Electric Bikes -N- Scooters Blog

Archive for March, 2007

New Ride, a company based in England has set up the 3rd recharging station in London. Not only can you recharge there, you can leave your electric vehicle parked there securely. Not only are you going to be able to recharge your electric scooters and bikes there, but you will be eventually able to park and charge your electric car there as well. I did some checking up on the company, New Ride and found out that they became active around 2005. Their goal is to clean up the air in and around their cities by making the use of electric vehicles and by providing a system of recharging for electric bikes, scooters and cars.

Apparently, anyone can recharge their electric scooter or bike by parking at a New Ride station and by registering the electric motorized vehicle with the city of London. New Ride also uses state of the art smart technology that recognizes the voltage requirements of the vehicle thaqt you are plugging in.

I only hope that America can pick up on this example and do the same thing soon, New ride expects to install several more charging stations in the next 2 years.

Triple A of New England have reported that gas prices have started to rise early this year. The Prices have risen an additional $.40 so far and there is no end in sight for this summer as the price per gallon has risen to over 3.29 in most states. Dispite how we feel, Europe is faring far worse than the U.S. Here is just a partial list of gas prices in Europe and Asia per gallon:

Belgium – $6.10
Great Britain – $6.30
The Netherlands – $6.73
Germany -$5.96
France – $5.80
India – $3.71
Italy -$5.91
Australia -$3.42

Of course, here are the prices for the middle east:

Saudi Arabia: $.91
Kuwait ( The people we have been protecting in the last two wars) $.78
Venezuela $.12

I guess you can see that oil is still in plentiful supply otherwise those countries would have high prices too!

Believe it or not, history does not repeat itself. I know that runs contrary to what you have heard since about the 1st grade, but it is not true. I guess if you could somehow eat an Oreo and bounce back through time you could repeat history, however it would violate the very laws of physics.

However, the things that do repeat themselves in history are the mistakes that humans make.

History does have a definite reason. We can look back at what others have done before us and say, “Wow that sucked! Let’s not do the Dark Ages thing again!” or ” Yep, we can do the same thing that the Greek Empire did, let’s just modify it and do it better this time!”

For some reason though, we never seem to learn from our past mistakes. In the early 1970′s gas was plentiful for the American consumer. I can remember my father coming home and telling us about the “Gas Wars” at the local pumps. The term “Gas Wars” meant that gas was so cheap that the gas stations would do just about anything to get you to come to them.

Then, October 17th, 1973 hit the American economy with a vengeance. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries got together and deliberately waged economic war on the U.S. by raising oil prices. The price of Gas went from somewhere around .21 cents a gallon to .50 cents from may to June of 1973. Not only did the Arab countries raise our prices, but for almost a week they disrupted the flow of fuel to America and disrupted our economic system. Gas lines ran for miles as Americans sat in lines for hours to get limited fuel.

The question begs however, did we learn anything from this situation and what have we done to give up our addiction to oil? You see the reason that the dinosaurs went extinct was because they could not adapt to a sudden change in climate. They didn’t have the brain power to know how to save themselves. One can only guess this is going to be the tragedy of the more progressive countries. We have the brain power to invent the Internet, go to the moon and create incredible reality TV shows like “Growing up Gotti” but in almost half of a century, we haven’t figured out how to get away from fossil fuels.

Well, I guess if the dinosaurs hadn’t croaked, there wouldn’t be half as much oil and civilization would have had to get by cleaning up horse poop every morning before going to work.

Darn, those stupid dinosaurs!