Gas Prices

[hkellick]

So.. a question (and another public entry!)

They're predicting gas prices to go up to $5 again for a while.

How much do you have to pay to fill up your vehicle before the price of gas outweighs the convenience of having your own vehicle? How much until you switch to biking/walking/mass transport?

If gas does go up to $5 or more per gallon, what do you intend to do?

Comments

[lite.livejournal.com]

I couldn't disagree more. Maybe it's about background, as I was born and raised in Buffalo, with a patehtic "subway/train" and a number of busses, but the Metro area is huge and all encompassing.
If you are talking about JUST using Metro Subways, than, yes, there are drawbacks, but once you include the sheer NUMBER of Busses (not just Metro Busses, but LEX and DASH and the Fairfax Connector et. al), I think you could get from almost any point in the Metro area to any other.
Yes, the Metro lines are expensive. But as someone who lives in Landover and works in Alexandria (and whose girlfriend lives in Landover and works next to the White House), I find it a whole lot better than any I'm actually used to using for long periods of time. And it's still better to hop onto the Metro and take an hour long commute, reading a book or working on Sudoku puzzles than hopping in my car and getting stuck in Beltway traffic. At least for me.

Our of curiosity, what other transportation systems have you used? Why do you think Metro is the worst?

[zaph.livejournal.com]

I've ridden the subway in New York, which, at the very least, is more efficient, even if its map is lacking in some areas. But it's quick, even if you do have to make a couple of transfers. I think a lot of that might have to do with the city's layout - you can go north and south very quickly, and then cut across. But there's no reason they couldn't have done something similar here.

Boston's system is reasonably good. It goes pretty much everywhere and, like New York's, is actually efficient. It does suffer from the suburb problem, though. But I don't remember it taking particularly long to get anywhere on it.

The El trains in Chicago are reasonably good, although it seems to have kind of the same problem ours does if you live outside the city itself. But since the city itself is arranged pretty much in a line (being next to a giant lake will do that) it's very easy to get around inside the city.

I have vague memories of the Paris Metro (which I believe ours is vaguely based on) and the London Underground from the few times I rode each on a trip about ten years ago, but I seem to remember there weren't many places you couldn't go on them, and I don't recall ever having to take a terribly indirect route. And London specifically has the Circle Line to prevent that sort of problem.

But here, rather than make things organised or efficient, they make the stations look nice. They pay Metro police to arrest people for eating. They have short trains that run way too infrequently, and the notification system, when it's up, is rarely accurate. The escalators and elevators are constantly broken, because some genius decided that outdoor, unprotected escalators were a good idea.

The farecard system and variable fares are inconvenient - on all the other systems I mentioned, you can use the same payment method to get several people on, because you don't have to record where you entered and exited.

I can't think of a single thing Metro has ever done right.