the Mark Pike

This is my whole-hearted endorsement of Zipcar.

For reals, click here and get $25 free driving right now and thank me later.

Since graduating from school, I’ve been living in metropolitan areas where owning a car and trying to park was simply not worth the time, money, and energy. Plus, public transportation options in Washington, DC and San Francisco, CA were so readily available that keeping up with a vehicle just didn’t make sense.

However, each month there seem to be enough random errands, road trips, etc. that having access to a car was still really important. I didn’t want to be the guy that always bums keys from his friends (thanks, guys!), so I looked into other options.

I walked by Zipcar parking spaces all the time in DC so I knew that it might be a convenient option, but I had no idea just how easy the system was until I signed up at the beginning of the year.

In fact, the first time I used Zipcar was on the way back from a vacation when I realized we accidentally booked a return ticket to a different airport than the one where my girlfriend left her car. The cost of a taxi up to BWI from DCA was quoted at more than $80. Renting a Zipcar for 2 hours? Less than $20. We reserved it the same day, didn’t have to deal with the hassle of rental car company paperwork, and the car was sitting there waiting for us to wave the magic membership card on the windshield.

Sure, there are some drawbacks. 

Right now you have to return the car from the same spot you rented it from, so you can’t drive one-way home from IKEA with a trunkful of Ektorp sofas and several dozen swedish meatballs. The likely issue with this is that the registration system is not advanced enough to compute “smart reservations” wherein you leave a car somewhere and then another Zipcar user picks it up and takes it back to its permanent parking space (much less a completely distributed network that does not rely on permanent spaces). Bike-sharing programs have dealt with this “free-rider” issue of people using the bikes to only zoom downhill by offering cheap rides and free credits for those who take bikes back to their uphill parking locations.

Another minor frustration is that many Zipcar users are infrequent drivers and therefore get lost much more frequently than regular drivers who are more familiar with the road system. This leads to late returns, which can have a domino effect and really screw up your schedule. For example, I rented a truck for one hour in San Francisco to pick up a new bed-frame. The person who had the truck before me was 30 minutes late, which only left me 30 minutes to complete my errand. Zipcar penalizes you $50 per hour if you’re late, so this prevents a lot of abuse in the system— but it happens.

They leave a fuel card in the car, so you can always fill up for free and you’re supposed to leave the tank at least 1/4 full (I always leave it 3/4 full!). They even give you a credit of one free hour if you take the car through a car-wash!

The best Zipcar feature, by far, is the mobile phone application.

While you’re on the go, you can search for close-by available Zipcars using an incredible map overlay. There’s over 20 cars within a half-mile of my apartment— everything from Beamers to Tacomas to Priuses. You can rent for as cheap as $7/hr. You can make your reservation via the mobile app on your smartphone and even— this blows my mind— unlock the car using your phone! The keys are always left in the vehicle and you have to swipe in at the beginning of your reservation with your membership card to identify yourself. One time, I accidentally left my wallet with the membership card locked in the car and didn’t think I’d be able to unlock the vehicle. But then I remembered the amazing mobile phone application that sends a signal to outer space and UNLOCKS the vehicle! Awesome.

As the network economy evolves and data-sharing via social apps is widely adopted, I think the co-ownership model will be incredibly convenient for many of us. Right now, you can count me as a happy customer.

If you want to join Zipcar today, check out this referral code that hooks you up with $25 free driving (and I get $25 too!). It’s only $50 per year, and there’s a one-time $25 application fee. 

Join Zipcar and get $25 in free driving!

As you can tell, I think it’s totally worth it. I look forward to sharing a car with you soon!

“What happened here?”

The question lingered in the air as our rental car sped along Route 54 in Kansas, somewhere between Wichita and Dodge City. We had no idea exactly where we were, or what had happened until we saw a sign.

GREENSBURG, KS
Rebuilding…
STRONGER, BETTER, GREENER
Home of the “BIG WELL”

That’s when I remembered the Tornado—and everything that came after it.

(Thanks to Chris Cheatham’s consistent coverage of Greensburg on Green Building Law Update)

On May 4, 2007, Greensburg was hit by an EF5 tornado, which destroyed 95% of the city and left the other 5% severely damaged (see e.g., Mike Theiss’ photos, and Jon Person’s photos). Only one building was left standing on Main Street (it’s now an antique store).

But the city decided to rebuild; and, it decided to rebuild “green.” In the words of then-Governor Kathleen Sebelius, “We have an opportunity of having the greenest town in rural America.”

Greensburg had to decide what policies to enact in order to achieve such a green goal. Just 12 weeks after the tornado flattened the town, the City Council presented a thorough long-term plan (.pdf, amazing that they made this so quickly and so well). The Public Square Steering Committee stated it’s vision statement therein:

“Blessed with a unique opportunity to create a strong community devoted to family, fostering businesses, working together for future growth.”

On December 17, 2007, Greensburg made history (.pdf) by being the first place in the country to require all city-owned buildings larger than 4,000 square feet to become certified LEED® Platinum by the U.S. Green Building Council and requiring all city-owned buildings to reduce energy use by 42% over current building requirements.

As a passerby on a road trip, it was inspiring to look out the car windows and see such an incredible story of rebirth in America’s Heartland.

Check out the full photo set from our drive.

Arrived in Los Angeles earlier this weekend and I’ve been couch-surfing ever since. Hopefully you’ve been following me on the other road trip specific blog for the past 2 weeks. It’s been an amazing experience!

I just did a radio interview with the Young Turks, and I think they asked me more questions about my personal life than energy policy. I guess that’s what makes for interesting radio! One of the hosts is named Jill Pike, but she wasn’t in the studio today. I guess we’ll never know if we’re related!

Now, I’m headed up to San Fran for a day or two and then I’m headed back to DC. I need a vacation from the vacation.

Law School starts soon.

Oh, and if you haven’t watched the rap video yet… Check it. What rap name is better for me: MC Esher or Mark Spitzzz?

I’m heading on a cross country road trip tomorrow with two of my best buddies from Duke. We somehow convinced some non-profit organizations, policy think tanks, and car companies to hook us up with a flex-fuel vehicle for the trip so we can see whether or not it’s possible to drive coast to coast on ethanol fuel. We’ll be meeting some elected officials, celebs and lots of interesting folks along the way and writing about it on a cool blog as we learn about alternative fuels and America’s energy future:

http://kicktheoilhabit.org/roadtrip

(this won’t be live until Sen. Obama introduces us at the Campus Progress conference)!

On the blog, you can track our progress on the nifty Google maps, leave us comments, and give us suggestions for dive bars and greasy fast food restaurants to visit. Pretty please let us know if we’ll be crossing paths with any of you and we’ll hang out. The itinerary has us cruising for 10 days, heading through the following states sequentially: DC, VA, MD, WV, OH, IN, IL, WI, MN, SD, NE, CO, UT, NV, CA.

After the trip, I’ll be relaxing back home in Virginia Beach for a little while before heading to William & Mary Law School in the Fall. Please keep in touch, and honk if you see us on the road!

At the end of Pier 45 in San Francisco, there’s a museum filled with coin-operated machines. If you drop 25 cents in a box and crank a wheel, you can watch a Marilyn Monroe silent film or footage from the Earthquake of 1906. You can have a wizard tell you your fortune (as featured in the movie BIG). Entire dioramas come to “life”; miniature circuses with moving gorillas, all for the price of a quarter. Player pianos. Puppets reenacting square dances. Skill games. Music and machinery. An entire universe of cranks and gears and levers and pulleys, all seemingly alive.

A man walks around dressed in denim with a nametag that simply says, “I WORK HERE”. Keys kept on a chain; he unlocks boxes, revealing the innards of the mechanical museum. He works quickly, stealthily, skilled. He knows where the jams are, knows what cogs to smack, gears to switch. Nobody notices him moving around from machine to machine.

I watch, intrigued, as he approaches the Photobooth. Two girls have been waiting patiently for their portrait prints to drop out of the old school black and white booth. He noticed them. They were standing there for too long, so he handed them 3 dollars and an apology. “Did the light go off?”

He opens the machine to inspect. I decide to make small talk, as a fellow Photobooth owner. I tell him how I own a color Photobooth in North Carolina, that I am in midst of a cross-country road trip, and that I’m so happy a place like his museum exists. He’s happy to meet a fellow “Boothian”. His name is Dan Zelinsky. After handshakes and shop talk he asks if we want to see what goes on behind the curtains, in the back of the Musée Mécanique.

He is the Wizard of Oz. An architect of a Newtonian universe. He shows us the tools he uses to make the spare parts from scratch. He took a class at City College a few years back and fell in love with it after the first 30 minutes. His dad started the collection a long time ago. His dad’s first penny arcade machine sat on the family kitchen table. The money he made charging family members helped start the collection. It’s grown ever since.

I tell Dan about the Photobooth archive that I helped put together in college. He tells me about the holy grail- a gigantic box of old strips tourists have left behind, test strips, randoms, etc. He gives me his business card and a black and white test strip he made.

At the end of a cross-country road trip, you’re looking for metaphors. At the end of Pier 45, it’s too easy.

“I’m going to be embarrassed if you say ‘yes’, but have I seen you on TV before?”

Did she really just say that? Did this hot cocktail waitress in Los Angeles really just say that? Is she trying to get a good tip? Who does she think I look like? My aunt told me I look like Christian Slater once, but I think she was just trying to make me feel good about myself. Aunts do that. She’s probably just trying to get a good tip. Should I make her guess who I am? Should I pretend I’m famous and try and get a free Bud Light? Movie stars don’t drink Bud Light. What do they drink? Should I ask for her phone number? Snap out of it! Say something.

“Nope.”

Oh man, is that Ashlee Simpson over there?

I love L.A.

What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas. That’s the city’s motto. Nevertheless, I think they could abridge the motto to “Your money happens to stay in Las Vegas.”

I am going to take the time to describe something located a few hours away from Las Vegas, one of the most beautiful things in the world, as a passive way of discouraging you from visiting Sin City.

Did you know the Grand Canyon is only like 3.5 hours away from Las Vegas? It’s one of the wonders of the world. I strongly encourage you to take whatever money you were going to spend in Vegas and go to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and throw it as far as you can. Watch its majestic trajectory. Throwing pennies in to the Colorado River is probably good luck. Maybe now you can throw down a cool hundred dollars at the tables in Vegas with better fortune, a sense of purpose, and a much clearer conscience. After all, you witnessed at the Grand Canyon that there is, in fact, a God with decent taste in design. The National Parks Service thanks you kindly for your donation, and requests that you please not litter in the future.

None of the casinos have clocks or exit signs. The slot machines are positioned to make the floors like mazes. What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas. They want as much of you to stay in Las Vegas as possible.

We escape the strip and find ourselves at a gas station, filling up for the road to Los Angeles. I buy some orange juice and cereal inside, the healthiest thing I’ve done in days. The total is $2.98. I toss 2 pennies in the “have a penny? leave a penny. need a penny? take a penny” jar. I wish I hadn’t.

While pulling out of the gas station, we realize there are no signs to exit the city either. It seems the civil engineers work in cahoots with the casino owners. I run back inside the gas station and ask for directions. “Take 3 right turns and you’re there”. I trust the cashier’s advice as much as the roulette pit boss’.

Shortly after our first cactus sighting, a truck full of steer skulls passed us. We had to have one. We revved up the little VW engine that could, and caught up with the truck bed of bones. “Could you pull over? We want one!”

The man smiled and obliged with a right blinker, parked in the shoulder and put on his hazards. We jogged over to his truck, careful not to get hit by the 18-wheelers speeding by. Perhaps the skeletal remains in the near vicinity were a good PSA about our own mortality.

We were staring at the mound of cow and bull skulls, and scratching our own noggins. How does one pick out the best looking dead cow? What are the criteria?

“That one looks like it had a lot of personality.”
“That other one has a healthy set of horns.”
“Are they horns or antlers?”
“I dunno. Oooh, let’s get that one!”

We have a new passenger in our car now. Looking in the rear view mirror, I can’t help but chuckle. I keep waiting to get scolded, “Eat Mor Chik’n.”

At night the eyes glow from the headlights behind us. It’s a lonely ride from El Paso to Las Vegas. Phoenix rose from the desert ashes.

Everybody we talked to said the drive from Austin to El Paso is the longest most boring car ride ever. Let’s just say that Mari and I placed bets on minutes passed before seeing another human being. A typical winning answer was approximately 8 minutes.

We stopped in Lyndon B. Johnson’s hometown and had sandwiches at the site of the World’s Best Chicken Fried Steak (nearly 3 dozen sold!). This was also the first time we heard the word “howdy” as a greeting. It was official. We were in the middle of nowhere.

After spending the night in a motel in a city that has a single entry in the AAA book (home of the largest roadrunner statue in the world), we got back on the road as quickly as possible.

Around El Paso, Mari and I realized that if we hooked a quick left, we’d be in Mexico. Mari had never seen Mexico before, so we decided to take an exit and see if we could get her a better view. Little did we know, the exit we took off of I-10 funneled us directly in to Mexico! Bienvenidos a Mexico! There was no turning around.

The custom agents waved us through and suddenly everything was written in Spanish. This was when I got extremely nervous.

I didn’t have my passport with me. Not knowing the current requirements of border crossing, I was spazzing out and imagining myself locked away as an illegal alien in a foreign country. I kept telling Mari things like, “If they lock me away forever, do you think my friends will visit?’ After 30 minutes of looking for an open burrito stand in the middle of siesta, Mari and I decided it would be best to get back on the road as soon as possible to relieve me of my border-induced anxiety.

The border agents told us to pull over the car. We were being inspected, because the bright red haphazardly packed VW Golf didn’t seem normal to them.

“What was your purpose of traveling to Mexico?” a man asks Mari after glancing at her ID with piqued interest.
“Oh, I had never been to Mexico before and we’re driving cross-country and we thought it would be a fun pit stop.”
“How long were you here for?”
“Umm. About 45 minutes, more or less.”

This got his attention. Three border agents gathered around the car and opened the hatchback. They were staring at a jumble of boxes and furniture held together with a mortar of Mari’s dirty laundry. Canines stood nearby, waiting to sniff around on command and find the proverbial heroin needle in the haystack. The border agents huddled around and had a quick conference. “Eh, I guess they look fine”. “Yeh, I think we should let them go.” “Yeah, me too.” “They’re from DC. Headquarters”. “Yeh, they’re cool.”

They hand us back our IDs.

“So you were just here for 45 minutes, right?”
“Yeh.”
“Never do that again.”

“Keep Austin Weird”. So says the bumper stickers. I’m totally cool with it. I don’t mess with Texas, as previously instructed by other bumper stickers.

We rolled up in Austin by midnight, and promptly drove around town with the map my best friend from home scribbled for us on a piece of notebook paper. We found a bar on 6th street and enjoyed the $2 Shiner Bock Texas drafts while watching Austin keep it weird.

In the morning, we hit up Barton Springs, a public fresh water oasis in the Austin summer heat. It’s tucked in to the rocks off the Colorado River just off one of the major roads, but it feels like one of those beer commercials where like 50 hikers randomly congregate in the middle of nowhere wilderness and drink beer in bikinis. I try to read a little, but it’s one of those mornings where I’m too busy grinning to concentrate on much anything.

We met up with my buddy and old roommate Terry, who now works in the Texas legislature as a historian. After a delicious Indian food buffet, we get a grand tour of the capitol grounds. Marble Ten Commandments sit just 10 yards away from the dome of Texas decision-making. Ten gallon hats mingle with business suits, and Terry tiptoes around in his tennis shoes and shows us where the House of Reps. is currently in session. “The woman in lavender is awesome”, we see her from the observation deck above, hustling around and making stuff happen. Terry transcribes and edits the daily events of Texas’ congress, including the morning prayers. He enjoys finding grammatical errors and correcting them.

Later that night, my buddy from home, who recently added a M.D. to the end of his name but still has time to watch trashy television in between healing people, gave us the Real World: Austin tour. “This is approximately where Danny got his face bashed at the end of the first episode”. I think about getting a picture on the spot- a modern remix of remembering the Alamo.