Are today’s prices of gasoline at the pump eating into your vacation budget? Tired of spending more on filling your gas tank than you spend on a couple of weeks of groceries? And have you also been thinking lately about how to become just a bit more environmentally active? Solutions to higher and higher gas prices are out there, and Associate Professor Damon Bahr has certainly found his. While we were disembarking from a UVX BRT at Provo Station I met Damon Bahr and later sat down with him in his office at the David O. McKay School of Education to learn more about the LECTRIC XP he was sporting that day on the bus. I soon discover that the day of our serendipitous encounter was also the “first or second” trial day of Damon’s experiment with doing something more than just bearing up under high gas prices.
Damon Bahr commutes daily from Santaquin to BYU’s main campus, a distance of 24 miles, and when the price of gasoline breached $5.00 per gallon he made a decision to park his car, start using the electric bike he had purchased in December and begin riding UTA’s Route 805 rush hour bus. He quickly calculates on the spot and tells me, “I’m saving $8.00 a day… and that’s not figuring in wear and tear on the car.” “A lot of the travel time is productive, I can get some work done,” Damon adds with somewhat increasing enthusiasm. At different times in the past he has commuted on a road bike to work, in Orem where he was teaching at UVU and in St. George at an elementary school. Now Damon is living in Santaquin and that last mile of his commute going home is all uphill, “a steep hill,” hence the LECTRIC XP Step-Thru 2.0 e-Bike. Parking is also playing to Damon’s advantage, it was a big factor in his recent decision. When driving to the office he had to park his car a good distance away, today he’s parking a mere ten feet from his office building. “I’m saving money, saving time, saving the environment… can’t beat that, can you,” Damon postulates in our discussion with even more enthusiasm!
But this can’t be all peaches and cream, can it? I question Damon about any problems with his daily commute to BYU, traffic lights and/or crossings maybe, and he’s having difficulty coming up with anything. Finally he responds by explaining the process of loading his e-Bike onto the racks at the front of the bus; the problem is that not all of the UTA bus racks accommodate the much fatter tires of his bike. Then Damon illuminates my knowledge of city buses by telling me that there’s a cabinet under the bus for storing a bike, a drawer that can be pulled out, a bike loaded on it, and the drawer pushed back in. “It’s dirty under there,” and the first time he used the cabinet he was forced to return home for a change of clothes. Still, Damon insists that if he had to use the cabinet everyday he wouldn’t go back to commuting by car. In fact, he smiles broadly and takes a deep breath, “the more I talk to you the happier I get.”
