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 suspect that if I were working and living in Buffalo, I'd be forced to drive a car because Buffalo doesn't have a wonderful mass transportation.

Hell, if I still worked in Beltsville (PBS&J), there's almost NO Mass Transport out there (Unless I wanted to figure out how to get to the MARC station :p )

I suggest that only big cities have a GOOD Mass Transportation system and other smaller cities have something ranging from god awful to... OK.

[lainiest.livejournal.com]

I'm told (by the person I'm moving in with who lives there) that Bellingham has a decent PTS. But they could be lying. :o
Really it just depends on the city rather than the size, I think. Big cities could just as easily have crappy systems.

[phoenixsong]

But larger cities are probably going to have funding for more than buses. There aren't many cities that have any sort of mass transit rail systems, regardless of quality (which is somewhat subjective anyway), and to my knowledge those cities are all big-name cities: NYC, DC, Boston, maybe SF?, London, Paris...

And no, I don't count Buffalo's toy train as mass-transit rail s:) (OK, maybe on a technicality, but for most places, one line does not a mass-transit system make, any more than one bus route.)

[sskipstress.livejournal.com]

SF, Chicago, and Philadelphia have local rail.

So does Baltimore, though I don't know how useful that is because I've never used it.

Dallas and Houston don't. Don't know about LA or Minneapolis/St. Paul or Nashville, but I should because I know people in all 3 of those.

[angiepenguin.livejournal.com]

Heh, Phoenix is building a light rail line. Goes from downtown Phoenix to ASU and back, I think. Maybe it'll go to one or two of the popular malls around here, too. Oh, and it'll stop by the airport (which is between downtown Phoenix and ASU). It won't be finished for another two years or more, though. I also think that Phoenix is pretty ill-suited for light rail, anyway.

Our bus sytems aren't too bad, though. The fare is pretty damn cheap, especially compared to what it apparently is in the DC area. There are occasional bus breakdowns in the summer due to overheating, but otherwise it's pretty reliable. They even have a thing on their website (http://www.valleymetro.org) that will tell you the fastest route between two points. Sometimes it needs a little tweaking of the inputs, but for the most part, it's pretty good. The actual time it takes to go somewhere is at best 1.5x what it would be in a car, though sometimes it's 3x as long. Except at ASU, where I actually save time by riding the bus because I don't have to hunt for a parking spot then walk 3/4 of a mile.

[sskipstress.livejournal.com]

It also depends on what you personally consider acceptable. I got around Ithaca for years with public transit and my feet. But there really wasn't anywhere I couldn't go by walking, and I usually had time to walk or I didn't have time to go at all.

In Austin, I chose my housing based on what bus lines were nearby. And biked a lot at some of the places I lived.

Neither of these places have GOOD mass transit, but they both had mass transit good enough for me.

[lite.livejournal.com]

I think the trick to Mass Transport is that it has to make more sense to use than driving. If it's cheaper, and easier to drive from one point to another and is at least as "Sane", than the Mass Transportation is not up to snuff.
I'm talking day to day, by the way, not into the City for a big event. Though, there's that as well.. if it, for example, made more sense for me to drive to RFK stadium to see the Nationals (and they aren't far away) why is it worth it for me to take the Metro?

[sskipstress.livejournal.com]

I agree. And I further state that by chooses one's housing and its location carefully, one can get along fine using mass transit.

What makes Austin's mass transit system bad is that there is a LOT of "you can't get there from here" about it. Ithaca has very infrequent buses so you need to have the schedule memorized or in your bag to not wait in the snow for half an hour for the next bus. And both systems have very limited numbers of buses running after 9pm.

[lite.livejournal.com]

I don't recall Buffalo having a great bus schedule. The NFTA train was better, but not half as good as the Metro system.

I love Mass Transportation, especially in big cities, both on an intellectual level (I dunno why, but the process of creating a city from very small town to metropolis is fascinating. Possibly too much SimCity.)

Unfortunately, small cities seem to be rotting from inside (all cities are, it seems, with the money flying into the suburb, but it's especially obvious with smaller, poorer cities.)