I Want More Eco-Friendly Mobility
But I can’t figure out how to kick my driving habit. Can you?
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It’s hard to stop driving a gas-powered car — even when you really want to.
Unless you live in a city, the combination of our transportation infrastructure here in the USA, along with the blind spots of the green energy transition make it unreasonably difficult to successfully transition to a greener option.
So for now, I’m waiting to pick up my 2003 Toyota Forerunner from the shop this afternoon. And I’ll have to keep driving it until I come up with a better option.
It makes me cringe to drive this inefficient, internal combustion vehicle hundreds of miles every week, especially in the blistering Texas summer.
But so far, I have failed to find a reasonable transition to something better.
I’d love to ride an e-bike, but…
It would probably get me killed on the roads where I live.
Twisting country roads with no shoulder, plenty of rocks, and big trucks zooming by?
I had a friend who tried it, and he nearly got run off the road several times in just a few months. And the flat tires 10 miles away from home? It just didn’t work.
I could go back to riding a motorcycle, but…
I have 2 young kiddos.
As much as I love the freedom of the wind on my skin, the combination of too much traffic and too little road just makes this a bad bet any way I look at it.
The badass, leather-clad, motorbike version of myself that I remember from my early 30’s before kids? She’s going to have to wait at least another 12 years to make her comeback. When my youngest will turn 18.
What about an electric vehicle? Or even a hybrid?
I really like the idea of paying less for gas by driving a car that costs me less at the pump. But thanks to the internet and a slight addiction to researching things too much, the decisions I make for the future cannot simply be all about the benefits I personally derive from them.
