Someone recently stated that we're idiots to waste gas driving 2 hours a day to and from work by ourselves. I wanted to respond to that person, but my response grew so long that I feared it would be read as hijacking someone else's diary, so I'm posting this instead. Here is my own personal quandary:
I've signed up to carpool every year for the past four years and haven't found anyone who can do it, given my strange hours (I only work 9-5 some days - usually I'm here much longer than that, and some days I'm hardly here at all).
I looked into public transportation. Using all of the discounts available to me as a student and employee, it will cost me $5.60 per day and over four hours per day to use public transportation. Currently it costs around $4.50 per day for fuel and about an hour and 45 minutes in drive time. With public transportation, I would need to take two busses and two trains each way to get from home to work and school and back again. Some of the hours traveling would be very late at night, and frankly, I fear for my personal safety. Further, as someone who works full time and goes to school full time, my time is valuable.
My Rav 4 gets 26 miles to the gallon. At the time I bought it, there was a waiting list a mile long for hybrid vehicles, and the price for said hybrid was way out of my league, even taking the reduced price of fuel into account. Also, hybrids did not offer the same amount of space - at the time I bought my car I was doing a lot of camping, and I needed more room than my old car, and many of the more fuel efficient cars, offered. I don't trade my car in for a hybrid now because mine is almost paid off and I'm starting grad school next fall. I can't afford a new car payment.
I seldom use my car on the weekends because my city has excellent public transportation and I use it. When I don't use it, I'm generally carpooling with friends or neighbors. One of the primary incentives for us to carpool is that parking in my neighborhood is terrible. Therefore, if one person is going to the store, three more tag along so that only one person loses their parking space.
I want to carpool. I want to take the bus or the train to work. The issue, to me, isn't that we're idiots. It's that the infrastructure isn't there (yet) to make public transportation a viable alternative for many of us. Meanwhile, I don't know what the short-term solution is. Maybe when gas hits four and five dollars a gallon it will then make sense for me to sacrifice my time for the money. I don't know. What I do know is that we must make the alternatives appealing alternatives. There are simply too many selfish people like me out there who aren't willing to sacrifice their limited resources for the betterment of all in order to obtain an abstract benefit, like clean air, in return.