These past few days the transportation team has been collecting questions and gathering data to build a transportation system baseline.  This will be a snapshot of what Lopez’s current transportation system looks like, in terms of some concrete measurable parameters such as how much gasoline is consumed per year, how much money was spent buying that gasoline, and how many miles were driven on that gasoline.  Gathering data on a small island community like Lopez presented quite a challenge, because the fine-grained data we need simply is not collected.  For example, to calculate gasoline consumption, we needed to find the vehicle miles traveled annually for Lopez.  We were happy to find that Washington’s DOT produces an annual traffic report<http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/mapsdata/travel/annualtrafficreport.htm> with resolution down to county level.  Perfect, San Juan County, as an island county containing Lopez, should serve as an acceptable proxy for the driving habits of residents on Lopez.  Unfortunately, San Juan County happens to be the only county in Washington where no such data is collected by the DOT!  We could also try to deduce gasoline consumption by looking at gasoline deliveries to the island.  We have already initiated contact with a person familiar with gasoline deliveries to the island in order to track down this data.  However, this approach still won’t give us a clear picture of gasoline consumption because we suspect many people purchase gasoline on the mainland, and we have found surveys from previous research<http://wstc.wa.gov/StudiesSurveys/FerryCustomerSurvey/default.htm> that shows a significant number of residents bring their cars to the mainland on the ferry regularly.  Despite these hurdles, we plan to present our picture of the transportation system to the residents of Lopez when we arrive there on Sunday and solicit their input to complete the picture.  One more thing we would like to note, tonight we learned about a handy graphical tool called Sankey diagrams<http://www.sankey-diagrams.com/>.  It is a way to illustrate flows of resources showing where they come from and what consumes them.  Such a tool would be a wonderful asset to each of the sectors of this Island Sustainability project, to illustrate graphically the disposition resources like energy and water.