Category: Transportation

Anything related to transportation, including cars, traffic, other modes of transport, and so on.

Post #1924: I bought a Chevy Bolt.

This morning I bought a three-year-old used car with just over 5,000 miles on the odometer.

Net cost, all in, just under $15K.  That’s ~$19K, out the door, at the dealer (including taxes, tags, and fees).  Less a $4K Federal tax credit.  For which I am depending on the dealer to file the critical paperwork with the IRS.

That’s a pretty good deal for any used car, these days.

The fact that it runs on electricity is a bonus.

The only thing missing is new car smell.  And for that, if I really want it, I can just buy some.

Note:  On that tax credit, you have to have sufficiently low income ($150K for married filing jointly).  Not every used EV qualifies.   Not every sale qualifies. Read the details before you even think of factoring that into your purchase decision. 

Continue reading Post #1924: I bought a Chevy Bolt.

Post #1922: Venn Diagram of Used Chevrolet Bolt Search.

A:   Not a salt-belt car.  Turns out, the majority of used Bolts for sale here in the DC area were sold new in the Northern U.S.  The cold isn’t the issue.  Multiple winters of driving on heavily-salted roads is the issue.  I don’t want a salt-belt car.

B:  No accidents, no obvious damage, no ludicrously excessive mileage.  I think the rationale there goes without saying.

C:  Dealer is not obviously a shithead.  And here, I’m not talking about the comments on Yelp (because those are always negative).  I’m just looking for a dealer where the majority of comments, on some mainstream site (e.g., cars.com), do not start off with some variation on “If I could give them negative stars … “.

As I sift through what’s listed within 25 miles of me, on Edmunds.com, this is how it shakes out.  This is what mathematicians call an over-determined system of equations.  Nothing satisfies all the constraints.  Or, the intersection of the areas is a null set.  Say it any way you like.

If I continue to pursue this, something’s going to have to give. At this point, I’m leaning toward buying a salt-belt refugee, from a seemingly decent dealer.  I mean, seriously, how much damage could three winters on salted roads cause?  Guess I may find out.

To be continued.

For the literal-minded of you, no, that’s not a proper Venn diagram of the situation. Some circles should overlap others, somewhere.  But it doesn’t look like a surprised face then, does it?  With the choice between literal mathematical correctness on a throw-away diagram, and some possible humor value, I went with attempted humor.  So sue me.  This is really more an expression of frustration over what ought to be a straightforward search for a commodity product.  But isn’t.

Post #1919: Salted Leafs and Bolts, an unexpected twist in my search for a used EV.

 

I’m in the process of narrowing down the used EVs I want to look at.

I just got a rude, but entirely logical, surprise.  It turns out that a lot of the late-model used EVs for sale in this area are salt-belt refugees.  That is, they were sold new in northern states, where they salt the roads heavily all winter long.  But were shipped south for re-sale as used vehicles.

The story.

Based on the ratings of car dealers on-line, I’ve focused on a couple of independent used car dealers in my area.  (FWIW, Kingstowne and Eastern’s Sterling).  I think maybe the phrase in italics is key, because these aren’t new-car dealers accepting trade-ins.  These are used-car dealers.

As I was doing my on-line due diligence, seeing what I can see about these cars by VIN, I happened to notice that one car I’m interested in — a 2021 low-mileage Bolt — was originally sold in Michigan.

Hmm.  Funny that this car ended up in Virginia.  But people move, and so on.  And yet …

I tracked down the original state of sale for the other two I’m focused on — 2020 and later, relatively low mileage.  Those were originally sold in Upstate New York, and Vermont.

One salt-belt car might be by chance.  But every car I’m looking at?  Highly unlikely that’s a coincidence.

I can guess what’s driving this.

EVs lose a lot of range in cold weather.  That’s a fact.  None of these cars has an efficient (heat-pump) heating system.   Also a fact.

I have to guess that:

  1. You have a lot more dissatisfied owners in cold-climate states.
  2. You get a much better resale price on these vehicles, in warm-climate states.
  3. So there’s a steady trade in shipping used EVs south for resale.

The issue isn’t that these were driven in the cold.  The battery management systems on these cars will all prevent the owners from damaging the batteries permanently by (e.g.) charging when the batteries are below 32F.

The issue is that all of these cars are salt-belt refugees.  That is, they were driven in the states where roads are heavily salted, for a significant fraction of the year.

After a few months of watching YouTube auto mechanics in salt-belt states (Watch Wes Work, from Illinois, and South Main Auto Channel, from upstate New York), one thing that comes through loud and clear is that salt is incredibly destructive.  Among the things I learned from those videos is the term “rust jacking”, which is when the accumulation of rust literally bends and breaks metal parts of the car.  Never seen that around here, and I’ve owned a lot of crappy old cars.

And so, once again, I need to stop and cool my jets, as I give this a re-think.  And look at what’s available as a used vehicle, from local new-car dealers.

Post #1918: Falling Leafs, fallen Bolts: The trend in used EV prices in my area.

 

I don’t drive much.  I haven’t had a car for a couple of years now, and have gotten along  by borrowing my wife’s car, when convenient.

I’d like to get my hands on a nice, used EV.   That’s a good choice, given that I’m going to use this for a grocery-getter and little else.

Depending on the price, of course.  And I’m clearly in no hurry to buy one.

Back in July I looked at my local market for used EVs and narrowed my best option down to a 2018 or later Nissan Leaf.  That’s laid out in a series of posts around Post #1837, and the posts just prior to that.  The year cutoff was due to a change in the Leaf battery chemistry that year, to a much more stable (long-lived) battery.

I have been checking back occasionally ever since.

And I’ve been reading articles suggesting a steep decline in the price of used EVs.  I see talk about price declines on order of 30% per year.   This is almost always attributed to the fact that most used EVs are Teslas, and Tesla made some steep price cuts to their models this past year.

In other words, a falling tide sinks all boats.  Those Tesla price cuts are rippling through the entire used EV market.

But in addition, Chevy cut the price on the Bolt last year.  Both to spur sales, and maybe because the Bolt was plagued by a significant recall due to battery fire issues in a handful of vehicles.  Chevy claims that’s taken care of, but they ended up replacing the batteries in tens of thousands of cars.

In any case, when I went back to re-assess my local market for used EVs, it sure did seem like prices were down.  So I did my best apples-to-apples comparison between what I looked at back in August, and now.  As shown above.

By my estimate, asking prices for a used late-model Nissan Leaf fell 14% in the last five months of 2023.  Or … on-order-of a 30%/year rate of decline. 

More interestingly, I can now get a used Chevy Bolt for about the same price as a used Nissan Leaf.  This is a change from the prior analysis, where my back-of-the-envelope on a Bolt of this vintage, five months ago, put the average asking price at $21,000.

But now, consistent with the decline in the Leaf price, there’s been an even steeper decline in the Bolt price.

Objectively, the Bolt looks like a lot more utility for the money.

  • The Bolt has about 90 more miles of range than the leaf (about 250, versus about 160 for the base Leaf)
  • It uses a standard (J1772) plug, instead of the soon-to-be-obsolete CHADMO plug on the Leaf.
  • It has active battery temperature management, compared to the Leaf’s passively air-cooled battery.

The sole drawback from my perspective is that the Bolt looks like a tiny little car, where the Leaf does not.  To me.  They have roughly the same interior volume, and the Bolt actually has a higher curb weight than the base Leaf.  But the Bolt is shorter by about a foot-and-a-half.  Just enough that I notice how small it is, compared to (say) the 2021 Prius that my wife drives.

For either car, if you had little enough income in the year of purchase, Uncle Sugar will give you a $4K tax rebate for purchasing that used US-made EV.  (Yep, for purchasing a used US-made EV.  Part of the Biden Administration’s buy-American industrial policy intersecting with its global warming initiatives. So, thanks, Joe Biden. I guess.)

Rumor has it that the big drop in the Bolt price is due to Chevy rehabbing and re-selling a lot of those recalled vehicles.  I’m not sure how much that is true.  What I am sure is that the Bolt looks like a pretty good option, if you trust Chevy to have fixed that rare battery issue.  If you pick and choose, you can plausibly pick up a three- or four-year-old car, with about 10K miles on it, for a net $13K or so.

This, where the only expensive component — the battery — comes with a mandatory eight-year/100,000 mile manufacturer’s warranty. Which should, in theory, take a whole lot of the risk out of this used-car transaction.  Roughly speaking, you pretty much have to get at least five years of driving out of the car, or the manufacturer (not the seller!) has to replace your battery.

As used cars go, that seems like a pretty decent deal, regardless of the fuel source.  The fact that this is the low-carbon alternative is almost gravy, at this point.   To me, based on what I’ve been looking at, this now looks like it’s just a pretty good deal on a used car.  Period.

I have to confess that the first and last Chevrolet product that I ever bought was a Chevy Vega.  It was a traumatizing experience in many regards, as those of you familiar with the history of the Chevy Vega will understand.

I guess, going on 40 years later, maybe I can find it in my heart to forgive, and give Chevy another try.

Post #1914: Pneumatic tires for wheelchair use, no good solution to the problem of flat tires.

 

This is a brief followup to the just prior post, on the use of non-pneumatic (e.g., solid rubber) tires on wheelchairs.

I’m trying to work out what I should recommend if asked to replace more wheelchair tires.  Traditional tires with air-filled inner tubes are much easier from the standpoint of the installer.  The question is dealing with the drawbacks of those from the wheelchair user’s perspective.

The only way to guarantee that a wheelchair tire won’t go flat is to use a non-pneumatic tire.  That includes solid rubber tires, and solid rubber inserts taking the place of an inner tube inside regular tires.

What I discovered in this post is that many anti-flat products available for bicyclists will not work for most wheelchairs, owing to the wheelchair’s use of narrow, high-pressure tires.

When all is said and done, between the past post and this post, I think I now have a fairly firm set of recommendations.

If you cannot tolerate a flat tire on-the-go, then opt for solid rubber tires (and not solid inserts in regular bike tires).  But mount them using the $35 steel bolt-to-the-workbench device sold specifically for mounting such tires on wheelchair rims.  Mounting them with simple hand tools is just too hard and too iffy.

If you can tolerate the occasional flat, the best option seems to be puncture-resistant tires and tubes.  All the rest of the anti-flat products available for bicycle use — chemical sealants, anti-puncture tire liners, tire “wipers, and the like — either won’t work with typical wheelchair tires, or are not available off-the-shelf in the right size or configuration for that use.

Background

Solid rubber tires and solid rubber tire inserts definitely will not go flat.  There’s no air in them in the first place.

But those tires have some drawbacks.  Per the just-prior post, both of those non-pneumatic options are difficult to install using ordinary hand tools.  In addition, solid inserts are difficult to purchase as they must match the tire fairly exactly.

Both types of non-pneumatic tires offer a harsher ride and higher rolling resistance than high-pressure pneumatic (air-filled) tires.  And there are relatively few options available in the correct size for typical wheelchair rims.

By contrast, traditional pneumatic bike tires (tire plus inner tube) are easier to purchase and install, but they have two big drawbacks.  They require frequent, routine re-inflation to maintain the correct pressure.  Otherwise they go soft, and that raises rolling resistance.  And they can go flat, unexpectedly, while you are out-and-about.

The latter is not just a problem for the high rolling resistance you get with a flat.  It’s all too easy to roll a flat bike tire right off the rim, or to damage both the rim and the tire if you keep going on a flat tire.

This post is my research into minimizing the hassle from both of those drawbacks:  routine periodic inflation, and flat tires.

Caveat 1:  In the particular case I’m looking at, my options are  24″ x 1″ or 24″ x 1-3/8″ tires.  This puts a lot of limits on the types of bike-tire solutions that can be adopted for wheelchair use.  You might have other options available if your rims can accept wider tires.

Caveat 2:  My only qualification for writing about this topic is that I’ve changed a lot of bike tires in my life.  And I happen to be friends with someone who uses a manual wheelchair.

Routine inflation:  An electric air pump can solve this problem.

Source:  https://www.homedepot.com/p/Husky-120-Volt-Inflator-H120N/325096203

Best guess, $20 and a trip to Home Depot gives an adequate way to maintain tire air pressure up to 100 PSI.

I don’t think it’s worth belaboring this.  All pneumatic bike tires lose air over time.  It’s not a leak, per se.  It’s that air diffuses through the rubber.  (The same thing happens to rubber balloons and car tires, just much faster and much slower, respectively).  The higher the tire pressure, and the thinner the tire/inner tube, the faster the tire goes soft.  There’s no way to stop it that I have ever heard of.

This means that pneumatic tires have to be topped up on a routine basis.  And in the modern world, the obvious solution for routine tire inflation is an electric air pump.

A standard full-sized manual bike tire pump doesn’t do the average wheelchair user much good for routine use.  Not only are they designed to be used while standing up, they are designed to be fast, that is, to move a lot of air with each stroke.  They do that by using a piston with a relatively large surface area.  But wheelchair users often prefer high-pressure (e.g., 140 PSI) tires, for the low rolling resistance such tires provide.  Even if a full-sized manual pump can achieve pressures like that, it takes a lot of force, owing to the large piston area.

The typical manual mini-bike-pump — the kind you take with you on a bike ride — is both slow and awkward to use.  They are slow because they have tiny little pistons, suitable for pumping tires to high pressures using only your arm muscles.  And they are awkward because they either clamp directly to the valve stem, or have just a short attaching hose, either of which essentially dictates exactly where the pump must be held, relative to the tire.  In essence, those pumps are made for emergency on-the-road use.  You can use them for routine tire maintenance, but I sure don’t.   

Compressed C02 cartridge pumps are expensive for use in keeping tires routinely inflated.  The poorly-designed ones appear hard to use, based on Amazon comments.  But even for the well-designed ones, depending on the pump and the tire, you’d be spending $1.50 and tossing away a metal C02 cartridge every time you topped off your tires.  Plus, based on what I read, C02-filled tires deflate more rapidly than air-filled tires, owing to something-something-something about the ability of C02 to diffuse through butyl rubber.  You’d turn your routine tire maintenance into a $100-a-year habit, for no particular reason.

The efficient solution is an electric tire pump. 

These days, you have your choice of 120 volt plug-in, 12 volt plug in, and rechargeable battery-operated pumps.  You only have to check a few things:

  • How loud are they?
  • Can they do high pressures?
  • How awkward are they to use?
  • How long will they last in routine use?
  • Is the battery replaceable?

And, of course, how much do they cost?  Because, near as I can tell from reading Amazon comments, the cheaper pumps tend to fail several of the checks outlined above.

I have no specific recommendation to make, other than the Home Depot offering shown above.  All I can suggest is (e.g.) reading the comments on pumps offered on Amazon.  In particular, a lot of cheaper battery-operated pumps cannot produce high pressures despite what the Amazon listing might say.  When in doubt, get one that plugs into the wall.

Avoiding flats:  Nothing is bulletproof

If you absolutely, positively must not have a flat tire, the only real option is solid, non-pneumatic tires.  In this section, I’m shooting for two things:

  1. A tire and tube setup that minimizes the risk of catastrophic flats.
  2. A simple, no-maintenance pump that can be kept on the wheelchair for emergency use as needed.

The pump is easy.  Any C02-cartridge inflator that fits comfortably in the hand should be adequate, as would a standard bicycle mini-pump with the addition of an extension hose.  Either would be small enough to be stored long-term on the wheelchair itself.

But finding a combination to minimize the chance of a wheelchair flat is hard, owing in part to the small size and high pressure of the typical wheelchair pneumatic tire.  Puncture sealants (e.g., Slime (r)) do not appear to work at high pressure.  Puncture proof tire liners do not appear to be available in the narrow widths required for wheelchair tires.  The only options that work for typical wheelchair rims combine relatively expensive “puncture-resistant” tires with relatively expensive “thorn-resistant” inner tubes.  Even with that, neither of those is likely to stand up to an ill-placed tack, nail, or screw.

So the bottom line is that there is no good anti-flat solution for pneumatic wheelchair tires. The best you can hope for is that any puncture is small enough that you can inflate the tire, on the go, enough to get you someplace where you can swap out the wheel.

Tire and tube setup.

An important restriction is that the only tires that I know will fit the rims I’ve been working with are 24″ x 1″, and 24″ x 1-3/8″ tires, designed for use with inner tubes.  These are narrow by bicycle standards, and that limits choices quite a bit.

Puncture-resistant tire liner:  No off-the-shelf option in this size. 

Source:  Amazon.com

These are (typically) just a tough piece of flexible plastic, designed to turn aside (e.g.) thorns.  Note what the original Mr. Tuffy tire liners don’t say:  Nails, tacks, screws, staples, and similar.  Given that I’ve had nails go right through the tread of a steel-belted radial car tire, I’m pretty sure a piece of plastic isn’t going to stop them in a bike tire.

But it’s moot anyway.  Near as I can tell, all the ones made for bicycles are too large for 1-3/8″ tires, and are certainly too large for 1″ tires.  For the Mr. Tuffy brand, 24″ wheel sizing starts at 1.95″ and goes up from there.

At best, I could cut them down and use them.  But I’d have to sand down the edges to be sure that the tire liners themselves didn’t cut the tube.

Tire sealants:  Dubious in higher-pressure tires.

Slime (r) does not make ready-made self-sealing inner tubes sized for a 1-3/8 tire.  That said, the original Slime (r) sealant was sold in bottles, to be squeezed into a bike inner tube after removing the valve core.  So it’s easy enough to make self-sealing 1″ or 1-3/8″ tubes from standard tubes and a bottle of Slime (r).  By reputation, this will stop (or greatly slow) leaks from small punctures for about two years.  After which, I think you have to remove and replace the old tubes.

So that’s an option.  Based on what I read on the internet, Slime works, somewhat.  Won’t stop a rip or tear in the tire.  May not seal fully.  But gives you enough sealant to get home on a tire with a small puncture.

This seemingly-knowledgeable user provides a major caveat:

Tire pressures above 45 psi are less effective at sealing, and above 60 psi, don’t expect any effectiveness at all.

Oddly, Slime (r) itself does not mention this limitation.  But now that I Google Slime (r) and tire pressure, I see warnings in multiple locations that Slime (r) and similar sealants will not work well in high-pressure tube tires.  I’m not entirely sure how accurate that is, but until proven otherwise, that’s a caveat for tires in the 100 to 140 PSI range.

FWIW, a competing product in this segment — Flat Out — specifically says “fat tire bikes” (reference).  The implication there is that this sealant would not work in (e.g.) road bikes with high-pressure tires.

Beyond that, Slime has a reputation for sometimes causing problems such as blocked valve stems.  All things considered, Slime (r) may be reasonable for low-pressure (“fat”) bike tires, but whether or not it will work well and without issues for thin, high-pressure wheelchair tires is an open question.

A final issue is the use of Slime (r) in mounted tires that might be stored, unused, for a considerable length of time.  Rumor has it that Slime (r) can “pile up” in the low section of the tire.  If you’re getting close to the point where the Slime loses its ability to flow, you may end up picking up a replacement wheelchair tire only to find that the low section of the tire (as stored) is now solidified Slime.

Puncture-resistant tire:  Expensive and somewhat effective.

As with tire liners, these aren’t a bulletproof solution.  It’s puncture-resistant, not puncture proof.  Near as I can tell, the only puncture-resistant tire marketed in the 24″ x 1-3/8″ size in the U.S. is marketed as a wheelchair tire.  Hence it costs two or three times as much as a regular tire.

Puncture-resistant tube:  Expensive, effectiveness unknown.

There are a handful of “thorn-resistant” (that is, extra-thick) inner tubes marketed in the 24″ x 1-3/8″ size.  These appear to cost about two to four times as much as a regular inner tube.  As with puncture-resistant tires, these are unlikely to stop a tack, nail, or screw.  Whether they provide any additional resistance to punctures from man-made objects, I don’t know.

Run flat tire:  No option in this size.

There are now foam inserts for bike tires that provide some degree of run-flat capability.  These are oriented toward tubeless tires typically used by (e.g.) bike racers.  Near as I can tell, there is no run-flat tire option available for something as small as 24″ x 1-3/8.

Tire wipers:  Maybe, but requires D-I-Y mounting.

A final offering for minimizing punctures goes by various names, but probably “tire wipers” is sufficiently descriptive.  These are typically wires that ride lightly on the tire, and knock off any solid debris that has stuck to the tire, including tacks, nails, and thorns.  The idea is that it typically takes several tire revolutions for such debris to penetrate the tire, and if you can knock it away, it won’t puncture the tire.  These typically mount (e.g.) the same place as the brake calipers on a bike, which means that you’d have to device a custom mounting for use in a wheelchair.

Emergency pump:  C02 inflator or Standard bike mini-pump plus long adapter hose.

Based on what I read on the internet, plenty of wheelchair users adopt standard bike mini-pumps for tire inflation.  These pumps are capable of reaching the (e.g.) 140 PSI required for high-pressure tires, but tend to be slow to inflate a tire, because of that.

The main drawback that I see, for on-the-go use, is that most of these pumps require direct attachment to the valve stem. That means that the user would have to hold the pump to the side, stabilize it on the wheel, and pump up the tire in that awkward position.

I think it’s far easier just to add a two-foot air hose, readily available from Amazon.  That would allow a person seated in a wheelchair to inflate the wheel by holding the pump comfortably in the lap, rather than leaning over to manipulate a pump directly attached to a valve stem.

But by far the most obvious solution is a C02 inflator.  These are compact enough to be held in one hand, and so should be readily usable by a seated wheelchair user to inflate a low tire on-the-go.  A single small (16 gram) C02 cartridge should be adequate to bring a 24″ x 1-3/8 tire up to a reasonable working pressure.

A battery-operated rechargeable tire pump is a distant runner-up.  Most of these are relatively bulky.  Many of the less expensive ones cannot generate high pressures.  And even with that, the batteries would slowly self-discharge, meaning that the user would have to remember to charge the pump periodically.  That’s just begging to find that the battery is dead, just when you need it the most.

Conclusion

For pneumatic wheelchair tires, periodic maintenance of tire pressure isn’t much of an issue.  Reliable plug-in electric inflator pumps capable of 100 PSI are readily available.  These can be had with reasonably long air hoses, allowing the user considerable leeway in hooking the pump up to the valve stem.  All that is required is remembering to use it on a regular basis.

The big problem is flat tires while out-and-about.  There, many of the off-the-shelf solutions available to bicyclists — in-tire sealants, puncture-resistant liners, run-flat tires, and “tire wipers” — are not available (off-the-shelf) for narrow, high-pressure pneumatic tires typically used on wheelchairs.

That only leaves puncture-resistant tires and tubes.  Those may slow down the rate at which flats occur, but neither of those will stop sharp metal objects such as tacks, nails, or screws.

I guess my bottom line is this.  If you can tolerate the occasional flat tire, then go with high-end “puncture resistant” tires and tubes.  Forget Slime (r), tire liners, tire wipers, and similar makeshift solutions.  If not, I’d go with solid-rubber tires (not inserts), along with the steel bench-mounted tool used to install those tires safely on wheel rims.

Post #1908: I returned a broken jar of jam to Amazon today …

 

… and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that.

I packed it in something leak-proof and put a Post-It on it saying “broken glass”.  But I didn’t even need a box, as I dropped it off at the Amazon returns counter at my local Whole Foods.

But …

Shipping a broken jar of jam is clearly fundamentally stupid.

And yet …

Shipping a broken jar of jam was the right thing to do.

I will now outline the whole series of events, so that I may justify to myself what I just did.  But it boils down to “there’s no way to tell Amazon that I should just toss this in the trash”.

So … you want your money back, you want to play by the rules?

Then you ship them back their broken jar of jam.

Do be do be do

Amazon gives you the option of having a week’s packages all delivered on one given day.  Friday, for me.  That’s instead of having different orders arriving throughout the week.

Trying to be a good do-bee, I take them up on that option. Particularly at this time of year, when I’m ordering Christmas presents.  I do it because I think it’s (ever-so-slightly) more environmentally friendly, but mostly because it cuts down (for Amazon) the total work involved in delivering my packages.

I’d guess that means a greater likelihood of getting a large carton packed with multiple unrelated items.  (Compared to having items arriving on different days.)  But I’m not sure about that.

At any rate, today’s shipment had a $10 jar of fancy jam, broken, inside a multi-item carton.  The carton had a lot of empty space with no filler material.  Not a good plan when you’re shipping glass jars.  The only thing that prevented that jar from painting the inside of the carton with jam was a single layer of bubble wrap taped around the jar.  As it was, I had to sponge smears of jam off the rest of the items in the box.

Despite this, I still think having all your Amazon packages delivered one day a week is the do-bee way.  When feasible.  But I might reconsider that after this event.

What to do about the broken jar of jam?

Amazon returns

So I go on-line, to get Amazon to send a replacement or refund for that $10 jar of fancy Christmas-present jam that got smashed.

Amazon says, sure old buddy, no problem.  When are you going to return the first one to us?

And I’m like, return it?  God no.  That’s just plain stupid.  It’s a mess.  Its a smashed jam jar, held together by leaking bubble wrap.  It needs to go straight into the trash.

On the Amazon on-line form, there’s no check box for that.  Or anything like that.  No option for “trust me, you don’t want this back”.  If I want a replacement or a refund, I need to return it.

I know that, in theory, I can somehow get in touch with somebody at Amazon and they may OK a refund without the stupidity of returning the jar of jam.    But I didn’t want to go to that effort of working my way through their customer service process trying to find somebody to do that for me.

(I once had an empty package delivered from Amazon.  You think it’s tough returning a broken jar of jam, try returning the contents of an empty package.  That’s how I know that if you can find a human, you can at least sometimes get an exception to what’s shown on the return form.)

And as an economist, I can see that’s its an open invitation to criminal abuse if you let people easily claim a refund without returning the items refunded.  So I have no problem at all if Amazon wants you to have to jump through hoops to do that, as a matter of course.  I just wasn’t up to hoop-jumping today.

What to do?  To get my money back,  I have to ship a broken, oozing jar of jam as if it were merchandise.

Either that, or cut my way through Amazon customer service.

Shipping it is, then.

Nesco to the rescue

One uses the gizmo pictured above, plus special plastic bags, to produce vacuum-sealed food.  Or, in this case, vacuum-sealed garbage.  The bags are heat-sealed (i.e., melted shut), and so are leak-proof as long as the seal doesn’t fail.

I duly sealed the broken jar (bubble wrap, oozing jam, and all) inside a seal-a-meal bag, along with two big sticky notes saying “Broken Glass”.  This, to prepare it for its journey back to Amazon.

I then drove to my nearby Whole Foods, and handed that over the Amazon return counter there.  If you return it that way, you don’t have to pack it in a box.  Whole Foods staff handle that in some fashion.

The guy at the counter was, I think, the biggest person I had ever seen working a counter at Whole Foods.  Big and tall, like a college linebacker.  Neither here nor there, merely unexpected.  The Whole Foods clerks in this area tend to be fit 20-somethings.  This was like seeing a bear onstage among the ballerinas.

I let the clerk at the return counter know I was returning a broken jar of jam, with my apology for shipping back something that stupid.

He didn’t bat an eye.  Took the package, scanned the QR code Amazon had given me (displayed on my phone), and said I was done.  As far as Amazon was concerned, it has been returned.  They’ll send an email shortly.

The entire return transaction took about ten seconds.  He practically had to shoo me away, as I stood there in disbelief.  I thanked him profusely, and walked off to pick up a few grocery items while I was at a grocery store.

In any case, when I decided to return it, I was betting that this ridiculous return has relatively modest environmental impact, relative to just tossing it in the trash.  The fact that you don’t have to box your item probably means that they fill a bin with returns, at Whole Foods, then everything gets trucked to some Amazon return center.

I probably used no more than one KWH for the in-town round trip to the store, which would equate to about 0.65 lbs C02 emissions here in Virginia.  Full trucks, by contrast, are vastly more efficient than empty autos, for moving freight, on order of 100 ton-miles per gallon of fuel.  Pro-rated to my 12 ounce jam jar, the fuel cost from Whole Foods back to Amazon was nugatory.  So I’m hope-guessing that the entire return trip “to Amazon” resulted in release of less than a pound of C02.  If I’d decided to toss that $10 item in the trash and take the loss, for environmental reasons, that would have worked out to a ludicrous $20,000 per ton C02 avoided.

That in no way suggests that it’s smart to return a broken jar of jam to Amazon.  It remains fundamentally stupid.  It’s just that if I’m going to burn up $10 to save the environment, there are for more effective ways to burn it.

This takes no account of the effort and energy expended after this broken jar of jam gets back to Amazon.  I have no firm idea of what happens after I hand my return over the counter at Whole Foods.  Presumably, between my reason for return, the big yellow stickies inside the package saying “Broken Glass”, and the purple goop encapsulated in the vacuum-seal bag, oozing around the bubble wrap, somebody along the line will have the good sense to throw this away.  It’s just a question of how much effort it takes to do that.

The upshot is that, no matter how stupid it seems, returning the smashed jar of  jam to Amazon was not a particularly bad thing to do.  (Assuming my sanitary packing holds up.)  It turned out to be almost no hassle, given that I owned a vacuum sealer (though a zip-lock might have been acceptable too, for all I know.)  Tossing it in the trash, solely to avoid C02 emissions, would have been ludicrously inefficient.

Plus, damnit, they owed me a new one.

Will I ever see this jam again?

It got me to wondering.  In Amazon comments, you will frequently (enough) read of somebody who claims to have gotten an obviously used item sent to them as a new item.  The presumption is that the vendor got a return, and sent them a returned item instead of a brand-new item.

I now wonder about the extent to which this is an urban legend.  Or not.  I see it enough, from a wide enough variety of people, that I’m thinking it’s true, and not an urban legend.

And sure enough, here’s what a CNBC article says about those returns.  Amazon will return the merchandise to the seller, at the seller’s option.

When an item can’t be sold as new, Amazon gives the seller up to four options for what to do with returns: each with a fee: Return to Seller, Disposal, Liquidation, or (by invitation only for now) Fulfillment by Amazon Grade and Resell.

Presumably, the original vendor can tell Amazon (for a fee) just to dump this particular return.  And this whole sad episode will come to a close.

Closure

Is it any wonder that I am increasingly baffled by the modern world.

Shipping a broken jar of jam is clearly fundamentally stupid.

Shipping a broken jar of jam was the right thing to do.

In any case, it’s Amazon’s problem now.

Post #1853: Urban bicycling really is as dangerous as it looks.

 

Bottom line:  Per mile, risk of death on a bicycle is about thirteen times higher than risk of death in a car/SUV/van.  Calculation shown below.

Background

I read a story in the Washington Post today, about a woman who was killed while bicycling, in the bike lane, alongside River Road in Bethesda.  Crushed by a careless commercial truck driver making a right turn.  Leaving behind a husband and two young kids.

The truck driver was given the maximum sentence allowed by law, which in this case was a $2000 fine.  And a brief moment of shame in court.  He’s still on the road, driving a truck.

I looked up the accident scene on Google, and it was the worst kind of grudging, cheap, zero-effort retrofit urban bike lane that the very least of your tax dollars can produce. Based on historical images, they took a narrow, disused shoulder of a 35-MPH urban arterial highway, and painted little arrows and bike icons in it. 

Well, there’s your bike lane, right there.  Problem solved.   The result of that zero-effort accommodation of bicyclists is every bit as safe as you might reasonably expect.

Above, the middle red circle is the site of death.  It’s just one of many driveways opening into the busy commercial establishments that line the road.  It’s located just 500 feet from the Capital Crescent Trail, a dedicated bike path whose road-crossing bridge can be seen circled in the background.  Which is almost certainly why they bothered to re-paint the road shoulder.

In the foreground is a sign.  Based on Google street view, that sign was only placed there a few months ago.  If you don’t routinely bike in an urban area, you’d think that sign was there to remind motorists to use caution, and look before they turn.  But for that purpose, in this context, a sign like that is useless.  Motorists don’t even perceive signs like that, in the crowded visual field of an urban motorway, at 35 MPH and up.  The actual, practical purpose of the sign is to warn bicyclists and pedestrians that they are in the middle of a war zone, and that they should act accordingly if and as possible.

But in this situation, there’s not much a bicyclist can do.  The bike lane appears to be just under 3′ wide.  The curb is about a foot to your right, so there’s no escape in that direction.  Your life depends on the caution and good sense of the drivers passing a couple of feet to your left.

A slender reed, for sure.

But is it really as dangerous as it looks?

Yes it is. 

And, for some reason, this appears to be an answer that absolutely infuriates bicycle advocates.  Not because they don’t want to make roadways safer for bikes.  But simply because they don’t want to believe that there are significant downsides to bicycle transport in America.  This, even if everybody grasps what a drag it is to (e.g.) bike in bad weather.

(And, to be clear, I’m a lifetime bicycling enthusiast.  But I’m also a realist.)

Years ago, I did the homework to answer this question, to my own satisfaction.  I came up with an estimate that bicycling is about ten times as dangerous as driving, per mile traveled.  That’s in terms of risk of death.  It’s even higher in terms of risk of injury requiring medical attention.  Those specific calculations are lost in the mists of time.  So I thought I might update and document that here.

Any estimate of bicycling safety ends up combining data from two separate sources. That’s always a risk for accuracy, but it is what it is.

Information on traffic-related deaths comes from a motor vehicle crash reporting system maintained by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.  Whatever its limitations, that’s the U.S. gold standard for counting traffic-related fatalities in the U.S.

(Secondarily, if you have an interest, you can use nationally-available hospital statistics from the U.S. Public Health Service’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project to find the number of hospitalizations and outpatient visits related to bicycle accidents.  But non-fatal injuries actually show an even grimmer picture for bicycling versus driving, so it’s probably sufficient to settle on an estimate of risk-of-death while bicycling versus driving, per mile.)

So, bicyclists accounted for about 2.4% of all U.S. traffic deaths in 2020.  That figure is roughly constant over time.

Information on bicycle-miles traveled comes from the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS).  This is based on a log-diary survey of thousands of U.S. households, capturing how and why they traveled over the course of a week.  Near as I can tell, it’s the only nationally-representative information on actual use of bicycles versus other modes of transportation.

Source:  2017 National Household Travel Survey

Based on that large, nationally-representative log-diary survey, bicycle transport accounted for 0.2% of all U.S. household transportation, or about 8.5 billion bicycle-miles per year in 2017.  (Sounds like a lot until you realize there are about 330 million U.S. residents, so that works out to about 25 bike-miles per person per year.)

We have to re-calculate the percentages above, to restrict this to cars versus bikes.  After that, it’s just simple math.

Summary.

Yes, bicycle transportation really is as dangerous as it looks, as you drive along the road.

Using two gold-standard U.S. databases, bicycling appears vastly riskier than driving a car.  In this most recent calculation, I estimate about 13 times higher risk of death, per mile, on a bike, versus in a car.  That’s reasonably consistent with the estimate I got years ago. 

And, as I recall, if you expand to non-fatal injuries requiring medical attention, the relative risk is actually much higher.  More like 50 or 60 times the risk, per mile.  That’s for the obvious reason that a collision that produces only minor bumps and scrapes to car occupants can produce severe wounds to an unprotected bicyclist.

Four things are worth noting.

First, the absolute risk is low.  If you bicycle 1000 miles a year — which is a lot — your risk of death-via-bike is about 0.01% per year.

Second, for older adults, the exercise benefit vastly outweighs the crash risk.  This is another one that I did the homework years ago, then lost the analysis somewhere.  For the average 65-year-old man, all-causes risk of death is about 2% per year.  Best available research suggests that frequent vigorous exercise roughly cuts that in half.  The health benefits of frequent bicycling likely outweigh the risk-of-traffic-death by an order of magnitude or two.

Third, on paper at least, walking around traffic is more hazardous than bicycling. I’m not sure to the extent this is driven solely by work-related pedestrian accidents in big cities.  But whatever the cause, this too seems plausible.  In effect, we let amateurs drive 3-ton pieces of machinery, at high speed, around crowds, with virtually no enforcement of rules or penalties for engaging in risky behavior.  It’s a wonder that so few pedestrian deaths result.

Finally, if you do a deep dive in the FARS database, you’ll find that dead pedestrians and dead bicyclists have something in common with dead drivers.  An astounding fraction of them are dead drunk at the time.  Roughly half, in each case.  The moral of the story is that BUI and WUI are maybe not as deadly to others as DUI, but they clearly up your risk of death on the roadways.

But in this case, that’s irrelevant.  It was broad daylight, and the victim was returning from a school function for her kids.  The death was just the result of a toxic combination of thoughtless, zero-effort bike lane design, and bad luck.  Ten seconds sooner, or ten seconds later, and she’d have been fine.  It’s just an unavoidable risk of bicycling in most urban areas of the U.S.