus or telecommutes to work instead of driving alone. We are a free public service of the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission and the New River Valley Planning District Commission.
By providing transportation alternatives in the Roanoke area, RIDE Solutions improves regional air quality, reduces traffic congestion, and helps create a sustainable transportation infrastructure.
Want instant updates? Follow us on Twitter or become a Facebook fan.
Filed under: Carpool Opportunities | Leave a Comment
Tags: Blacksburg, Hollins
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Register for a carpool partner, or sign up for Guaranteed Ride Home if you already carpool, bike, walk or take transit to work.
