We all know that there are steep environmental costs to driving, but for most Americans driving is an essential part of the fabric of their daily lives. Most of us need the flexibility of our own wheels to get everything done. But there are many ways that you can reduce the environmental impact of your driving. Here are just five of them.

1. Share your rides with others. Offer your neighbor a ride to the grocery store, go to parties with friends who live near you, offer to pick up some other children from school when you are getting your own, or plan outings ahead of time with others. You’ll be building community at the same time that you are saving gas.

2. Switch to a car that gets better mileage. It doesn’t have to be a hybrid; if you live in the country, as we do, there is less benefit to hybrids than there is for city dwellers. This is because one of the primary ways that hybrids conserve gas is that they don’t run when idling at a stop. There are many small cars now with miles per gallon figures that were unheard of in the recent past. Read the rest >>>

How cool would it be to build your own solar car? That’s what my husband Kelly Hart thought, over ten years ago. He was following all the solar car news, and he noticed that all the attention seemed to be going into racing vehicles. He thought a slower moving, reliable neighborhood vehicle would be very useful. So he built one, with some help from me, and we called it our Sunmobile. We used it to drive around our small Colorado town. We even took it in the 4th of July parade one year!

How did we create this unusual thing? We began by buying the framework, a very sturdy four-person bicycle called a Rhoades Car. We kept one of pedals, so the driver could pedal if needed. We would have kept the one on the left as well, but Kelly’s design needed that space for some of the parts. We joked that we had a hybrid vehicle: solar and human powered! Read the rest >>>