Posted on 07/16/2008 5:43:59 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Fall in line, now! *SMIRK*
Unless, of course, you have more cash than either and can afford to buy yourself a nice chunk of land outside of the city or your own McMansion now that prices are falling!
See? There's always a Silver Lining. :)
This is my situation, too. I live about 50 miles from work. This lady just gave me an idea, about camping part of the time!
I noted the word “truck” in the lament about commuting costs. I have a truck. I use it sparingly. I use my 37 mpg car for going to work. Perhaps the loon that wrote this article might start using one of his two brain cells to bring these things up.
Liberals secretly love higher gas prices.
I have to disagree with you here....i have some liberal friends ( we do not discuss politics ) and they are livid about the gas prices.....and have suv’s and trucks...i do not believe it is the liberals as much as the old smelly drug using flea infested hippies....they just gotta go
“Liberals secretly love higher gas prices.”
They like anything that hurts Joe Six-Pack. Eventually he will be financially ruined due to their policies and will have to depend upon Mother Government for sustenance. Jerks.
I have a 10-minute commute; wouldn’t have it any other way. Husband runs his business from home. It works for us.
Agreed. My wife has an 80 mile round trip commute each day and the gas prices have not hit us that badly because her car gets great mpg.
Bottom line is, you only get what you can pay for. Nobody has a God-given right to live in the middle of nowhere. You want to use up a ton of energy, it's your right, but expect to pay for it, and expect prices to continue to go up. Anybody with any brains saw this coming from a mile away. High gas prices have really brought out the ugly sense of entitlement that so many of today's suburban warrior style “conservatives” have.
No thanks.
Why do you live 50 miles from work? That’s nobody’s fault but your own.
I doubt she can save enough gas to be "worth it" to ride her bike part way. I don't know how far she is riding, but the last few minutes of a drive are when the car gets the best gas mileage, as it is warmed up. The first 10 minutes are generally worse for gas mileage. Cutting 10 miles off her trip, if her truck gets 20 mpg after it is warmed up, would save her $2 a day. But 10 miles of bike riding is expensive.
If her entire commute is 90 miles a day, at 15 mpg average, that is 6 gallons a day of gas, or $24.
Is it worth $24 to camp out in the back of your truck? Maybe, the article doesn't say how much it costs to stay at the campsite and use the shower. You could cut the cable premium channels, or turn the A/C up 1 degree higher and replace a few light bulbs with CFL, and probably save about as much.
Now, if her truck gets 12 mpg, that's $30 a day, or about $150 a week, or $7000 a year.
If she went out and spent $2000 on an old corolla (I did this in 2004 and it cost $900), she could get 30 mpg, and cut her fuel costs to $12 a day, $60 a week, or $3200 a year, which would save her $1800 in the first year, more than she saves camping.
Of course, a lot of people decided to own property far from where they work. They generally (not always) are less connected to their community because they work so far away, and often leave early and get home late. They can't pop in for lunch, or attend community activities, or meet their kids for school stuff very easily.
While people who live and work in a community want most to spend their tax dollars making the community better, people who commute long distances primarily want their taxes spent on day care for kids, and for more roads to get them to their work.
They drive up the costs of living "out in the country", because they have higher-paying jobs associated with near-city living, but live out where the jobs pay less and are less plentiful. This puts pressure on those who want to live and work in the same location, drives up their taxes, puts a strain on services.
In the end, I understand their plight now that gasoline isn't so cheap. But I don't have enough sympathy for them, I guess.
“High gas prices have really brought out the ugly sense of entitlement that so many of today’s suburban warrior style ‘conservatives’ have.”
I’ll assume you’re not just b*tchin’ at me, personally.
However, I’ll never give up my land. They’ll be carrying me out of here feet first, LOL!
I WORKED for 20 years and made many sacrifices to OWN land in the country. I worked for it, I PLANNED for it, and screw anyone that takes away MY choice to live as I please. I lived in-town and in suburbs with the SOLE intent of getting the heck out of there on day down the road. And I DID it! Wa-Hoo!
As for people that live in McMansions...that chit doesn’t come cheap, either, and I’ve YET to meet anyone that has their wealth tied up in a house that didn’t work for what they wanted JUST as hard as I’ve worked for what I wanted.
Sense of “entitlement?” WTF?
I think they are pretty open about it. Everytime I drive by a gas pump I wonder again how it is that Democrats are attempting to destroy the American middle class.
The enviro-wackos led by the Demo-dummies in Congress are quick to say that it will take 10 years for any new oil drilling to impact the price of gas. What they don’t tell you is that we are at least that many years away from any benefit from bio-fuels or other alternatives.
Drill here, drill now, pay less.
You’ve got it backwards. We’re more depending on the government now, using their road system, begging them to drill for more oil, paying gas taxes they can raise, etc. If people moved back in to cities where they could walk or bike to work, or drive a short distance on local roads maintained by a more accountable local government, we’d be less dependent on government.
I’m no liberal, but I think high gas prices will be good in the long run. People have made poor choices that have put them in a rough situation, and now they’re paying for it. Nothing is for free, and nobody is entitled to anything. Time for people to grow up and take responsibility.
BTW, the answer is to get businesses to move out into the country. After all, in the internet age, a fair number of these jobs could be done from anywhere.
This is especially true in the DC area. There is almost no reason for a million people to be commuting into DC each day just to push papers around and answer phones and do office work.
If we spent a billion dollars moving some government work into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, we wouldn’t have to widen the roads, or spend more on the subway and buses.
1/6 of an acre is a LARGE LOT? That’s about 75’ X 100’! What kind of McMansion can you put on a 75’ X 100’ lot? And a 2000 square feet house is just average, not a mansion.
It’s all pretty clear that the euphoria that the Left is getting about the high gas prices making people move back to where crime and criminal municipal politics is rampant is part of a contrived strategy.
A lot of jobs in the service sector and even light manufacturing is already in the suburbs. Failed government policies have forced both the jobs and the workers out there.
More than a few “republicans” seem to move in that direction as well.
Every day there is more and more written about why government should provide this or that service, arguments which could be used to pretty much justify government takeover of everything.
Well, in my case I live 15 miles from work. The cost in the difference in housing will off-set my commute to the tune of $800/month or more. That's just for the house on a lot.
I have 1/2 an acre inside the city limits where I live. To get that same amount of room in the city where I work would cost me more than $300,000 more. I chose elbow room over commute. I can buy a lot of gas for the difference.
Well, then, she should ride her bike the first ten miles and commute from there. Then she'd get that advantage of efficiency (kinda like daylight savings). ;-P
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