Sunday, June 22, 2008
News, In this Issue...

Getting there

If you’re tired of high gas prices, you can always stop driving a car

Gwinnett County Transit

What’s next?

With oil prices so high, it’s nice to know America has some hard-working microbes.

It used to be that you only saw the words “oil” and “microbes” together in stories about giant oil spills where microbes were used to “eat” the oil. But a 50-person San Francisco-based start-up called LS9 is putting microbes to the opposite use: Theirs are excreting a chemical structurally identical to diesel fuel. How identical?

“You do not need a converter to put it in a car that runs on diesel,” says LS9 spokesman Tim Gnatek. “That’s the cool thing about it. It’s essentially a petroleum product.”

The genetically engineered microbes eat non-food plant material like wood chips or switch grass (Georgia has plenty of both) inside an anaerobic fermenter—a big air-tight container—and then excrete a substance that is diesel’s identical twin.

In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Paper, Bob Walsh, LS9’s president, says that he expects his company to be able to produce 5 million gallons of the microbial oil by the end of 2010.

“By 2012 we would be producing 100 million gallons,” he says.

That amount could be greatly increased with more investment. Right now LS9 has only one plant. The good news is, unlike ethanol, LS9’s product can be moved through a pipeline so it doesn’t have to stay where it’s produced. Walsh spent 26 years at Royal Dutch Shell, where he managed Shell Europe Oil Products and oversaw how those products were moved around Europe. He says although genetically tweaking the microbes to produce other kinds of fuels is a possibility, for the foreseeable future he plans to stick with diesel. Its market is well defined, and it’s always in demand among large fleets of corporate vehicles.

The quest for ways to bring alternative fuels to the market in a practical manner is fiercely competitive, and progress is being made. In the meantime, people are still urged to do everything they can to become less dependent on fossil fuels.

“There is no magic bullet,” says Walsh.

By Stephanie Ramage

As it turns out, Americans are not the unbending creatures of habit that we sometimes believe ourselves to be. We can change our habits, and prompted by rising gasoline costs, we’ve apparently done exactly that—at least enough to make a dent in our motor fuel use. 

According to the Energy Information Administration, Americans have reduced their use of automobile fuel by 2.3 percent since this time last year. The administration’s data tables show that finished motor gasoline product consumption for the second week of June fell from an average of 9.5 million barrels per day in 2007 to just under 9.3 million barrels per day for the same week this year. The International Energy Agency has predicted U.S. oil demand will shrink as much as 2.5 percent in 2008.

Even Atlantans, known automaniacs, have adopted new methods for avoiding the pumps. Here are the six most popular that we’ve found.

1. Spin it

Mary Ann Schneider doesn’t even know what it’s like to anxiously watch the gas meter’s needle dip toward empty in the middle of the morning commute. She’s been riding a bike to work for 17 years. She rode her bike when she lived in Washington, D.C., and when she lived in New York City. So when she and her husband moved to Decatur, she didn’t plan to change her mode of transportation.

“When we were looking at houses,” says Schneider, “the length of the ride to work was a major factor in deciding which to buy.”

She’s logged about 69,000 miles on her modest Raleigh 10-speed, and based on an average price of $1.50 per gallon, she’s saved approximately $44,000 in fuel costs during that time.

Monday through Friday she pedals from Decatur to her job at Smith Moore LLP near the intersection of Peachtree and 14th Streets, sometimes riding with her youngest tucked behind her as far as his school in Decatur before maneuvering into the car-heavy commute on North Decatur Road—which, she says, is the toughest part of her journey.

“Usually, when motorists see you, they are really polite,” says Schneider. “I’ve heard stories, but in my experience, they’ve only been polite.”

Her husband drives the family’s car. If an emergency requires that one of their five children be picked up early from school either he does it, or Schneider “would” take a cab. So far, such an incident hasn’t happened. She says it takes her about the same amount of time to ride her bike as it would to drive to pick up one of her kids anyway (she often passes cars stuck in traffic, which is how The Sunday Paper happened to see her as she spun by us in Druid Hills).  

At 55, she says she’s in excellent health, something she attributes to her daily commute. But there’s also something about her commute that presents a health concern.

“I ride my bike in part because the air quality is so bad and I don’t want to contribute to making it worse,” she says. “But sometimes when I take a deep breath in traffic, I feel like I am breathing at the bottom of a laundry basket stuffed with dirty socks. I do wonder about the long-term effects on my lungs. We really need to clean up the air.”

2. Get on the bus, Gus

MARTA buses picked up more than 147 million riders in 2007, a 6.6 percent increase over 2006. Rail ridership also increased by more than 12 percent, with nearly 78 million passenger boardings.

Every public transit provider in the Atlanta area has seen ridership increase since gas prices started their dizzying climb in April, but public transit is old hat for Tracey Masters, an attorney for the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole. Masters has been a Gwinnett County Transit passenger for more than six years.

“I was on the second bus that pulled out of Discover Mills on the very first day the buses started running,” says Masters.
 
He catches the 5:50 a.m. bus Monday through Friday. During his roughly 40-minute commute to the Sloppy Floyd Building across the street from the state Capitol, he mostly plans his day. In the afternoon, he catches the 5:15 p.m. bus home and promptly falls asleep.

“When I get home, I’m ready to tackle the home life,” he says.

A one-month pass on Gwinnett’s commuter transit service costs $100, and Masters says that number is reportedly going to increase to $150 by the end of the summer.

“But for me, it’s never been a money issue, it’s been a quality of life issue,” he says. “People talk about the cost of gas or the cost of the wear and tear on your car, but what about the wear and tear on yourself, spending all that time driving in traffic?”

Masters has set an example for his officemates, who are increasingly using public transportation. Scheree Lipscomb, the public information officer for the pardons and parole board, says she rides a Georgia Regional Transit Authority bus and that other co-workers are increasingly turning to public transportation.

“Tracy has turned us all on to it,” says Lipscomb.

3. Get your motor running

“The bike’s tank only holds three gallons, so when I fill it up, it’s about $12 to $15. It cost about $140 to fill up the tank of the Suburban,” says real estate developer and manager Aaron Ferris. So his Chevy Suburban has been mothballed to a certain extent. When he travels to and from properties—he’s the man in charge at Castleberry Lofts, among others—he’s on his motorcycle, an economical Honda. 

“I’m a single dad with four daughters, though, so when we all go somewhere, we still use the Suburban,” he says. After navigating traffic on the motorcycle, driving the lumbering behemoth of a Chevrolet feels like, well, driving a lumbering behemoth of a Chevrolet.

Ferris is aware that some folks shy away from motorcycles because of safety concerns, so he recommends that any new motorcyclist take a safety course before taking to the road. Nonetheless, he also thinks the notion of motorcycles being less safe than other vehicles may be overblown. 

“Driving in Atlanta is always dangerous, no matter what you drive,” says Ferris. And the payoff at the gas station is well worth the helmet hair.

4. Share the ride

At Turner Entertainment’s offices in Midtown, the security guards call Banister Murray’s van “the Tijuana Taxi.” He doesn’t care. It doesn’t belong to him. He just drives it—and, oh, yeah, decorates it with a hula girl, Mardi Gras beads and a big pink feather boa.

“And there’s a fishing rod instead of an antenna, don’t forget that,” says Murray.

The van actually belongs to Turner and van-leasing agent VPSI. Murray, as a “driver/commute coordinator,” had to sign a three-party agreement with the other two, stating that he would act responsibly behind the wheel. In exchange, he gets to use the van to drive to work, as well as for his personal errands on weekends.

It’s free. He doesn’t even pay for the gas.

During the work week, the Tijuana Taxi leaves a Cobb Commuter Transit parking lot promptly at 7:05 a.m., usually with 12 passengers—“If you’re not there at 7:05, we leave you,” says  Murray—and heads to Turner’s offices in Midtown. In the afternoon, it heads home again, threading its way through the teeming masses of seething metal on I-75. 
Sometimes there are problems among the passengers. Not all of them are Turner employees; other companies buy coupons to allow their employees to ride the Tijuana Taxi and various Turner van pool vehicles like it, but clashing corporate cultures isn’t the problem.

As people enter the van, looking for a place to sit, and some passengers suddenly become very absorbed in books, or shove their laptop bags over onto the adjoining seat, Murray recognizes something he’s seen before.

“The problem is totally old-school. Nothing changes over the years,” he says. “Certain people sit next to each other, others don’t. People talk about each other behind their backs. It’s the human personality.”

Murray tries to maintain control by making himself the target of ridicule, a task that is not beyond his abilities.

“I am the disturber,” he says with obvious—perhaps even overdone—resignation. 
Despite the (infrequent) episodes of arrested development, the Tijuana Taxi has become a victim of its own popularity. Since gas prices reached $4 a gallon a couple of weeks ago, more Turner employees have signed up for the van pool. And because they have priority over non-Turner passengers, some of the coupon-users will have to be booted off the bus. But which ones?

“I have to decide,” says Murray. “I was thinking we might do something like ‘Survivor’ and vote them off one by one.”

Not to worry. Those ousted riders have options. Commuter Club, a service run by the Cumberland Improvement District, connects wannabe carpoolers and vanpoolers from all over the metro area to rides. The service costs only $50 a month, and at present has riders registered from 17 metro area counties.

5. Scoot over

The dashing young man next to you in traffic—not that one, the one on the chartreuse scooter—might very well be SP’s own news intern, Chuck Stanley. Between piano and logic classes (he says there weren’t many classes left when he registered) frequent smoke breaks (SP staffers bum cigs off of him all the time), and cranking out excellent stories, Stanley gets where he’s going on a scooter that he says gets about 60 miles to the gallon. Lucky for us, because none of the other scooter riders we saw in traffic would even slow down to talk to us.

Last week at ATL Scooters on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Midtown, manager Joe Nieberding surveyed a mostly empty lot below a banner touting his scooters’ average gas mileage: “70 Miles Per Gallon.” He usually has between 75 and 95 scooters available, but the recent rush on scooters had nearly wiped out his inventory. He was down to only 18 just before a new shipment rolled in.

“My sales have tripled,” he says.

6. Log in to work

Based on the Center for Transportation and the Environment’s (CTE) regional commuter survey conducted in 2007, there are 306,883 teleworkers in the 20-county metro Atlanta region.

The Clean Air Campaign, which assists employers with starting or formalizing telework programs by training teleworkers and their managers, reports that it has created almost 4,700 new teleworkers, and has worked with nearly 5,500 existing ones.

Additional teleworker numbers:

Approximately 10,000 teleworkers participate in Commuter Rewards, the regional incentive program administered by the Clean Air Campaign.

101 teleworkers have enrolled in Cash for Commuters since January 2008 (compared to 43 for the same time period in 2007).  Cash for Commuters is a Clean Air Campaign incentive program that pays solo drivers $3 a day to switch to an alternative commute. Another incentive program, Commuter Prizes, is a $25 gift card drawing.

     Earlier this month, Georgia’s Speaker of the House, Glenn Richardson, made international headlines when he sent a memo to state House staffers telling them they could telecommute one day each week through the summer. His intention was to save gas, thereby easing the strain on employee wallets—and the strain on their working environment.

Brent Cranfield, a press liaison for the House, characterizes Richardson as being pro-technology, and points to how his 2005 initiative to revamp and modernize the House makes Cranfield’s own telecommute possible.

“To me it is almost just like being in the office,” says Cranfield. “I can watch any committee hearing going on through the Georgia Legislative Network’s video streaming. I review previous meetings in the archived video sections, etc. It also allows me to focus on the project that I am working on at that particular time without any distraction from people coming in and out of the office.”

He estimates that he is saving between $25 and $30 each month in gas.

“With the latest price spike to $4 per gallon, the savings may actually be a bit larger,” he says. SP