8 weeks of clean living

In an earlier post I considered the difficulty of getting to the airport in a timely fashion via bus in San Diego. The main problem is that the MTS route 992, the only route that services the airport, simply follows a loop between the airport and downtown, and thus one must go all the way downtown and then back up to the airport if coming from the north. When I wrote the article, I had not actually tried taking the bus the whole way, however, and now I have several times.

It turns out that depending on when one is traveling, taking the bus is not too big of  a hassle. Specifically, if one is traveling around rush hour on weekdays the 150 runs every 30 minutes and gets downtown from campus in approximately 40 minutes where you can then catch the 992 (running every 12 minutes) to get to the airport. This is actually all fairly quick and costs just $2.50 without a student bus pass or $2.25 with (for the 992, which is inexplicably not part of the free bus zone). The story is different mid-day or on the weekends. Mid-day the 150 only runs hourly, which can waste a lot of time, and on the weekends it does not run at all, and one has to take the 30, which can take over an hour to get all the way up to campus.

I’ve actually taken to scheduling flights that fit well with the bus schedule and I’ve had good luck getting to and from campus quickly and inexpensively.

Having efficient public transit to and from the airport (in any city) is a great boon for travelers looking to save a few bucks and avoid driving or being driven. Despite this built-in demand, there is only one MTS bus, the 992, that services the San Diego Airport. This bus goes back and forth between downtown San Diego and the airport, and thus anyone trying to take the bus to the airport from north of downtown has to go well out of his or her way to do so.

I flew into San Diego on Monday morning and needed to get up to school quickly, but I was reluctant to pay the approximately $45 it takes to get to UCSD by cab. I also wanted to try and use public transit if at all possible. I came up with the following solution, which I think is the best compromise given the current transportation mix available at the airport. I hired a cab to take me to the Old Town Transit Center, which cost me $17 including tip. Then I caught the MTS 150 express up to campus, which is free for students. All told, I landed at approximately 9:20 AM, caught the cab at approximately 9:30 AM, caught the bus at 9:48 AM and arrived at school at approximately 10:05 AM (driving to the San Diego Airport takes about 25 minutes and taking the bus the whole way takes approximately 65-90 minutes, for comparison).

While this works pretty well coming from the airport, it does not work very well going to the airport because there is no taxi stand at the Old Town Transit Center. Ideally MTS would operate a bus on a loop between the Old Town Transit Center and the airport, Which would vastly simplify the project of getting to and from the airport. Cynically one might suppose that there is a strong disincentive for the airport to enable better public transit, given the revenue associated with airport-owned parking lots, fees garnered from private drivers and the like.

The other obvious option for somewhat mass airport transit is taking a shuttle bus (like SuperShuttle, with which I had some experience in LA), but they insist on arriving at the airport maddeningly early (around two hours before one’s flight), and take their sweet time doing it. For these reasons, I think they are even less palatable than an out-of-the-way bus route.

…and I for one welcome our new robot bus overlords.

My roommate Marci told me about a series of lightbulb exchange events being hosted by the City of San Diego and SDGE. I was able to go to one yesterday and trade in five incandescent bulbs for five compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). Check out the schedule for future trade-ins here (the events at Scripps seem pretty cool since one can also get a 2-for-1 pass to the aquarium at the same time).

CFLs have been covered to death as one of the easiest ways to save energy, as well as a little bit of money (Lighter Footstep has a good article about them here). Normally the savings on one’s electric bill far outweigh the higher upfront cost of CFLs (let’s say you pay $.10 per kWh and replace a 60W incandescent with a 13W CFL, over an 8,000 hour lifespan one would save around $35). When you can trade in incandescents you already have for free CFLs, however, it’s all profit.

CFLs do have a couple drawbacks compared to incandescents. They take about half a second to actually turn on, and then another 30 seconds to reach their full brightness. During this warmup, they use approximately as much energy as an incandescent, so it’s not really worth putting a CFL in a closet or somewhere where one doesn’t use the light for more than a few seconds. In the majority of use cases, though, they are preferable and indistinguishable from their incandescent counterparts.

I switched over most of my lightbulbs to CFLs back when I moved in, and now every fixture in the house has a CFL, except for the one in my closet and one out on my porch whose devious enclosure I haven’t been able to penetrate…

A couple of days ago, I took the MTS Route 30 down to La Jolla and went for a pleasant snorkeling trip at the La Jolla Underwater Park Ecological Preserve. The Preserve has a bunch of really cool fish, including tons of large phlegmatic orange ones, and accordingly there are many people in the water at any one time, so it’s also a fairly safe place to swim around.

The trip made me think about the environmental impact of how we entertain ourselves. It seems to me that activities appropriate and unique to one’s region can have a smaller environmental footprint (and cost less) than those activities that attempt to be as general as possible. For example, movies are the quintessential generalizable entertainment experience. No matter where one is or which theater one sees a movie in, the content and overall experience are essentially the same. On the other hand, going for a walk or a swim can take on vastly different dimensions depending on one’s location. In order to create a movie experience, gobs of energy and resources must be used in the production and the subsequent display of a film. In contrast, going snorkeling or bodyboarding or taking a hike in the mountains has no real energy cost outside of transportation, and if one lives nearby there really is no substantial energy cost to the activity (except for the up front costs of fabricating a snorkel, bodyboard or backpack).

In a way, these thoughts remind me of the native gardening trend, where only native plants are used in one’s garden in order to reduce water and pesticide use. By exploiting the properties of one’s region, one saves time, energy and effort while creating something unique compared to more idealized (and generalized) cookie-cutter lawns and gardens.

For these reasons, over the next few weeks I will continue to explore entertainment possibilities that are low-environmental-impact and appropriate to the San Diego area. I’ll mark them under the “Local” and “Entertainment” categories along the right hand side of this page.

UPDATE: Green Options has a nice piece on a similar topic with some more tips for hosting green gatherings.

A couple of days ago I took the NCTD 101 up to Solana Beach to visit one of my favorite spots in North County, Pizza Port. Besides having great pizza, Pizza Port is an excellent local brewery with a wide variety of beers to choose from (my favorites include Old Viscosity and Hop-Through-It IPA). Unfortunately, the traditional six pack of longnecks is a somewhat wasteful packaging for beer (though the box and bottles are certainly recyclable), especially if one is enjoying it with a few friends and intends to finish it. Luckily, an alternative and reusable beer transportation device exists: the growler.

Growlers hold 64 ounces of beer in a completely reusable glass container. Besides reducing packaging waste, growlers encourage one to seek out local craft breweries and save the energy required to transport the beer. (Of course if one is driving to the brewery the savings might not be that substantial depending on how far away it is compared to one’s local grocery store.) Also near UCSD (just a few miles east on La Jolla Village Drive/Miramar Rd), we have one of the top craft breweries in the world, AleSmith, with three beers in RateBeer.com’s Top 50. Unfortunately, unlike Pizza Port, AleSmith is very difficult to get to by bus so driving is required. Cheers!

Alongside farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs can be a great way to acquire fresh local produce without much hassle or label checking. Most CSAs have a subscription-based structure where one commits to buying a box of produce each week over a certain time period from a community farm. Due to this subscription structure, CSAs make it easier for farmers to plant and grow an appropriate amount of each vegetable or fruit, avoiding some of the waste that can occur at farmers’ markets when a farmer miscalculates demand.

My local CSA is called Be Wise Ranch, located in the Santa Fe Valley approximately 20 miles north of San Diego. I’m signed up to receive a small box of vegetables every week, and this week’s box included onions, beans, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, strawberries and zucchini. Since one doesn’t get to pick which vegetables are in the box each week, one is forced to find new and exciting recipes for the vegetables one doesn’t traditionally buy at the grocery store. For example, this zucchini soup recipe has been a big hit with me and my friends. Here’s a photo of some of my recent CSA acquisitions from Be Wise.

To find a CSA near you, check out this helpful tool over at Local Harvest. Many CSAs operate primarily through drop spots scattered throughout the communities that they serve. If there isn’t currently a drop spot near you, contact the farm and offer to set one up and manage it! The Be Wise drop spot that I currently use was started by an enterprising graduate student with an interest in local food (and he even receives a free box every week for his troubles).

The La Jolla Farmers’ Market is a great place to pick up some fresh local fruits and vegetables, as well as a surprisingly diverse array of knickknacks, jewelry and other curiosities. I hopped on the MTS Route 30 bus this morning to go grab some lunch and pick up some supplies for dinner.

My favorite place to go for lunch at the market is Belinda’s Cocina. Belinda has a wide array of really great Mexican food (the selection has expanded quite a bit over the last year), and—especially exciting for a vegetarian—she has the best chile rellenos I’ve found in San Diego. She also has containers of homemade salsa that you can purchase. Apparently her recipes have been catching on: she recently catered large gatherings at La Jolla Country Day School and Balboa Park, as well as several house parties in La Jolla. Unfortunately, Styrofoam containers are in pervasive use, so if you’re feeling environmentally minded bring your own plate.

Another great spot is the Petrou Foods booth, selling what Mr. Petrou claims to be the best olive oil and balsamic vinegar in the world. He says that the quality is a result of his long aging process and the fact that Temecula (where his olives are grown) gets “326 days of sunshine a year.” I picked up another bottle of balsamic vinegar to shore up my dwindling supply.

After having lunch at Belinda’s I came home with the aforementioned balsamic vinegar, as well as some fresh pasta from Peggy’s Pasta, a mini ciabatta, two apples, an onion, some Cremini mushrooms, fresh Parmesan and an olive spread that goes perfectly with the ciabatta. To see the rest of the pictures I took, check out my La Jolla Farmers’ Market photoset on Flickr. If you live in the area, you owe it to yourself to check it out!