Gas at $2.50? Where's my bike?

Now that the price of gasoline has risen to an average of $2.50, I started biking to work. I think I'll be able to keep it up. Whether I can say the same of our economy, I'm not quite so sure. Here's what I think:

• The price of gas should have been raised to $2.00 a long time ago, and the taxes from it used to fund energy efficiency research and better public transportation. We only import about 10-15% of our oil, so I have been told, and we have known about the oil problem for a long time. Now we are really paying for it and the economy will suffer. In the US, we use oil oil to make exhaust driving to Wal-Mart to buy foreign-made products. In China, most of the oil is used to power factories and make goods to export.
• Solar energy and hydrogen power are too far in the future to make a difference. Fusion power probably won't exist in our lifetime. Maybe the answer to this problem is nuclear power combined with electric vehicles. The only problem I have with nuclear power is the safe disposal of the nuclear material. If it were me, I would say build a space elevator, lift the stuff into the space, and send it back into the sun where it came from. The only problem with that is:
  
• We just spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a space mission whose highlights were:
  
• It came back.
• Some cloth was pulled.
• Garbage collection.
• So a space elevator is probably not gonna materialize unless its done by a private firm, which I am kind of against. I don't know why, but I am. However, SpaceShipOne made me a believer in the fact that private industry will be better at space exploration than NASA is anyway.
  

So anyway, I started riding my bicle to work, which is kind of a problem because I can't afford to ride it. It's really a chicken and egg problem. The bike has tubular sew-up racing tires which glue to the rim and are expensive to replace. The first time I tried to bike to work earlier this year I got a flat tire and it cost me $50 for a new tube and $25 for the install fee because I don't trust myself to put one on properly. To rebuild the wheel with new rims that would accept normal clincher tires would probably cost me at least a hundred bucks or more per wheel.

But I started riding to work today and I'm proud of myself. It took me about 35 minutes to bike in and closer to 40 to bike home. I think I can get that down to 25 minutes each way if I really try. My friend Alex once rode home in 17 minutes from the middle of town and I only live about 22 blocks further away. My traffic is worse, but maybe after a while I can ride with the flow. Who knows. At least I'm not paying $2.50 a gallon.

My next post will be about how little I like the bicycling shoes I paid $180 for. Yeah you heard me. $180. They are weird, no one else has them, they weren't worth the money, and when they broke I couldn't find a small enough weed wacker cord to fix them so I fixed them with picture hanging wire. What?!? It's true. Stay tuned...