It's a fact that the cost of gas and the impacts from so much driving keeps increasing and they are not going to go back. All this is giving us the opportunity to reflect on our heavy dependency on cars and find ways to alleviate this malady, to find alternate modes of transportation and at the same time reduce our GHG emissions.

Estimating your C02 emissions
As starting point, in case you haven't calculated the emissions from driving your car, let me pass a simple method to do the math:

For each one of your vehicles:
1. Estimate how many kilometers you drive in a year : Mileage: _ km
2. Find out your car's fuel efficiency (eg 7 litres/100 km) : _ litres/100km
3. Divide your mileage by 100, and multiply by your fuel efficiency _ litres
(Eg 12,000 km, at 7litres/100km = 120 x 7 = 840 litres)
4. Calculate your C02 emissions. (each litre of gas releases 2.5 kg of CO2 or each litre of diesel releases 2.7 kg of CO2 )

Total emissions for vehicle: __ litres x 2.5 = __ kg of CO2 each year !

What can we do?
Let me suggest a few actions or things that will help in reducing our car dependency:

1). Walk, Walk, Walk, Bike, Bike, Bike !
2). Ride sharing. Ride Sharing is an effective tool to reduce car usage. It is essentially the organized giving or getting of rides to people traveling to close by towns and islands.
3). Car sharing. We can also share our cars with friends and neighbours or simply join the existing Car Co-op. This can save lots of money in insurance and gas.
4). Community Bikes. Bike Sharing consists of bikes owned by a local group or organization that may be used by a large number of people. For instance, a pool of bikes are available to ride around town, with designated stations for pick and ride.
5). Rickshaws as Local Public Transit. A big problem we have to face in small towns and islands around is the lack of public transit. A transportation mode that is becoming popular for this situation is the bicycle rickshaw. Rickshaws will provide a few jobs for local youth. It is possible to have electric rickshaws or as an alternative four-seat electric golf carts.
6). Electric bikes rentals. We know that biking is not an easy task for older folks. However, adding electric motors to our bikes could help a lot. Bike rentals may also be a tourist attraction and may help in avoiding more summer traffic.
7). Organized Hitchhiking A media campaign to encourage people (tourists and locals) to consider picking up hitchhikers or to hitchhike themselves is a viable option to reduce the number of cars on the road, as are the placement of visible and vehicle accessible hitchhiking posts.
8). Reduce our dependency of importing goods and services. For the long term, we need to look more into becoming a self-sufficient community as much as possible. Relocalization is key !
9). Location efficiency. This means to ensure all new developments, residential and commercial, are located and designed to maximize accessibility to public transit and services, where we can bike or simply walk and we don't need to depend on cars. This point also helps with reducing indirect housing costs and help for low-income affordability.

If you really need to drive
Now, if we really need to drive our cars, then, we can at least try the following things to minimize GHG emissions:

1. Change our car, truck or SUV for a fuel-efficient car (hybrid, electric, etc.)
2. Drive to conserve fuel, for instance:
- do not speed just to get faster to the next stop light,
- avoid heavy-traffic routes
- minimize your driving by choosing the shortest routes
- change you aggressive driving behaviour, drive gently
3. Do not idle your car, avoid using the drive-through fast food restaurants

Benefits
The benefits from the above actions are plenty: environmental, economic and social. We will be healthier from walking and biking. We will save lots of money in gas, car maintenance, ferry tickets, insurance and more. We will produce way less GHG emissions.
This is a Win-Win-Win solution

For some good online papers on these topics, visit :
- Pollution Probe at www.pollutionprobe.org/Publications/Air.htm Look for their report "Driving Towards a Cleaner Environment - A Cleaner Future"
- Victoria Transport Policy Institute at www.vtpi.org