apple juice

Because the apple juice news team is fair and balancedâ„¢, we are updating an earlier story, Starting My Car in the Winter

After a week of subzero temperatures, culminating in Thursday night’s -25 degree reading, my car failed to start without a jump. The battery simply couldn’t turn the engine fast enough.

Now, since it did in fact start, after the laborous process of pushing it out into the alley so I could hook jumper cables to a neighbors car, I do not count this as “not starting”.

But since boasting of my record of starting the car in the winter, I thought it would be fair to share that I needed the jump-start.

regular news updates to resume shortly…

Most conversations about my car go like this:

“So that thing is a diesel?”
“Yup”
“Um, how’s it start in the winter?”
“Pretty good.”

So, I decided to take a little video. I have an enormous minnesota accent! Do I always have that?

Geez.

Anyway, enjoy me being a nerd.

Many people will tell Mr. Obama that taxing carbon or gasoline now is a “nonstarter.” Wrong. It is the only starter. It is the game-changer. If you want to know where postponing it has gotten us, visit Detroit. No carbon tax or increased gasoline tax meant that every time the price of gasoline went down to $1 or $2 a gallon, consumers went back to buying gas guzzlers. And Detroit just fed their addictions — so it never committed to a real energy-efficiency retooling of its fleet.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Real Generation X – NYTimes.com.

emphasis mine. The stupid thing is that Ford, GM and Chrysler make more energy efficient cars for other markets! So where are those cars for America?

Amtrak ridership in Minnesota continues at a record pace, greasing the rails for high-speed train service between St. Paul and Chicago.

via Next stop: Fast St. Paul-to-Chicago train?

I love it… greasing the rails. Seriously though, great news! Hopefully rail transit will be part of the new public works projects. I would love to be able to take a train to Chicago or Duluth. Let’s make this happen!

St. Louis Park, Hopkins, Minnetonka and Eden Prairie all are making plans for new housing and businesses to take root around light-rail stations that have already been sited in their towns.

From Four Suburbs are Betting Big on Light Rail

Great news – but again, it would be a lot better to be planning and building a number of lines in tandem. Where are the lines to the north and east?

Article today in the Star Tribune — What route is best for Southwest LRT

The basic arguments come down to: What’s fastest for suburban commuters, who’s backyard will it run through, and which neighborhoods are we going to connect.

My gut reaction in looking at the alignments is that it would be best to curve through uptown, connecting uptown, eat street, and downtown.

But perhaps there are further plans on the drawing board… maybe a streetcar line starting around calhoun, and then tracking uptown/eat street/downtown? Then you can have the LRT line run a more direct route, and serve the dense populations of uptown/downtown with streetcars.

It’s hard to say without knowing what the larger system looks like, and this is the fundamental flaw in looking at each of these proposed lines in isolation. It doesn’t seem like we’re focused on making a system for the Twin Cities.

I know that plans are out there for successive lines and how it all fits together, but the discussion of this particular alignment needs to take into account the larger vision, otherwise I can just imagine that the public hearing will come down to a lot of bickering.

It is good to see that we’re moving forward with additional lines though!

why is this car not going to be available in the US?

I think any automaker that says we can’t get to a 35mpg fleet average is crazy.