Keeping your engine tuned up can be one of the most effective things you can do for your gas mileage. The US Department of Energy says that repairing some problems that can be uncovered with a routine engine tune-up can improve your fuel economy by as much as 40 percent. And other fixes, such as putting the right grade of motor oil in your vehicle and keeping the right amount of pressure in your tires, don’t take much time.

By Barbara Kessler

Riding a bicycle offers a chance to stop and smell the roses on your way to work or school.

If Americans substituted biking for just half of their daily short car trips they’d enjoy extensive health benefits, while contributing to cleaner air, which would enhance health in their entire community, according to a study by University of Wisconsin researchers.

The study takes the conventional wisdom – that biking can displace pollution and improve health – and quantified it for a set region under certain circumstances in order to project what the real outcomes would be if Americans moved out from behind their steering wheels, at least some of the time.

To project actual benefits, the UW research team measured the potential effects of replacing short car trips (under five miles round trip) with bike trips, at least half of the time and only on good weather days, in urban areas in the Upper Midwest.

They found that parking the car and taking the bike in their scenario would prevent 1,100 premature deaths and save more than $7 billion in healthcare costs annually in the six states that comprised the study area.

IKEA’s Frisco employees are getting an early Christmas present. The Sweden-based home furnishings company is providing a new all-terrain bicycle to each of about 12,400 co-workers at its 37 U.S. stores.

“It’s been a good year for IKEA, so what better way to celebrate our success than to thank our IKEA co-workers who made this happen,” said Mike Ward, IKEA U.S. President. “This is our way of saying ‘Thanks IKEA co-workers for being strongly committed to working together.’ We hope this bike will be taken in the spirit of the season while supporting a healthy lifestyle and everyday sustainable transport.”

Chevy's new Volt makes an appearance at the State Fair of Texas. Photo: greenrightnow.com

By Bill Sullivan

Imagine an array of wind turbines in West Texas, whirring away, generating electricity to be transmitted to Frisco and other points in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Imagine that clean, green power surging into your home. Then, imagine your new, state-of-the-art electric car plugged into a 240-volt outlet in your garage, charging that clean-running, environmentally friendly vehicle for the next day’s commute or round of errands.

If all that sounds like a nice idea that will never happen, guess again. In Texas it is happening, right now, thanks to a previously unlikely alliance of planners, power infrastructure providers, utility companies and automobile manufacturers, all coming together to help the future get here just a little bit faster.

By Bill Sullivan

You’ve probably seen them in and around town, those white Toyota Priuses with the “Frisco” logo on the side. They’re quiet, efficient…and, yes, a little more green that your average city fleet vehicle.

“They’ve done just fine,” Fleet Manager David McBurnett says. “The fuel economy with them, obviously, has been way up.”

The hybrids run part of the time on batteries and part on a conventional gasoline engine. Because they’re used mostly by city employees to get around town or the immediate area, the battery (which does most of the work at lower speeds) can offer real savings.