One Snarky Chica with Issues

This morning as I was sitting at a red light at a very large intersection I started looking around at all of the cars around me. Presumably most of these people were heading off to a job. There were a lot of cars at this intersection. I would guess maybe twenty or so. Out of those twenty or so cars I counted exactly three cars that had more than one person in them. Two cars had two people in them and one car had three people in it. All of the other cars had one single person.

No wonder mother nature and the environment are on strike and the price of gas is so outrageous, I thought to myself.

Of course, the city that I am in has a laughable public transportation system. It is a fairly large city. There is a professional sports team. And public transportation is practically nonexistent. I live about 15 miles or so from downtown. Technically I live in a little suburb of the city. When I was working I actually looked into taking the bus to work because traffic was absolutely horrible every single day and my commute was about 45 minutes. I was shocked to find that there were no bus stops near me at all. In fact, I would have had to have gotten on the interstate and driven down to the next exit (3 miles) to find a bus stop.

Based on my average gas mileage, it took me one gallon of gas to drive to work and one gallon to drive back - so that is two gallons of gas a day or around $7 a day. That is kind of a lot, at least to me, so I still looked into driving 3 miles to catch a bus to work because riding the bus has to be cheaper than $7 a day.

I could catch the bus at the next exit, but no buses on my side of town traveled directly to the side of town I worked on. I would have to catch the first bus and ride it back to the main bus station downtown. From there I would have to wait about 20 minutes to catch another bus to take up to the North side. And from there I would have to catch yet another bus to go to the Northwest side of town where I worked. Total travel time: 2 hours and 45 minutes.

So my options were $7 per day plus almost 2 hours in total commute time or $5 a day for the bus ($1.50 for first bus and then $0.50 for each changeover) and a total of 5 hours and 30 minutes commute each day. Not only was the bus not that much cheaper thanks to the changeover charges (which is kinda strange after living in NYC and not having to pay for that sort of thing) but it would take three and half more hours each day!

I think maybe cities need to get with the program and beef up their public transportation systems. I was perfectly willing to ride the bus to and from work, but they made it rather difficult and they made it so that it was not that much of a cost savings for me. And I can’t be the only person that feels that way.