Dealers across the country are running out of new cars to sell that qualify for the program. (Photo source: IFCAR at Wikimedia Commons)
Two billion dollars is being added to
the very popular Cash for Clunkers
program. The original one billion dollars
is almost gone. But, Lester Graham
reports, there’s a shortage of new cars
that qualify for the program:
Transcript
Two billion dollars is being added to
the very popular Cash for Clunkers
program. The original one billion dollars
is almost gone. But, Lester Graham
reports, there’s a shortage of new cars
that qualify for the program:
The National Automobile Dealers Association says they’ve been hearing from dealers across the country who’ve been running out of new cars that qualify for the program.
Steve Demers is the General Manager of Cueter Chrysler Jeep Dodge in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a state where Cash for clunkers has been especially popular.
“There’s virtually no vehicles available, so there are other areas in the country that may not be as – the program has not been as popular – so we’re able to pluck some of that inventory out of their states, but it’s a nation-wide problem. I mean, we’re out many, many states away, thousands of miles before we can find a vehicle that can be brought in for one of our custormers.”
Factories are shipping more cars to the dealers but can’t keep up with demand.
185,000 gas-guzzling clunkers have been turned in to be scrapped in exchange for the government incentives.
Car buyers get up to 4,500 dollars toward buying a new fuel-efficient model.
Cars stacked up and waiting to be shredded at United Iron and Metal in Baltimore, MD. (Photo by Tamara Keith)
The scrap heap, what's left of hundreds of cars and other metal waste after they go through a shredder. (Photo by Tamara Keith)
Engines in storage at All Foreign Auto Parts. This is the one piece of the car that absolutely can't be resold under the Cash for Clunkers program. (Photo by Tamara Keith)
The federal Cash for Clunkers
program kicked off this weekend,
and dealerships were pushing it
hard to sell new cars. The program
was created by Congress last month
to give a boost to the struggling
auto industry while helping the
environment. The idea is to get
older polluting cars off the road
for good and replace them with
new more-efficient ones. Tamara Keith has this report
on what will happen to all the
clunkers:
Transcript
The federal Cash for Clunkers program kicked off this weekend, and dealerships
were pushing it hard to sell new cars. The program was created by Congress last
month to give a boost to the struggling auto industry while helping the environment.
The idea is to get older polluting cars off the road for good and replace them with
new more-efficient ones. Tamara Keith has this report on what will happen to all the
clunkers:
Car dealers suddenly have a whole bunch of cars on their lots they have absolutely
no use for. The clunkers cannot be re-sold. That would defeat the whole green goal
of the program.
So all those old trucks and sagging sedans, they’re headed to places like M and M
Auto Parts in Stafford, Virginia. Most of us would call it a junk yard. But don’t tell
that to owner Rick Morrow.
“Long before green was popular, this kind of operation, even though a lot of people
said, ‘Oh junk yard.’ But they were actually recycling cars. They were making use of
what the component was built for in the first place.”
His company’s logo prominently features a large green recycling symbol.
“This is the dismantling area where after the cars come are inventoried and then take
them apart.”
Morrow’s business is all about re-use. A fender, or a tail light, or maybe an alternator
from this car will live to see another day in a car that needs a replacement part.
You’d think Morrow would be totally excited about Cash for Clunkers. But he’s not.
Because the one component from the clunkers that absolutely cannot be re-sold is
the engine – pretty much the most valuable thing in the car.
“If we do a few dozen cars and it looks like it’s costing us more money than it’s worth,
we’ll say, ‘sorry.’”
From an environmental perspective, it absolutely makes sense to prevent those
engines from ever polluting again. But, from a business perspective it’s a real
problem for the nation’s auto recyclers.
“It will make it extremely hard to make money on a car.”
Scotty Davis is the vice president of All Foreign Auto Parts in Fredericksburg
Virginia. He says it costs him $1800 in labor to take apart a car.
“It’s going to cost me money to do this. It’s one of these things. I have to bring the
car in. I have to get rid of the tires. I have to get rid of all the fluids, the freon,
process it – just to crush the vehicle.”
Davis specializes in newer foreign vehicles. Parts from a clunker won’t help stock
his shelves. But he feels like he has to take the cars to stay in the good graces of
the auto dealers he sells parts to.
“And I’ll be very honest with you. A couple of them I do a lot of business with, I said,
‘I will take your cars.’ And they said, ‘what are you going to do with them?’ I’m going
to crush ‘em. I mean they’re not of any value.”
(sound of a shredder yard)
Once all the usable parts are removed, and the toxic chemicals cleaned out, most
cars will end up at a scrap yard like United Iron and Metal in Baltimore.
“Right now you can see the tail end of a car coming on the conveyor belt down into
the shredder.”
“A tremendous amount of friction is going on as these hammers are pulverizing that
car into small pieces.”
Bruce Savage is with the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries – a trade group. It
only takes 15 seconds, and when the shredder is done with a car, it isn’t even
recognizable.
“That big pile over there is the end result. It’s just a big pile of metal pieces.”
Savage says the metal is then sold. Whether scrap recyclers will cash in on Cash
for Clunkers all depends on the commodities prices for metal in the coming months.
“What was an old car can become a new car or can become a dishwasher or siding
for a home. It depends on the materials. But everything is being reused,
reprocessed and renewed.”
So maybe a 1989 suburban can be reborn as a 2010 Ford Focus Hybrid.
‘Cash for clunkers’ became popular before all the rules were final. For the past few weeks there’s been a growing backlog of orders at dealerships.
(Photo by Samara Freemark)
Today is the first official day of the cash for clunkers program. The government program offers you up to $4500 to trade in your gas guzzling car for a more fuel efficient new car. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
Today is the first official day of the cash for clunkers program. The government program offers you up to $4500 to trade in your gas guzzling car for a more fuel efficient new car. Lester Graham reports:
The goal is to clean up the environment and give sagging new car sales a boost.
‘Cash for clunkers’ became popular before all the rules were final. For the past few weeks there’s been a growing backlog of orders at dealerships.
At Varsity Ford in Ann Arbor, Michigan, people have been seeing if their clunkers qualify, and picking out a new car that they’ll finally be able to drive off the lot today.
Matt Stanford sells cars there. He says as far as he’s concerned, ‘cash for clunkers’ is already a success.
“We’re going to sell new cars. We’re going to get cars that don’t really need to be on the road off the road.”
The National Autobmobile Dealers Association says some dealerships have been holding off until they learned more about the rules of ‘cash for clunkers’ which were just cleared up last Friday.
The clunkers will be scrapped. The cash ends when the one-billion dollars in government money runs out.
A phantom traffic jam is when everyone slows down or stops, but starts to go again inexplicably (Photo source: Crazytales at Wikimedia Commons)
According the the last report from
the Texas Transportation Institute,
traffic congestion in the US causes
more than four-billion lost hours stuck
in traffic and nearly three-billion
gallons of wasted fuel. Lester Graham
reports mathmeticians have found – on
paper – one type of traffic jam looks
something like a bomb going off:
Transcript
According the the last report from
the Texas Transportation Institute,
traffic congestion in the US causes
more than four-billion lost hours stuck
in traffic and nearly three-billion
gallons of wasted fuel. Lester Graham
reports mathmeticians have found – on
paper – one type of traffic jam looks
something like a bomb going off:
Phantom traffic jams are frustrating. You know the kind – traffic slows downs or completely stops, and when you finally get to the end, there’s no wreck, no closed lane – nothing.
Mathematicians at MIT say these phantom jams are a lot like detonation waves produced by explosions.
Morris Flynn is the lead author of the report published in the online edition of Physical Review E.
“You have a single person who taps on their brakes. The driver behind them will over-react, hit their brakes just a little bit harder than the person in front. And this disturbance is just cascaded all the way back so that eventually you get this very rapid deceleration.”
And, phantom traffic jam.
Solutions: more lanes on the highway, and automated signs that warn drivers about slowed traffic ahead.
Kathryn Stewart and her boyfriend Roger Williams have gone car-free in Phoenix. They live 30 miles apart, so it can be a very long bike ride to see each other. (Photo by Rene Gutel)
The cars we drive pump out a lot of pollution. The average car puts out about 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year. So whenever we drive, we’re adding to the global warming problem. To cut down on that pollution, there are some people who are giving up their cars altogether. They’re joining a movement called the “World Carfree Network.” Rene Gutel reports on one of their members:
Transcript
The cars we drive pump out a lot of pollution. The average car puts out about 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year. So whenever we drive, we’re adding to the global warming problem. To cut down on that pollution, there are some people who are giving up their cars altogether. They’re joining a movement called the “World Carfree Network.” Rene Gutel reports on one of their members:
Kathryn Stewart doesn’t own a car. She’s never even had a driver’s license. She’s an editor at a publishing company and commutes mostly by bus and by bicycle.
And while you might think you know plenty of people like Stewart, especially in big cities such as New York or Chicago, consider this: Stewart lives in Phoenix – the land of freeways and strip malls and summers that top 115 degrees.
“Honestly it’s really difficult in Phoenix. It’s challenging but not impossible if you’re really committed to it. It takes a lot of advance planning.”
(sound of street)
Stewart’s work is just a few miles away, but it takes her half an hour to get there.
She says one of the hardest parts of being carfree in Arizona are those broiling summer days. But she has a secret weapon – a heat-shielding umbrella that she daintily refers to as her parasol.
“My parasol is great. I don’t care how I look – it’s amazing.” (laughs)
But major cities in the US aren’t necessarily built for people who like to walk to work. This is especially true in the West.
Carol Johnson is a planner for the city of Phoenix. She says this is due, in part, to a theory that was popular in the 1960s, when everything was planned for the car.
“This is my opinion, maybe there were some efficiencies of scale in terms of infrastructure – if you only had to put one road in, even it was six lanes wide, that was more efficient.”
But a lot of cities now are trying to get people out of their cars. They want to cut pollution and ease traffic problems.
The mayor of New York, for example, proposed a fee on cars to get more people to take public transit. And San Francisco hosts “CarFree Days” where they promote walking, running, and bicycling.
(sound of biking outdoors)
Okay so this may all sound well and good, but what does being carfree mean for Kathryn Stewart’s social life? How does she meet people and have any fun in this city built for cars?
Turns out she manages. She and her boyfriend – Roger Williams – see each on weekends. They like to take bike rides.
“We going right or left, Roger? Take a left. After these cars.”
They live about 30 miles apart – not a long car trip, but by bike, the ride can take two and a half hours. Williams owns a car, but he figured out pretty early on in their relationship that a willingness to be carfree was a good way to impress her.
Williams: “The first real date that we did, I surprised her and she was asking me questions, oh what are we going to do? Where are we going to go? And I’m like, it’s a surprise but we’ll be able to walk the whole date.”
Gutel: “So you were like the carfree Casanova?”
Williams: (laughter) “I love it! I saw the opportunity and I seized the opportunity.”
Stewart and Williams also encourage each other to be healthy and have less of an impact on their environment by the foods they eat. But being carfree, that’s the main sacrifice.
“I really feel like I’m making a big dent, cause, you know, there’s a lot that people say you can do, make small changes, do this, do that, but when you don’t have a car, it’s automatically, like, a big change.”
Stewart says she realizes it’s big change most people would have a hard time with. But it’s a choice she’s dedicated to in order to do something about global warming.
Just how easy is it to hoof it in your 'hood? A Seattle software company
called FrontSeat created WalkScore.Com. The programmeers claim the site indicates whether a
neighborhood offers residents enough amenities to get out of their cars. They hope people will
consider the site's "walkability" scores when choosing a place to live. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Here's a screen capture of results for the heart of Chicago's Logan
Square neighborhood. FrontSeat derives the walkability score from various
data sources, but the biggest factor is what businesses, parks,amenitites are present within
a mile's walking distance from a particular address. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Here's a real-life snapshot of the address rated in the previous
slide. Programmers for the Walk Score Web site say the many businesses huddled together in
this Chicago neighborhood give the area a score just shy of a "walker's paradise." (Photo by Shawn Allee)
A walkability activist in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood says
even a "walkable" neighborhood can have particular patches of street that intimidate
pedestrians. Ben Helphand says walkers who travel past this corner have to compete with
cars that dart in and out of the gas station. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Picking a place to live can be a huge
environmental decision. Some people argue
if you can walk to everything you need, you’ll
stay out of your car, and that will cut air
pollution. But how do you compare how ‘walkable’
one place is to another? Shawn Allee looks at a Web site that aims to make that a breeze:
Transcript
Picking a place to live can be a huge
environmental decision. Some people argue
if you can walk to everything you need, you’ll
stay out of your car, and that will cut air
pollution. But how do you compare how ‘walkable’
one place is to another? Shawn Allee looks at a Web site that aims to make that a breeze:
When urban planners want to know exactly how ‘walkable’ a neighborhood is, they
commission a study, and get results in weeks or months.
One computer programmer says this approach is poky.
“And so we built a piece of software that would let anyone look up to what they
could walk to from their address.”
Matt Lerner helped build a Web site called Walk Score dot com.
You don’t have to be an urban planner to use it.
Anyone can just type in an address, and …
“We tell you all the closest schools, parks, retail stores, so you can see exactly what
that neighborhood looks like.”
Walk Score dot com also spits out a number between zero and a hundred.
If a place scores above ninety, the site calls that a ‘walker’s paradise’.
Lerner says the computer ignores stuff like weather and hills, but there’s a reason behind
that.
“Research on why people walk has shown the number one predictor of whether
people will walk is whether there’s something good to walk to.”
This is all well and good, but does Walk Score dot com work?
I want to test it out – so I ask Lerner to score a Chicago neighborhood close to me.
“If you look at Logan Square, you can see it has a walk score of 86. So if you’re
living near Logan Square, you can get by without driving very often, or even owning
a car perhaps.”
Really?
I head to Logan Square and ask people, does the neighborhood deserve the high score?
Resident: “Yeah, we’ve got a movie theater, a grocery store, restaraunts and bars.”
Resident: “Yes, you can really minimize your use of a car.”
Resident: “Everything’s close – even jewelry stores, furniture stores, grocery stores.
It’s pretty easy to get around walking.”
Most of the people I speak to say the Web site’s pretty much got it right. This is a
very walkable neighborhood. But there’s an activist who works on making the
neighborhood more walkable. He’s not convinced the web site’s got it 100% right.
He says it leaves out some things, for example, this:
(sound of dog barking)
“You’re talking about kids walking to school? That house, that’s a barrier.”
And, Ben Helphand says the Web site doesn’t just miss dogs. It misses other things
that intimidate walkers.
“They should factor in these things that are known to decrease the walkability of the
neighborhood, a big gas station complex, a drive-through bank which is right
behind us.”
Shawn Allee: “Only because they’re hard to walk by, because cars are coming in
and out?”
Ben Helphand: “And because they disincentive people getting out of their cars,
because they’re designed to keep people in their cars.”
The programmers admit the Walk Score site leaves out a lot. Helphand says he’s a
fan of the site, it’s just that it’s tailored to one purpose.
“Their real target audience is people who are moving or relocating and they want
walkability to be a factor in that choice.”
Helphand says the site gives the impression that people interested in walkability have
only one choice to make – where to live.
He wants them to make lots of choices over time.
He wants them to fix bad sidewalks, tame scary dogs, and support zoning laws that favor
walking over driving.
Helphand says if that happens enough, we can make new walkable neighborhoods – not
just rank ones that already exist.
Devin Smith and Matthew Rolen Stucky use waste oil from deep fryers
to power their diesel car (Photo by Katie Carey)
For many people, the summer road
trip includes trips to the beach, and of
course, frequent stops to the gas station.
Two college students are driving across the
country in a car that runs on used vegetable
oil. So when most people pull in to the gas
station this summer, they pull up to the
grease traps. They say it’s a way to raise
awareness about alternative fuels, and save
a bit of money. Katie Carey brings us this
audio postcard:
Transcript
For many people, the summer road
trip includes trips to the beach, and of
course, frequent stops to the gas station.
Two college students are driving across the
country in a car that runs on used vegetable
oil. So when most people pull in to the gas
station this summer, they pull up to the
grease traps. They say it’s a way to raise
awareness about alternative fuels, and save
a bit of money. Katie Carey brings us this
audio postcard:
MATT: My name is Matthew Rolen Stucky. I am taking this ’85 Mercedes Benz Diesel
with a grease car kit, putting old vegetable oil that we find from restaurants along the way
and sticking it in and making it go.
DEVIN: Hi, I’m Devin and we’re getting our fuel for the car from mainly restaurants
from the deep fryer. They dispose of the grease and we just take that and filter it a couple
times.
MATT: Well I pre-filter it – it’s basically a water filter. I have a couple mesh filters that
it goes through and then it goes through a second gas tank where it heats up and runs
through the car and then has one more engine filter that it goes through secondary. You
can drive this around everyday nearly in every situation and it doesn’t slow down your
gas mileage you have the same top speeds, the same acceleration, literally you will not be
able to tell the difference, until you realize you’re not buying the gas, and then you are
happy about it.
DEVIN: We have a journal in the car and we have a tally of how many hummers we’ve
seen on the road trip so far and I think the tally is to sixteen, and we kind of do a little
‘ha-ha’ every time we see one. Just because we know how much they are spending on
gas.
MATT: The reactions range from people saying, “Oh yeah, you are putting it in your car,
great, yeah here take it.” To people going “You do what? What does it do in your car?”
And they don’t believe it and they want to go see it sometimes.
DEVIN: Some people this is the first grease car they have ever seen and they just think it
is awesome that someone is out there doing it. It’s not a solution for everyone, again,
there’s not going to be waste vegetable oil for every single person that wants to drive in
the car around the country, so it definitely is not a solution to the fuel crisis. It’s just us
trying to do our part to raise awareness.
Dealers across the country are running out of new cars to sell that qualify for the program. (Photo source: IFCAR at Wikimedia Commons)
