I'm Ellen Smith, member of the Oak Ridge City Council. Thank you for visiting my blog and reading my views on public and private life in and around Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This website is my own; content here does not represent the official policies or views of the City of Oak Ridge. To add your own comments, click on the topic title to open a comment box. To read posts about a particular topic, scroll down to "Categories" (in the sidebar) or use the "Search" box in the sidebar. Look under "Archives" to see collections of past posts organized by date.
After much waiting, our new Nissan Leaf is finally here. I picked it up this afternoon. It’s definitely a new kind of car — not only is it fully electric, but in many respects it seems a bit like a computer on wheels. It goes faster than any computer, though. Driving on Oak [...]
One event planned for Earth Day 2010 in Oak Ridge is the “Oak Ridge Gran Prius.” This will be a rally event challenging participants to get the best gas mileage driving a Toyota Prius across town on a defined course — thus letting people (particularly public officials who make decisions on buying vehicles) find out [...]
If we thought that Oak Ridge should cut back on fuel use by city vehicles, consider Knox County, where it seems (according to today’s News Sentinel) that there are 136 county-owned take-home vehicles (not even including the sheriff’s department), including 52 SUVs, 46 pickup trucks (most of them 3/4-ton Ford F-250s), and 6 “vans or [...]