Photograph by Thomas Okay. ARnold
Bicyclists using outdoors the bike lane, within the sharrows, on Coast Highway, Encinitas
Back in 1897, Mayor Samuel Black of Columbus, Ohio, vowed to crack down on a brand new menace that gave the impression to be taking on his metropolis’s streets: bicycles. He referred to as reckless bicyclists “evil” and blasted “scorchers,” his time period for dashing cyclists, for making individuals afraid to drive their automobiles and horse-driven carriages on the asphalt streets.
![](https://media.sandiegoreader.com/img/photos/2021/11/22/Reader-Cover-2021-11-25-Lane-Changers-CREDIT-Jim-Wang_t360.jpg?08762bacb7cfe1fceac1012efbf2749e3290ffac)
Later that 12 months, metropolis leaders went on a regulatory binge, imposing an 8 mph pace restrict, mandating lights after darkish, and banning riders from hunching over in order that their view of the road was impaired. The Columbia Dispatch newspaper, in the meantime, railed towards riders who rode with no palms on the handlebars: “This latter class of riding is only done by those smart alecks who want to create a favorable impression upon the ladies. This practice is a very dangerous one, and every decent rider ought to hiss off the street the man who disregards the rights of others.”
Similar situations had been performed out in cities throughout the nation as the primary large bicycling craze took off, triggered by the arrival of the so-called “safety bicycle,” with pneumatic (air-filled) tires and chain drives. Church leaders blasted biking as a risk to morality due to the “indecent” bloomers worn by biking girls, whereas medical doctors warned that “over-exertion, the upright position on the wheel, and the unconscious effort to maintain one’s balance tended to produce a wearied and exhausted ‘bicycle face,’” based on an 1895 Literary Digest article.
More than 120 years later, bicycles are as soon as once more a flashpoint of controversy.
- Bicycle, bicycle , bicycle
- I wish to trip my bicycle, bicycle, bicycle
- I wish to trip my bicycle
- I wish to trip my bike
- I wish to trip my bicycle
- I wish to trip it the place I like
- — “Bicycle Race,” Queen
![](https://media.sandiegoreader.com/img/photos/2021/11/22/Coast-Highway-bike-lane-Encinitas_t720.jpg?5755a55b677da5dfc6c8e05d88cfbaffe8abac5c)
Coast Highway bike lane, Encinitas
Photograph by Thomas Okay. ARnold
What might be thought of the very first bicycle was launched to the general public in Paris by a chap named Baron von Drais in 1818, based on the Canada Science and Technology Museum. The machine had two in-line wheels related by a wood body, however no pedals. The rider straddled the contraption and pushed it along with his ft, whereas steering the entrance wheel. “It was not very efficient but it was faster than walking, and many upper-class young men found it an amusing pastime,” based on the museum’s web site. In the early 1860s, two different Frenchmen, Pierre Michaux and Pierre Lallement, got here up with the thought of including a mechanical crank drive with pedals on an enormous entrance wheel. They referred to as their machine the velocipede. By the top of the last decade, the entrance wheel had shrunk right down to the identical measurement because the rear wheel, and tubular metal frames and wheels with wire spokes had been launched. Next got here pneumatic tires and chain drives.
An Englishman, J.Okay. Starley, is credited with growing the primary trendy bicycle, the Rover, in 1885, based on The Independent. The century ended with what’s often called the Golden Age of Bicycles, when the pedal-powered two-wheelers grew to become a major mode of transportation, alongside the venerable horse and buggy and the quickly encroaching motorized vehicle.
The bicycle has been an integral a part of most of our childhoods, and most each grownup I do know has at the least one bike within the storage. Today, considerations about local weather change, an more and more health-conscious inhabitants, and rising congestion on our roads has led to what could be thought of a second Golden Age of Bicycles. The Bicycle Guider web site claims there are greater than 1 billion bikes on the planet — practically half of them in China. The United States a distant No. 2 with an estimated bicycle inhabitants of 100 million. But between 1990 and 2009, the web site claims, the variety of U.S. bike journeys greater than doubled, from 1.8 billion to 4 billion — and that was earlier than e-bikes grew to become a factor.
In September 2013, the SANDAG board of administrators authorised the Regional Bike Plan Early Action Program, a $200 million initiative to develop the San Diego County bike community with a further 77 miles of bikeways, and to complete high-priority initiatives inside a decade.
![](https://media.sandiegoreader.com/img/photos/2021/11/22/Blakespear-Bicycle-Rail-Trail-Campaign-Shot_t360.jpg?08762bacb7cfe1fceac1012efbf2749e3290ffac)
Catherine Blakespear agrees that bicycles won’t ever be the dominant mode of transportation, however argues {that a} minute swap could be useful.
Photograph courtesy Catherine Blakespear
This formidable objective has not been met, as a consequence of a wide range of elements, together with financing and governmental in-fighting. In an opinion piece revealed final August within the San Diego Union-Tribune, Jacob Mandel — till lately, the advocacy supervisor on the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition — wrote, “Eight years into the program, only 12 miles of bikeways are complete. There are an additional 13 miles under construction now, and an additional 31.5 miles of bikeway projects are nearing construction. While we are making progress, we need more of it.”
One challenge “nearing construction” is the two.3-mile Pershing Bikeway, which options buffered bike lanes and separate paths for bicyclists and pedestrians. The challenge was alleged to be accomplished in 2018, however design disagreements between town, county, and SDG&E led to a delay. “Despite being a priority for the region’s bicycle network due to high speeds and lack of adequate bicycle or pedestrian infrastructure, the delay allowed the street’s dangerous design to stay in place,” Mandel wrote. “Tragically, architect Laura Shinn was killed while cycling along Pershing Drive on July 20 in the northbound bicycle lane by a driver who struck her from behind. If our government agencies had worked together to resolve design issues and delivered the project when promised initially, the location where Laura Shinn was riding would have been a bikeway completely separated from vehicle traffic. The driver would have hit the curb separating the roadway rather than cross into the bike lane, possibly preventing the crash that killed Shinn.”
Another obstacle to bike lane building is opposition from critics in addition to elected officers who imagine authorities ought to focus extra on widening and in any other case enhancing roadways than on catering to what they contemplate the very small share of people that commonly trip their bikes. In a hilly, sprawling space like San Diego County, the overwhelming majority of individuals won’t ever abandon their automobiles for bicycles, they are saying.
These critics are lacking the purpose, argues Catherine Blakespear, mayor of Encinitas and chair of the San Diego Association of Regional Governments (SANDAG). She agrees that bicycles won’t ever be anyplace close to the dominant mode of transportation, however argues that even a minute swap could be useful. “Congestion [on our freeways and roads] is created in the last 5 percent to 10 percent, and if we can even get just 5 percent of commuters to ride their bikes instead of drive, we would reduce congestion, and people would enjoy themselves and their lives much more than sitting in traffic for hours,” she says. “Having a car as the only option is just really not what we want as humans.”
![](https://media.sandiegoreader.com/img/photos/2021/11/22/Peder-Norby-CREDIT-Thomas-K-Arnold_t720.jpg?5755a55b677da5dfc6c8e05d88cfbaffe8abac5c)
Peder Norby envisions a future during which the automotive will share the road with a variety of “micromobility” choices.
Photograph by Thomas Okay. ARnold
Blakespear maintains most locations to which individuals drive — work, faculty, the shop — are lower than 5 miles from the place they stay. “And then there are all these kids between the ages of 10 and 16 who cannot drive and could be riding their bike,” she says. “But because we haven’t truly accomplished a bike network that is safe for kids to ride, we have all these parents circling around schools and soccer practice and the beach. It’s worth investing in building the bike infrastructure so more people can ride more places and we can improve people’s lives.”
Carlsbad City Councilman Peder Norby — a former San Diego County planning commissioner and guide for the cities of Carlsbad and Encinitas (amongst different shoppers) on land use, transportation, power and agriculture — agrees. “I want to draw an analogy,” he says. “Years ago, the blufftop along the Coast Highway in Carlsbad, from Pine to Tamarack, was just asphalt ending in dirt. It was a place you just wouldn’t walk; fewer than 100 people a day would walk there, even though the bluff was directly overlooking the beach and ocean. Then, in 1985, the city built a facility that made it very safe for pedestrians — a blufftop walkway and a lower seawall. And, almost overnight, you went from a few dozen pedestrians to a few thousand people a day. Why? It’s because they felt safe and comfortable and protected. We can do the same with bikes. As long as it’s not safe, we’re not going to get there. But if you can find a way to make it safe, I believe the same thing will happen. That’s why I’m really excited about the future.”
And how, precisely, can we make bike using safer? Experts say the most secure choice is what’s referred to as a Class I Bike Path, utterly separate from vehicular visitors and reserved completely for bicyclists and pedestrians. Examples embody the San Luis Rey River Bike Trail in Oceanside, which runs alongside the San Luis Rey River; the Mission Beach Boardwalk alongside the ocean, from the tip of the Mission Beach isthmus north to Palisades Park in Pacific Beach; Bayside Walk, which winds round west Mission Bay; and 13 miles of San Diego’s famed 24-mile Bayshore Bikeway, which follows the San Diego Bay shoreline from Imperial Beach by means of Coronado. “They are absolutely the safest,” Norby says. “But in many cases, there’s simply no room to build them.”
![](https://media.sandiegoreader.com/img/photos/2021/11/22/Bicyclist-using-sharrows-where-bike-lane-and-pedestrian-walkway-converge-Encinitas-Coast-Highway_t720.jpg?5755a55b677da5dfc6c8e05d88cfbaffe8abac5c)
Bicyclist utilizing sharrows the place bike lane and pedestrian walkway converge on Encinitas Coast Highway.
Photograph by Thomas Okay. ARnold
But Nevo Magnezi, secretary and board director of native advocacy group BikeSD, counters, “There is room to build them, but not everyone prioritizes them over parking or building other infrastructure like freeways.” In its “Riding to 2050: San Diego Regional Bicycle Plan,” adopted in 2010, SANDAG referred to as for a complete of 227.8 miles of Class I Bike Paths by 2050, with 159.3 miles already in existence. Since then, solely about 20 miles of extra Class I Bike Paths have been constructed —with the latest one being the two.1-mile Rose Creek Bike Path, which opened in May 2021.
The subsequent stage of safety are Class II Bike Lanes, which initially consisted solely of white stripes painted on asphalt, with the phrases “bike lane” and silhouettes of bicycles within the middle. Some are buffered, with an additional stripe of paint to create a slender strip of no-man’s-land between automobiles and bikes. In latest years, numerous native governments have stepped up efforts to color increasingly more bike lanes, together with these in Carlsbad and Coronado, whereas others — together with town of San Diego — have experimented with giving a few of these lanes daring paint jobs to higher stand out.
These efforts haven’t all the time labored out properly. In January 2013, KPBS reported that metropolis of San Diego road crews had scrubbed out a brightly painted bike lane on busy Montezuma Road main into San Diego State University “after realizing the lane made the area no safer, and possibly more dangerous.” The diagonal, neon-green bike lane, which confirmed the place bicyclists ought to cross by means of the right-turning visitors at Collwood Boulevard, gave bicyclists a false sense of safety, prompting town to backtrack simply 4 months after the portray was achieved. City visitors division spokesman Bill Harris advised KPBS, “We were a little concerned that drivers were not going to slow, not going to notice the bicyclists as much as they should, given the fact that we seemed to be encouraging the bicyclists to cross through that lane non-stop.”
More than two years later, in September 2015, indignant residents converged on Coronado City Hall to protest the brand new bike lanes metropolis crews had been portray on the island metropolis’s streets over the summer season. One speaker chastised councilmembers for “covering Coronado with paint stripe pollution,” based on a San Diego Union-Tribune report. Another mentioned, “The graffiti on the streets does not help our property values,” whereas a 3rd maintained, “It’s very similar to personally taking all three of my daughters to a tattoo parlor and having them completely body tattooed.”
Lately, there’s been a transfer to put in protecting boundaries between bike and automotive lanes — both asphalt or concrete curbs, or plastic “candlesticks,” or typically each — to create what are referred to as “cycle tracks,” or Class IV bikeways. Encinitas lately did this alongside the Coast Highway, from Chesterfield Drive in Cardiff south to Solana Beach, and in addition alongside parts of Leucadia Boulevard. Says Blakespear, “I think one of the most exciting things we’ve done in my years as mayor has been building these protective barriers along a mile and half-long stretch of Coast Highway so people can ride to the beach safely without having to be right next to cars going 50 mph. The fear of getting hit by a car or truck is what keeps people from riding their bikes in unprotected bike lanes. If you want people to ride bikes, you need to protect them, and it makes sense that when you have a physical curb or candlestick, cars are not going to drift over into the bike lane. I’ve felt great fear in bike lanes myself, and I think protected bike lanes are something we should invest in.”
But a few of the most vehement opposition to protected bike lanes has come from bicyclists themselves. They say the protected lanes make bicyclists really feel they don’t should be as cautious as they might be in visitors lanes, and restrict their capability to swerve round pedestrians or different cyclists. Serge Issakov, a 20-year member of the San Diego Bicycle Club who serves on town of San Diego’s Mobility Board, maintains that “when you put up a barrier, you also put up a mental barrier. Bicyclists feel safe — that’s the whole selling point. But the flip of feeling safe is they are less careful because they feel nothing can happen to them, so they’re not paying as much attention. The push for physically separated cycling infrastructure implies that it’s necessary for cycling safety,” he provides. “The underlying message is that cycling on roads is inherently unsafe ,and that message, in and of itself, is very discouraging to cycling. I go so far as to call it anti-cycling advocacy, because it’s so discouraging.”
Blakespear says the bicyclists who oppose protected bike lanes represent a small minority of “vehicular bicyclists” who need bikes to have parity with automobiles. “They are very experienced cyclists who feel comfortable acting like a car, and when people in spandex and in large groups feel comfortable acting like a car, they don’t understand why other people don’t,” she says. “We’ve been putting paint on the ground for 30 years, hoping more people will ride their bikes, and it hasn’t happened.”
BikeSD’s Magnezi says the idea of “vehicular bicycling” dates again to a 1976 guide by John Forester referred to as Effective Cycling, which argued that automobiles and bikes ought to share the road. According to a 2016 Los Angeles Times editorial, Forester argued that “cyclists shouldn’t cower in the gutters, but should assert their place in the middle of a lane, where they should be afforded equal treatment by operators of motor vehicles — and the law.” But that philosophy is dying out in favor of constructing separate lanes for bikes, “blissfully segregated from bus and auto traffic by a physical partition,” based on the Times.
Magnezi says he’s had discussions with different bicycle advocacy teams all through the state, “and most of them haven’t had that sort of discourse in more than a decade. You only have that assortment of vehicular bicyclists here, in San Diego County. And they’re essentially saying, ‘You don’t need to accommodate us — the safest thing is for us to act like vehicles.’ But I think that kind of perspective only applies to a very small percentage of bicyclists. We have BikeSD members who go biking with their kids, and they’re not going to take any lane on any street where the speed limit is 25 mph or greater. They’re just not comfortable. We have meetups at a coffee shop on Park Boulevard, and one of our volunteers lives just off that street, but says she would never bike even a short distance on Park.”
If something, vehicular cyclists have pushed for extra “sharrows” — marked visitors lanes the place drivers are reminded that they’re legally required to share the road with bicyclists, even when the bikes are touring at a decreased pace. Sharrows are an more and more frequent part of what’s often called Class III Bike Routes, which usually are designated solely by indicators. “I like sharrows a lot, for a couple of reasons,” Issakov says. “One is it tells the motorist that bicyclists are allowed to be there. But more importantly, it tells bicyclists that they are allowed to ride in the middle of the lane. It makes them so much more visible and makes motorists see you so much sooner.”
Critics, nevertheless, say sharrows are a nightmare, with bicyclists who train their authorized proper to make use of the complete lane doubtlessly triggering harmful road rage from the motorists caught behind them. South Pacific Street in Oceanside is a chief instance, they are saying, with indignant motorists patiently driving behind bikes till there’s no visitors in the other way after which swerving across the bicyclists at excessive pace —which endangers pedestrians crossing the road to get to the seashore.
“I don’t think sharrows are great,” Blakespear says. “They put cars in the middle of bicycles, and for most people, that does not work.”
“Sharrows are sometimes the worst of all options,” provides Norby. “They work better on low-speed roads where there are two or more lanes. Of all the iterations you can go through to promote bike riding, you start at sharrows only if there really is no other option.”
Another controversial option to make biking safer is thru one thing referred to as “road diets,” during which a two-lane road is decreased to at least one lane and the additional area is used for a bike lane or sharrows. In 2015, a half-mile stretch of the Coast Highway south of Oceanside Boulevard often called “The Dip” was placed on a road eating regimen after a bicyclist was killed. Four lanes of visitors had been decreased to 2, and buffered bike lanes had been put in. The part of road that’s now only one lane stays a supply of frustration to motorists, because it has turn into a bottleneck that’s most of the time congested. But observers predict extra road diets alongside the Coast Highway all by means of coastal North County as it’s recast from a major artery to extra of a scenic byway.
“From my perspective as a bike rider, the most dangerous thing is relative speed,” Norby says. “If you’re on a bike and you get hit by a 4000-pound car, the rate of speed of that car is going to determine whether you live or you die. And if you look at the Coast Highway in general, the posted speed limits have been steadily decreasing. Most of it is now 35 mph; in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was Highway 5 before there was a Highway 5 and the speed limit was 65 or 70. Overall, we are in the process of rebalancing our roads. Our roads are for everyone, and we have classifications for roads. The interstate transportation system is one type of road, and that’s for cars only. Then there are prime arterials, which are mostly for cars, but we’re making room for other modes of transportation as well, because we want to give people choices. And then there are residential streets that I call jambalaya — they’re for everyone, and you’re already seeing cars, bikes, pedestrians, people walking their dogs.”
Norby envisions a close to future during which the automotive should be the dominant type of transportation, however will probably be greener and cleaner and share the road with a variety of “micromobility” choices: small, light-weight automobiles that zoom alongside at modest speeds, usually lower than 20 mph, and are pushed by customers personally. Micromobility gadgets embody bicycles, e-bikes, electrical scooters, electrical skateboards, and, sooner or later, enclosed, single- or two-seat electrical automobiles. “We can look back and say the way to get across America was covered wagons, and that worked until about 1865, when all of a sudden you could take a train across the country, and now railroads were the primary means of transportation and, poof, covered wagons were gone. Then came cars and freeways and airplanes. Our transportation choices have changed dramatically three or four times over the last 150 years, so you would be unwise to think that they will never change again. That flies in the face of history and in the face of progress. But we’re still in the preseason. The game hasn’t begun.”
Perhaps, however that doesn’t imply the struggle isn’t on. Right now, there’s a rising backlash towards a latest innovation, one which clear transportation advocates imagine will lastly make biking a viable different to the automotive, significantly for brief journeys round city: the electrical bike. According to Cycle Industry News, gross sales of e-bikes surged 145% from 2019 to 2020. And as of July, based on StreetsBlogUSA, Americans are shopping for e-bikes — which usually retail within the $1500 to $2000 vary — at a clip of 1 each 52 seconds. A surge of this magnitude is sure to create issues, significantly in seashore communities like these in coastal North County — the place Nextdoor, the social networking website for neighborhoods, has turn into a well-liked sounding board for complaints about e-bikes. “Every kid I see around here has an electric bike. What happened to good old-fashioned exercise on a regular bike and not spending that kind of money for kids that shouldn’t be on them anyway?” wrote one “neighbor” on the Olde Carlsbad microsite. “My worry is I see kids ALL the time without helmets, swerving on the street because they’re busy talking to each other, and two and three people on one bike literally with one hanging off the back end. What are these parents thinking???” Wrote one other: “I almost ran over some kids riding those e-bikes today. No helmet. Not about to tell someone else’s kid what to do, but helmets are always a great idea….” A 3rd added, “It’s going to take a lot of kids getting killed or mangled on these bikes before the lawmakers finally step in and make it so people have to have a driver’s license and wear a helmet before they get on these bikes.” Finally, a fourth: “Two days ago, I was on Donna Drive in Carlsbad and three young girls on ONE E bike zipped through the Basswood Stop sign. The driver couldn’t have been more than 12 years old and the two others looked a little younger, no helmets.” Similar chatter will be discovered on Nextdoor websites for Encinitas, the place in June, critics started circulating a petition to ban e-bikes from the Moonlight Beach space.
But advocates say there’s a studying curve for every thing, and e-bikes aren’t any exception. “I think it’s natural growing pains,” says Norby. “When you’re a teenager, you are somewhat immune to the ills of the world, and you think you’re bulletproof. But if you’re on a bike and you collide with a 4000-pound car, you’re going to lose. I look at today’s behavior and the outreach communities are doing and it’s a lot better than it was last year. Kids are wearing helmets, slowing down and stopping at stop signs. It really is an education and enforcement issue — and I’m happy they’re not in a car.”
Norby calls e-bikes “a game changer” and believes their rising reputation will result in a surge in biking, which is an effective factor, in his eyes. “A traditional bike is good for some, particularly a young athletic person, but for most of us, with the first big hill, we’re done. I’m 60 years old and I can get to the downtown village, two miles away from my house, in a few minutes.” He maintains that nearly everybody who lives in a small city or metropolis is not more than 5 miles away from that city or metropolis’s downtown, “and that is eminently bikeable.”
“Five years ago, we had a French exchange student who would ride her electric bicycle to school and she was thought to be odd,” Norby concludes. “You hardly ever saw electric bikes, and when you did, it was for someone old or with bad knees. Now, just about every high schooler is on an e-bike, and we have all age groups, from junior high to 70-year-olds, back on bikes. That’s a massive change in consumer adoption. And every single one of these people is not in a car, which cuts down on both pollution and congestion. Each of these kids is not being driven by mom or dad to the beach, or to school. The emissions aspect is real. I don’t care what you think about climate change, but I do know what Southern California was like in the 1970s and ‘80s – our air quality was just awful. Today our air is a lot better, and I know that’s because of the transportation choices we’ve made — beginning in the early ‘70s with catalytic converters and then the push for better gas mileage and, more recently, with electric cars and hybrids. So every time I see someone on an electric bike, that’s one less car that’s on the road. And that is something to be celebrated and encouraged.”
Blakespear agrees. “Electric bikes are transforming the way people get around,” she says. “Kids and adults have independence and the freedom to go much longer distances [than on regular bikes]. The important thing — and we’re doing this in Encinitas now — is to support efforts to better educate kids about safety, speed, riding in the right direction, and following traffic laws, which a lot of kids just aren’t doing. Electric bikes are one more form of transportation, and I think they’re here to stay. My entire family has electric bikes; my kids are 12 and 14 and ride them to the beach and around the city, and my husband rides his to work in Oceanside, and it’s great.”
But David Drake, a San Diego sheriff’s deputy, says that with the rise in e-bikes on the road, his division has seen a rise in complaints. Among the largest questions of safety are riders doubling up on a single-seat e-bike, not carrying helmets. and disregarding visitors legal guidelines. Riders youthful than 17 are required to put on helmets whereas on Class 1 and Class 2 e-bikes, which might attain speeds of as much as 20 mph. And all riders on Class 3 e-bikes, which might attain 28 mph, are required to put on helmets, Drake says. “It is very important to understand that the e-bike must be designed to carry passengers, and the same helmet laws apply to the rider as they do the passenger,” he says. “Most of the e-bikes I see transporting passengers are not designed for them, or the rider is not experienced or mature enough to safely transport a passenger.” Drake disagrees with Norby’s competition that issues are enhancing. “There are more e-bikes than last year,” he says, “so that is a bit like comparing apples to oranges.”
On August 31, the cities of Encinitas and Solana Beach hosted a web based e-bike security discussion board to share security suggestions, legal guidelines, and different data for riders to know. More academic outreach efforts are underway. “The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department has partnered with the cities of Encinitas, Solana Beach and Del Mar to conduct online forums to discuss e-bike safety and help raise awareness to specific e-bike classifications and regulations,” Drake says. “The San Diego Bike Coalition also reached out to the North Coastal station and we are beginning to participate in some school-based presentations with live riding skills after a short classroom discussion.”
Magnezi notes that state and native governments are engaged on methods to place much more individuals onto e-bikes. California’s E-Bike Affordability Program, which is scheduled to start in July 2022, will present $10 million in subsidies to assist individuals purchase e-bikes. SANDAG can also be eyeing incentives. “My partner and I moved to San Diego three years ago and didn’t bring a car,” he says. “My partner bought an e-bike, opened a small business in Liberty Station, and every day, she takes her e-bike from our home in Hillcrest to her business. It really makes a difference. I think a lot of people would be interested in biking a few miles regularly, but riding a [non-electric] bike any further than that is more challenging for a lot of people.” And from an environmental angle, he says, each the battery and the bike are a lot smaller and lighter than a automotive, Magnezi says, “so you’re using a fraction of the resources to get the same results, which is to get to work or the grocery store.”