There is something very wrong about the way public transit works out for me. It costs me an arm and a leg more to be green than it does to kill some dinosaurs a second time.
If data plans were not so damn expensive i could actually post this from the train I’m riding. Which would be cool. Here is the problem i face with riding the train to work. A paradox if you will. Both my wife and myself work at the very same university, in fact we work about a mile apart in the same large department but very different groups. So we have two people who need to get from point A, ie our cute little house, to point B our J.O.B. I love riding the train and the absence of the traffic, the ease of getting some work done on the commute among the many people watching opportunities. I’m a much better man when i can get my groove on and write on the way home.
By the numbers. Paying for parking at said university would be 96 bucks a month for 1 car, which is good because that is all we have. As it is we are “going rouge” and parking on the mean streets of North Philadelphia. No guaranteed spots and a slight history of vandalism to the vehicle being parked, we have so far had nothing really serious but two middlin incidents in the 9 years we have been on the reservation both as students and then as worker bees. Going rouge is technically free.
Car payment is an embarrassing amount due to a complete lack of foresight on my part. ad to that insurance and we are in the whole for around 500 bucks plus 120 for gas each month. So lets just figure this to be $720 dollars for the privilege of going to work each month. Now take the car expense as a given so put aside 500 bucks. If both my wife and I took the train we would need an additional 170 dollars each for trans-passes. so a cool 340 for riding the rails, against a savings of probably 75 dollars in gas. Because living were we do ditching the Grey Ghost just isn’t a feasible option with a youngin. If I lived in a more walkable section of the city i could deal with that.
Perhaps there should be some type of voucher against your taxes for using public transportation, close the gap a little. I’d pay for the privilege to relax a bit but damn if it wouldn’t send me bankrupt. This just seems messed up