Toronto-Montreal Rideshares and Vegetable-oil Fueled vehicles

Friday morning, I checked Craigslist for a car pool link that could lead me to a stranger that would kindly drive me home that evening for a small sum of money (25$ in this case). I dragged my lazy sleep-deprived body to a metro station after a 3 hour long lazy breakfast and met up with this stranger, hopped on the backseat (after gracefully giving up the front to our other passenger, being too anti-social to make conversation) and decided to gain my sleep back by falling into an immediate slumber. Before long, I was woken up by the sounds of techno remixes of Celine Dion, Rhianna and Beyoncé and realized we were in the middle of a blizzard. I noticed that my fellow travelers had switched the conversation to french and thought I was sleeping and the nausea induced by the accelerating and slowing down due to both traffic and the ridiculous amounts of ice and snow that plummeted the windshield made me decide not to join in on the conversation, but to give up trying to listen to soft soothing indie music over the loud techno and just eavesdrop on the conversation. After a long rant about nannies and maids, the passenger in front of me, a samba musician in Toronto for Canadian Music Week and conferences about latin american music, was talking about his vegetable fueled school bus. My indyish blogging instincts kicked in and I sneakily grabbed an old receipt and a pen and jotted down some notes:

He spoke highly of his beloved old diesel school bus but mourned the fact that he had to wait until the weather got warmer before he could drive it around on tour with his band so that the oil wouldn’t freeze. His bus was fueled on vegetable oil that he collected behind restaurants (preferably japanese ones because their oil is cleaner). Restaurant owners are all to happy to give up their used oil for free rather then having to call a company that would come collect it for a fairly large amount of money! He said that it only took a day or so to convert the old bus into a environmentally friendlier magic bus and he described it as a ”plummer job”, something to do with pipes. The oil needed to be filtered and he used a lawnmower motor to do so (don’t ask me how!). Although he did say it was a bit unpleasant to constantly smell like fried food, think about it! No longer pay for gas? Especially on a school bus! The consumption is the same, but there are legal limitations. The tank has to be fully sealed.

Tessa sent me a few links about biodiesel bus tours, and to name drop a bit, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Norah Jones, Tim McGraw and KT Tunstall have all used bio-diesel busses to tour. There’s a really interesting article on CMJ titled ”Convenient Truths About Making Indie Rock Touring Eco-Friendly” that you can read here.