All,
My wife is a homebody.
Deb is counting down the air travel trips for the year. She's got two down and two more to go. Me? I've been home for three weeks. Let's go somewhere, explore someplace new.
Both are vacations, so she is looking forward to them. It's just that she can't wait to get home to work down her list.
You know. The list. I'm sure you all have them. Her list never ends. Just keeps growing. Always adding to the list. Me? I am so lazy, so not useful around the home, that I don't have a list. Nothing would ever get done at home if it was left to me. I'm focused on work. And Sports. And my work at our church. That's it. I look past the laundry, dishes, repairs, burned out light bulbs and such. I admit it. I am not proud of that. It's something on which I continually need to work.
Take our recent trip to San Francisco. It was a work trip. We were scouting our upcoming event with First Element, the nation's first hydrogen truck stop. But it was also a chance to visit our son and daughter-in-law in their new home in the Noe Valley region of San Francisco. It's the first time we have visited them since their wedding last summer.
Drew and Blair have a beautiful home, right across from a schoolyard. Every day, I would step out and hear the kids yelling on the playground. Sheer joy. Loved it. Such a refreshing sound. And San Francisco, despite its growing homeless problem, is still my favorite American city. No other American city comes even close for me.
Typical scene on the streets of San Francisco's Noe Valley community
Dogs walking people at Crissy Field, San Francisco
It's so beautiful and unique. Vibrant. Alive. The Pacific Ocean meets the mountain/hills shoreline. Breathtaking views everywhere you turn.. The Golden Gate Bridge. Salita's restaurant in the harbor of Sausalito, just north of the bridge. Mill Valley. Tiburon. Walking along Embarcadero near the Ferry Building, at the foot of the Bay Bridge. Crissy Field. Everybody walks their dog because everybody in San Francisco has a dog. No yards. But a dog. Big ones too. So they jam the parks at all hours of the day. Dogs in coffee shops, restaurants. They are everywhere. Some people "wear" their dogs, you know, like an accessory. "This dog goes with my outfit."
But four days in the city was enough for Deb. She is just not a big city girl. She loves the neighborhoods, walking to coffee shops and visiting with Drew and Blair. She just gets stressed out by the parking and traffic. And she did none of the driving. I did. Maybe that says alot about the way I drive.
Your head is constantly on a swivel. You have eight lanes on the Bay Bridge that suddenly go down to four. All the locals are scrambling for position and out-of-towners like me keep creeping along in the lane I'm in because I don't know what's ahead. You have two-way traffic suddenly becoming one way roads. You are looking to make a right-hand turn, but you can't because in some stretches, every other road is one-way. This one to the right. That one to the left.
The thing that frustrates me the most are motorcycles. They have the right to go between you and the car next to you. Just when you think you can make a lane change, there is a motorcycle, suddenly appearing out of nowhere, coming from your blind spot. I'm amazed I didn't accidentally hit one of them because I didn't see them until it was too late..
Or the streetcars and buses. In some spots the left lane is dedicated to buses and streetcars. In others, the right lane is the bus lane. No rhyme or reason to me. It just seems unnatural to pass these slower-moving, bigger vehicles on the right. And will that right lane suddenly become a right turn only?. And I've said nothing of the pedestrians and bicyclists. It's pure chaos. It's like I'm on the dance floor and everybody around me knows the choreography except me. Pure chaos, I tell you.
Which brings me to parking. If you can find it. Or afford it. Most lots charge $20 to $50 a day. Some charge that much per hour. In Noe Valley, residents and guests can park for free at the street curb. And that too becomes an elaborate dance if you dare venture out during the day or evening. Will I have a spot when I come back? Do I remember how to parallel park?
At one point, I had the rear right wheel up over the curb, but too close to a tree trunk to turn the wheels right or left to get off the curb. I thought I was stuck. About 10 minutes later I was able to maneuver out of that parking spot and gave it up to someone else. I would gladly walk a couple of extra blocks than to stress about hitting someone else's car. If we were city dwellers, this would be the small price we'd gladly pay for the hustle and bustle of city life. Not everyone's cup of tea.
We flew all day Friday and got home around 2 a.m. We were jetlagged and slept in the next morning. When we finally got up, both of us grabbed a cup of coffee and headed to our favorite room in our house, the three-sided glass room that overlooks Byram Lake. We sit on a narrow, 1-acre sliver of property. Our neighbors weren't around. No one is living right on top of you or beside you. It was calming, quiet. No one in our view. Just scurrying birds and squirrels and the permanent herd of deer. Tranquility.
Deb sighed out loud. No audible words. But I knew exactly what she was saying.
She was so glad to be at home. At peace. "I missed this," she finally said.
Not a week later and Larry Burns, former VP of GM R & D, was a guest on John McElroy's Autoline AfterHours. Per usual, Larry said many provocative things. He always challenges my conventional thinking. And it reminded me of our recent trip and that moment of tranquility in our home.
Like this nugget.
"I think the transportation business has been overly occupied with urban transportation," Larry told John and journalists Gary Vasilash and Frank Markus on the Autoline talk show. "Not that it's not important, but not everybody wants to live in a city with the population densities like you see in Manhattan."
Americans identify with living in suburbs or rural settings, according to one recent survey Larry cites. More than 75 percent of us say home is in a rural setting or in a suburb (53 percent of us claim to be suburbanites). Cities are in last place at 25 percent. Why? Maybe work at home and the exorbitant cost of living make it more attractive to live in the boonies. You don't have to live in a city to work.
Urban planners have to reconsider their assumptions when it comes to transportation. "Personal transportation and goods transportation has to be looked at through the lens of rural and suburban," Larry said, "They are every bit as important as urban and I do think some of the people feel disenfranchised because of the so-called 'elitists' are writing about the things they just can't see fitting into their life when they are out in these less-densely populated areas.."
Larry has been thinking about these things since his days at UC Berkeley pursuing a PhD in the late 1970s. This came from his dissertation.
"There is a transportation piece. 'Yes. I have to move from A to B.' There is a geographical piece. 'What's at B?' and there is a scheduling piece. 'When i get at B, is it available?'"
If he were writing his dissertation today, he would add another element. "The real change is the time dimension."
In other words, do I even need to make that trip? Larry has a favorite example to illustrate. His daughters have an online, food planning business. He and his wife try to follow the recipes. One recently called for a tandoori spice, one that Larry didn't have in the pantry. Does he go to his local grocery store, take the time and cost of going three miles, parking and chance that the store doesn't carry the spice. Or, does he buy it on Amazon and get it cheaper and within the next 24 hours, delivered right to his doorstep? That's a time equation and I'm sure we all have our own versions of that story.
There are no sacred cows with Larry. What about my beautiful lake home?
"Why does our house have to be fixed to the ground?" Larry asked. "Why can't we simply have our homes truly be something like more advanced mobile homes and not have to have all of this fixed utility-based infrastructure?"
And not just utilities. Larry's also thinking about sewer and water and other "fixed-point" services on which we currently depend. The more I think about it, the more it reminds me of Star Trek and the starship Enterprise. My home could be the "Enterprise" and I could be moving through "space" exploring galaxies -- or at least terrestrial Earth.
"That's what the auto industry needs to be prepared for. I'm not talking about 2050. The enablers already exist," Larry said.
"To understand the future of the automobile, we need to understand the future of consumption and consumption is what we do in our daily lives. That's not just buying things. It's consuming experiences."
Or how about owning a big SUV to get groceries. I own a Chevy Blazer. Love it. Don't want to give it up. Larry owns a Chevy Traverse, which he and his wife use to get to their cottage on Lake Michigan. But what if society had a collective will to go smaller, lighter? To have a personal pod more fitting to what I need most times. Not much more in size and weight than a golf cart.
Larry's describing an auto pod with a top speed of 35 mph and autonomous so it doesn't have to stop at traffic lights. Traffic would be synced, coordinated.
Like this concept that he unveiled at the 2009 New York Auto Show, a concept called PUMA.
"The impediment to that is all the big vehicles on the road," Larry said. "It sounds like second-hand smoke. It sounds like a world where people used to smoke and take it for granted that I had to accept the fact they smoked.
"Maybe we can get our arms around this mass issue and speed issue, moving around in machines with radically less mass and material and top-end speed."
He takes a shot at EVs packaged in big, heavy vehicles -- some weighing 8,000 pounds and carrying 2,000-pounds in batteries to move the big object.
"All you have done is taken the lithium out of the ground and put it in a parking lot. That's not solving climate change. We've got to get off CAFE and fuel economy regs and -- no one will like this, but -- we have got to tax mass and we've got to tax top speed. I'm not saying you can't have a big, powerful vehicle, but you need to be responsible for the externality," Larry said.
The more I think about our trip to San Francisco, the more Larry's words come back to me. Instead of flying there, I could have traveled by home -- drove my home there. And, while in the city, I would have been moving about in my small little pod. Parallel parking with that would be no problem.
Better yet, it would be autonomous. So it would just park itself or even find its own parking spot! And I could go off to bed and dream about an automotive future.
And now for the rest of the news.
Scott