Yield To Fun Video

Here is our first Yield To Fun ride in Morristown. Folks in cars and on the street did not know quite what to make of it all. We did manage to get one woman to consider riding her bike the seven miles to her job. One small victory-One less car on the road. Sweet.

Yield To Fun!

It's the simplest thing to do! Yield to fun. If you have a bike ride it. Enjoy yourself. Save some cash, improve your health, ease traffic congestion, save the planet. When you are not on your bike and driving in your car and you see someone else on their bike, slow down a little and pass them carefully. Give other riders some space. You know, yield to someone else having fun! And for goodness sake, when you hear a non-biking person rattling on about what a pain in the ass cyclists are, ask them to think about some things. Like, they are surrounded by a ton of steel and can very easily kill someone on a bike if they are careless. Remind them that a person on a bicycle is not really slowing them down that much, certainly no more than all of the other traffic congestion slowdowns they will encounter. Remind them that a person on a bike means one less car on the road and that improves their own life. How? Less congestion and less carbon dioxide in the air. Hopefully the non-biking public will remember that the planet is currently choking to death on CO2 and that we will all need to do things to change the course we are currently on. Maybe they will get it, maybe they won't. But we have to try. If you want to learn more about global warming and traffic congestion, look in the links bar for Environmental Defense and Commuters choice. Use your bike to make the world a better place and just yield to fun!

Global Warming Blah, Blah, Blah

So my brother and I were just sitting around talking about the global warming thing. There are lots of scary things being written, broadcast, talked about and on and on. One particular story I recently saw says that British researchers have surmised that the ice caps are melting faster than first thought. It could be that global warming is going to be a bigger problem for us sooner than we thought. The thing that is irritating me is that politicians and big business interests are standing in the way of anything being done quickly enough to avert the coming disaster. Make no mistake, just about everyone agrees the global warming thing is really happening. The thing everyone is disagreeing on is what the real impact and consequences are going to be and how to avert them. The numbers being thrown around about reducing co2 emissions 20% by 2050 seems to me like it will be too little too late. I think we could do it sooner if people would get a little creative and quit being so lazy and selfish. I mean honestly, does anyone really need to be burning gas at unprecedented levels driving energy guzzling vehicles like the Hummer? Yeah I know, "this is America pal, we can do anything we want if we can afford it". But just because you can afford it doesn't mean it is a good idea!
Okay, so lots of people can't use a bicycle to get to their job, or to the store, or whatever, but there are plenty of people who can! Here are some facts I picked up doing a little research:
The average American car owner currently burns 600 gallons of gas per year. The burning of the gas creates 12,000 pounds of Co2! There are about 232 million cars currently registered. Let's see, that's 2 trillion, 784 billion, pounds of Co2. That's a lot! Come on people, we need to do something about this. If we wait for political leadership on this your grandchildren will be buying beach front property in Pennsylvania and wondering how they are going to get food!
By the way, did you know that while the US makes up only 5% of the worlds population, we create 43% of the emissions?
While there will undoubtedly be technological solutions being created along the way, we are going to run out of time before they can get the job done. One of the answers currently available to us is to simply using less fossil fuel now. Right this minute. Don't wait for someone else to do it. You do it. Stop relying on your car and start thinking of your bicycle as more than just a recreational toy. If we could all learn to reduce our fuel consumption by 20% that would go a long way towards solving the problem. Imagine it. Regular Americans taking things in to their own hands and solving the problem in spite of the corporate pirates who are willing to mortgage the future of our planet for profits this quarter.