Community

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ORIGINAL: McKate

I really don't reccommend buying a car, especially if you live in an urban area. When I had my last car, my loan was $293/month, my insurance was $230/month, and I must've spent well over $150/month in gas. Not only that, but you have to keep your car maintained...$30 here for an oil change, $300 there for a new belt. It gets to be RIDICULOUSLY expensive. Now, I spend roughly $200/month taking the bus.

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I live in an area with good public transportation, but you still need a car to get around. To put it plainly, it's a pain in the neck to get around in public transportation here. While it's pretty dense in this area, it's not a city densely packed like NYC, not many places in this country are. You still need a car to actually GET to the metro or bus stop.

A lot of people are commuting both toward DC (and outward) and metro just doesn't extend far enough for a lot of people so it makes public transportation more costly. Metro was considering extending a rail line to Dulles airport but that got suspended for who knows how long. For instance, I live probably 15 minutes away from the closest metro station and that means I have to get in my car, drive onto 66 (major highway) and go bumper to bumper, taking me twice as long to actually get to the metro station. It's just easier to forgo it altogether and use a car. Less hassle and stress. I've done the whole bus hopping to metro stop and it's literally a headache.

So it becomes vital to have a car.

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ORIGINAL: blessedinnyc

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ORIGINAL: McKate

I really don't reccommend buying a car, especially if you live in an urban area. When I had my last car, my loan was $293/month, my insurance was $230/month, and I must've spent well over $150/month in gas. Not only that, but you have to keep your car maintained...$30 here for an oil change, $300 there for a new belt. It gets to be RIDICULOUSLY expensive. Now, I spend roughly $200/month taking the bus.

Agreed.

For me to simply have a car where I live, here's how the math works out:

Depreciation: $50/month
Parking: $120/month
Insurance: $180/month

Thus, it costs $350/month simply to have a car.

To drive to work, it costs me:

$8 (tolls)
$25 (parking- would be $40, but my employer has a deal with the parking garage.)
$7 (gas)

Total cost to park a car in NYC: $$4200/year
Total cost to drive in to work every weekday of a year: $10K
Total cost to drive in to work every weekday of a year if your employer doesn't give you a parking discount: $13750

Total cost to keep a car in NYC and drive to work: $14.2K - $18K + maintenance


Instead of going through all that pain, I take the subway in. Fare both ways is about $6 and it's faster. The subway lets me off across the street from where I work. Thus, I only pay about $1500/year for transportation.

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ORIGINAL: blessedinnyc

What's really gotten us is consumption. Voracious consumption from India, China, and the US has driven up oil prices significantly.

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Actually refinery capacity has increased dramatically in the past five years, due to on-site expansion.

Because it takes $2.5 Billion and seven years of design, construction, and safety testing to build a safe nuclear power plant. Sure, we can do things like the USSR did them, but when you have a design as ill-conceived and cheap as the RMBK, you run into problems (Chernobyl was an RMBK.)

Also, last I checked, 17 reactors were under early site approval. This number has likely gone up significantly; the NRC expects along the lines of another 70-80 early site approvals to be filed by 2020.

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The problem is also that we have a market that can't see more than three years into the future. Any utility that decides to build a nuclear plant today has to take accounting losses- losses that go out on the 10Q's and 10Ks- for five to ten years before they see a dime out of the plant. In the meantime, the foolish CEO who approved the project is likely long-gone.

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If reducing supply in a way they [the oil compnies] could get away with would be a way of increasing profits, most oil majors would do so in a heartbeat. Indeed, when it comes to the refining industry, many refiners have done just that.

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ORIGINAL: rnershigh
Most people don't live in NYC. Most people need a car.

I live in an area with good public transportation, but you still need a car to get around. To put it plainly, it's a pain in the neck to get around in public transportation here. While it's pretty dense in this area, it's not a city densely packed like NYC, not many places in this country are. You still need a car to actually GET to the metro or bus stop.

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ORIGINAL: blessedinnyc
And America's obsession with buying Escalades and Navigators. The car industries refusal to create more hybrids.

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I'd rather see more coal burning plants built. They are cheaper and with the newer technology they burn close 100% of the coal. Plus, our coal reserves are like Saudi Arabia's oil reserves but the environmental terrorists put pictures of England in the 1800's out and convince the ignorant that coal means soot. The average diesel truck puts out more soot than an entire coal burning plant.

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That's another reason why coal makes more sense.

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When the airlines go on strike the federal gov't steps in. When ports go on strike the feds look to step in. When the oil companies do things to inflate prices that can cripple the economy more than anything the airlines could do, the feds are silent and wrap themselves in the flag of free enterprise and capitalism.

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That's the trouble with having an oil man in charge.

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ORIGINAL: blessedinnyc

You're the first anti-corporate conservative I've met.

-Neighbors often complain about coal dust blown from the 30 days of fuel inventory that coal plants often have on hand and store outside.

-Coal plants emit SO2, NOx, and other forms of pollution.

-We have a lot of coal in this country, but if we decided to get ALL of our energy from coal, we would likely have run out in about 20 years. If we did the same thing by merely reprocessing the waste we were storing in Yucca mountain, we would have enough U-238 to run the entire country for 200 years.

-There's also the global warming issue.

But if you look out just 25 years from the day you start digging, most nuclear plants have a higher ROI than coal plants. Operating costs are also much more predictable- reactor-grade uranium has gone from $10/kg to $100/kg over the past 3 years as Russia has stopped converting its weapons to reactor-grade uranium; this has increased the cost of generating nuclear energy from $0.02/kw to ~$0.022/kw.

Often because their hands are tied. 2/3 of the US's oil supply comes from overseas, and unless the fed starts enforcing anti-trust laws in Venezuela, there's nothing it really can do.

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- Force the car manufacturers to build cars with higher MPG's

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- Increase our refining capacity in the US so we don't have to import gasoline to fuel the inevitable increase in demand.

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- Give better incentives for converting houses to solar power. Especially in the southern parts of the country or the desert communities where the sun is abundant. We could literally take millions of houses off the national grid this way. This could also be helped along by making housing developers make a certain percentage of the new houses they build solar powered.

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- Big cities need to make a concerted effort to improve public transportation.

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ORIGINAL: wing2000

...oh, but we (family) sure loved riding the metro while vacationing in D.C. But I understand what you mean. Even a city like Washington does not have enough public transportation options to service the vast metropolitan area (the Metro hasn't been expanded or upgraded in some time if I'm not mistaken).

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Public transportation is not convenient because we as a nation have not made it a priority. In the era of cheap gas (which appears to be ending), it was easier to move further out in to burbs...and even beyond...to buy a larger house for the money...but then spend 30-90 minutes one way to work (commute times have been going up every year). Compounding the problem is the lack of urban planning in many of our largest cities...planing that if done right would place denser residential areas closer to major employment centers.

When we bought our house, we intentionally bought an older (and yes that meant smaller) house that was within 15 minutes of work (and near the bus line)...the only problem was our employer decided to relocate twenty miles further away (...it seems the executives went for the sweetest tax break from a neighborhing city...a city with no public transit and few highways....those same executives dismissed the lost productivity of employees living further away).

Our company is doing what it can...bumping up our work from home days to twice a week...I'm just hoping they go to 5 days a week so I can fill that black hole in our budget known as the car.

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ORIGINAL: stellaluna

Yes, this is true. There are some places where one must have reliable personal transportation, i.e. a car. (And if you live in the DC metroplex, I can completely understand that. I also understand employers who pick up and move and other extenuating circumstances.) But I don't think it's right to say most people need a car. And I certainly don't believe that most people need TWO cars. Across this great country, there are millions of people who want a car and drive a car when they could be doing something else. They choose to live 60 miles from work, they choose to drive half a dozen blocks to run an errand. Case in point, my mother. For an entire year she lived two blocks from her job. She drove. She drove to work in the morning, home at lunch, back to work after lunch and home after work. Another case in point, a close friend who lives in a very small town. She drives to the corner store...one block away, on the corner...at least twice a day to get a soda. Neither of these women had a good reason for driving when I asked, just that they didn't want to walk.

The point is that there is a prevailing idea that one must have a car and further, use it several times a day, even if you're doing something easily within walk/bike distance. This idea is instilled in our children, who become teenagers and expect to get a car as soon as they get a drivers license at 16. And then expect to drive around as a form of entertainment. It's a mindset that has done our country no good.

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ORIGINAL: blessedinnyc

You must be a closet Democrat. I get often get accused of being a closet Republican, so I know the feeling.

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I don't know if increases in refining capacity are the answer. Many economists and geologists- maybe even a majority- say that we're running out of oil. Some say that we've extracted 1 trillion barrels over the past 150 years and it's highly unlikely that we'll be able to extract another 1 trillion barrels- let alone extract them in the next 33-35 years to meet existing demand.

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We don't need to add to the existing energy infrastructure. Rather, we need to replace it.

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We have 4 billion years worth of wind and perhaps 1000 years of uranium (50,000 if we reprocess). We need to figure out how to get the energy produced by nuclear plants and wind turbines into peoples' cars. One option is plug-in hybrids; cars that can run on either gasoline or electricity. We can probably see these in widespread use in less than 15 years and less than $2 Trillion in investments; maybe as few as 8-10. Alternatively, we can work on hydrogen. This requires more infrastructure and more investments; perhaps $5 Trillion and 30 years.

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That sounds good on paper, but most conservatives would hate this. It would clearly be a secret attempt by the unseen liberal powers to send business to their green investments.

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I don't think anyone is going to disagree with this. New York is a perfect example of a city that has 7 million people and perhaps 2 million cars (practically all of them taxis) The reason we can avoid cars is that we have a huge public transit infrastructure.