As someone who owns a vehicle, I feel more like I’ve escaped the matrix when on public transportation than when I’m driving. I still have to have a car to get places public transit won’t go, but I always look forward to the completion of each new station, one more area I don’t have to drive to.
I rarely go farther from my home than I can go in a few minutes in my bycicle, so I never felt the need for a car. But once every few months I would need to go somewhere that is two hours away by bus, often with inconvenient bus timings (like either 6am or noon) - so I sometimes take an Uber instead.
When people her about me taking an Uber for such a “long” trip they call me insane, say that I’m wasting money and I should just get a car and those trips would be much cheaper. They never consider all the other costs involved in owning a car.
But then after a while people in my town started giving up on Uber and it became hard to find a driver whenever I might need one, so I finally got a driving license and bought myself a bike. People now were like “you’ll see how it changes you, you’ll use it for everything, you’ll go out a lot more often and to everywhere with it”. By the time I had a trip to make it was no longer turning on due to being stuck in a garage for so long. The counter showed less than 20 kilometers when I sold it.
You are definitely singing the song of my people. I bought my car when I was working 2 jobs with heavy overtime, and it mattered a lot that I could drive 20 minutes instead of the 1hr bus ride. I put about 20k kilometers on the odometer. Things changed recently, and I’ve found myself doing maintenance on it based on a time schedule rather than distance. I could buy 200 round-trip Uber rides per year for what I’m paying.
I tried getting into cycling, but there’s a lack of cycle paths and protected bike lanes here. It’s one of those areas that has “sharrows.” Pro tip: drivers do not share the road even with the sharrows.
As someone who owns a vehicle, I feel more like I’ve escaped the matrix when on public transportation than when I’m driving. I still have to have a car to get places public transit won’t go, but I always look forward to the completion of each new station, one more area I don’t have to drive to.
I rarely go farther from my home than I can go in a few minutes in my bycicle, so I never felt the need for a car. But once every few months I would need to go somewhere that is two hours away by bus, often with inconvenient bus timings (like either 6am or noon) - so I sometimes take an Uber instead.
When people her about me taking an Uber for such a “long” trip they call me insane, say that I’m wasting money and I should just get a car and those trips would be much cheaper. They never consider all the other costs involved in owning a car.
But then after a while people in my town started giving up on Uber and it became hard to find a driver whenever I might need one, so I finally got a driving license and bought myself a bike. People now were like “you’ll see how it changes you, you’ll use it for everything, you’ll go out a lot more often and to everywhere with it”. By the time I had a trip to make it was no longer turning on due to being stuck in a garage for so long. The counter showed less than 20 kilometers when I sold it.
You are definitely singing the song of my people. I bought my car when I was working 2 jobs with heavy overtime, and it mattered a lot that I could drive 20 minutes instead of the 1hr bus ride. I put about 20k kilometers on the odometer. Things changed recently, and I’ve found myself doing maintenance on it based on a time schedule rather than distance. I could buy 200 round-trip Uber rides per year for what I’m paying.
I tried getting into cycling, but there’s a lack of cycle paths and protected bike lanes here. It’s one of those areas that has “sharrows.” Pro tip: drivers do not share the road even with the sharrows.