{"id":3614,"date":"2008-11-07T13:02:09","date_gmt":"2008-11-07T18:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3614"},"modified":"2008-11-07T11:29:28","modified_gmt":"2008-11-07T16:29:28","slug":"my-experiment-in-socialist-transportation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3614","title":{"rendered":"Living With Socialism, 30 Minutes At A Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a busy, crazy year at the Berg household.<\/p>\n<p>Not all of it in a good way.\u00a0 But it&#8217;s been one of those things with its upsides.<\/p>\n<p>Due to a variety of issues dating back a few years, I was in a subprime adjustable rate mortgage that I was having a hard time getting out of, last winter.\u00a0 And when I say &#8220;subprime&#8221;, I mean Slobodan Milosevic could have gotten a better loan that me, at the time.\u00a0 It <em>was <\/em>pretty bad; it started adjusting about a year and a half ago, and by the time it was done it was eating up about 2\/3 of my takehome pay (and I make decent, albeit not spectacular, money).\u00a0 That, along with a few other family crises, made things a wee bit tight around the Berg house.<\/p>\n<p>So along about last Christmas, when my car broke down, I gave it a long, hard think.\u00a0 My employer pays for my &#8220;all you can ride&#8221; card on Metro Transit.\u00a0 My kids&#8217; schools are nearby.\u00a0 Most of what I needed to do in my life was walking, biking or busing distance away.\u00a0 The upshot; if I <em>absolutely needed <\/em>to get by without a car (and all of its attendant bills), I could.<\/p>\n<p>And by that point, I <em>absolutely needed<\/em> it.\u00a0 The savings on repairs, car insurance and gas alone, at that point, made it worth it (and this was back when gas was still at or around a mere $3 a gallon).\u00a0 Not having those bills kept things on the level while I sorted out the rest of the mess.<\/p>\n<p>My &#8220;experiment&#8221; ended up running about ten months.\u00a0 I bused to work until mid-april, when I started biking &#8211; which I am still doing, although it&#8217;s getting more and more difficult as it get colder.\u00a0 The kids bused to school.\u00a0 We did a lot of getting around via bus, bike, and good old-fashioned shoe leather.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>And boy, do I have stuff to report!<\/p>\n<p>On the upside:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Pants<\/strong>: I fit into pants 2-4 sizes smaller than I did last winter.\u00a0 My belts are all verging on too big.\u00a0 Everything I own fits better, unless it fit perfectly before, in which case it&#8217;s gotten kinda loose and baggy.\u00a0 I like that.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Money<\/strong>: I can say honestly that I bought not one drop of $4\/gallon gas.\u00a0 That aside, I saved enough to help get the family through what was probably the nastiest financial hurdle I&#8217;ve had, except for my stretch of un\/underemployment back in 2003.\u00a0 In some ways it was worse; when you&#8217;ve got little to no income, there&#8217;s an ineluctible logic to it all; it just makes sense.\u00a0 You stretch, you scrimp, you do what you have to.\u00a0 When you&#8217;re working hard <em>and <\/em>making decent money <em>and<\/em> still feeling broke?\u00a0 <em>That<\/em> sucks.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li><strong>Party<\/strong>:\u00a0When you take the bus or bike to Keegans\u00a0(or,\u00a0 y&#8217;know, wherever)\u00a0and driving a car is not an option, and you&#8217;re one of those guys whose tolerance has dropped from 4.5 to 2.5 beers in the past decade,\u00a0let&#8217;s just say it&#8217;s one less thing to worry about.<strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Hah<\/strong>:\u00a0 Back when I was an adjunct instructor at a MNSCU\u00a0university,\u00a0I had the\u00a0option of\u00a0paying my &#8220;fair share&#8221; for collective bargaing or, for $8 more, joining the union.\u00a0 I joined the union, because most of my liberal, &#8220;pro-labor&#8221; friends had never been <em>in <\/em>a union.\u00a0 I figured this gave me bragging rights.\u00a0 In the same way, while I see no empirical reason to believe in man-made global warming, I&#8217;ve rather enjoyed being able to hector my &#8220;liberal&#8221; friends and neighbors about their patrician &#8220;carbon footprints&#8221; and gas-guzzling Priuses.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Good<\/strong>:\u00a0 That&#8217;s how I feel, these days.\u00a0 I <em>feel<\/em>\u00a0 better, walking and biking and just being generally more active.\u00a0 My attitude&#8217;s better (and believe me, I&#8217;ve needed it to be better).\u00a0 And sailing past the Capitol, seeing the High Bridge over the Mississippi in the distance, and zipping into the canyon on Saint Peter between Babani&#8217;s and Saint Joe&#8217;s is a wonderful way to kick off a work day.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of course, it&#8217;s not all hearts and flowers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Expectations<\/strong>: I want to laugh when I see some of the lefties &#8211; especially the transit-oriented leftybloggers &#8211; yapping about running their lives on transit.\u00a0 I notice that not a single one of them seems to <em>have kids<\/em>; children are the big clinker in the &#8220;transit-oriented lifestyle&#8221;.\u00a0 If you have to get kids to an after-school event, it&#8217;s a major expedition; if you have to take one to urgent care, it&#8217;s either miserable (hauling sick kids on the bus is a rotten feeling, although I never had to do it) or expensive (cabs in the Twin Cities are nothing to write home about).\u00a0<\/li>\n<li><strong>Metro Transit Is A Black Hole of Suck<\/strong>: Although the stats show that the Twin Cities&#8217; metro transit system is less of a money suck than many\/most other major cities&#8217; transit setups, it is not ready for prime time.\u00a0 The part that bugged me the most?\u00a0 Bus-driver acquaintances tell me that absenteeism is a problem &#8211; and when too many drivers call in sick, and they can&#8217;t find a replacement in time (which is not at all uncommon), MTC shaves routes.\u00a0 They&#8217;ll skip a bus departure on some of the lower-traffic routes &#8211; including the one I use to get home.\u00a0 I can&#8217;t tell the number of times (usually once or twice a month) where I&#8217;ve had to wait the extra half hour for the twenty-minute bus ride home, because <em>the bus never comes<\/em>.\u00a0 Even the hideously-expensive Ventura Trolley often runs a few minutes late, and if you try to ride it on weekends (as I did on Saturdays for much of this past few months, getting to and from AM1280 on Saturdays when I didn&#8217;t have the legs to bike from Fort Snelling all the way down Highway 13), the line is staggeringly likely to be down for maintenance along one part of the route or another, replaced by &#8220;55&#8221; buses that make the half-hour train ride from downtown to the mall an hour-long ordeal.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li><strong>Minnesotans Are Terrible Drivers<\/strong>: Being a bike commuter was a great experience; there is\u00a0really very little\u00a0in life better than blasting downhill on\u00a0Shepard Road or Constitution on a beautiful summer morning; it&#8217;s a stunning way to kick off a day.\u00a0 But you can only enjoy it so much, because so many Minnesota drivers are too busy putting on their makeup, changing their IPod settings, or nodding off to Willie and Jay to pay attention to things like, I dunno, bikers.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Tote That Load<\/strong>:\u00a0One of the reasons I lost so much weight was because I spent so much time hauling loads of\u00a0groceries home from Rainbow &#8211; about a\u00a03\/5 mile walk.\u00a0 Yes, I could have taken the bus, but hauling bags on the bus is a major hassle, and frankly the quiet time was often nice &#8211; unless I had to bring a couple of gallons of milk and stuff home.\u00a0 Then, it just got <em>heavy<\/em>.\u00a0 And no matter how much you haul, you still have to go shopping in a couple of days, again.\u00a0 Which nullifies some of the savings from not paying for gas and such, I thought, muttering to myself as I trudged home more than once.\u00a0\u00a0 Much more than once.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Government &#8220;Services&#8221; Demean and Degrade The Consumer: <\/strong>After a few of those missed buses, and bobbled schedules that left me standing for wasted half-hours at one bus stop or another, I found myself adopting the sullen, angry listlessness that PJ O&#8217;Rourke observed among anyone who has to sit and bark on command for government &#8220;services&#8221;, only to be implicitly told &#8220;you&#8217;ll take what we give you and you&#8217;ll like it&#8221;.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not the better me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So this past week or so I got my mortgage squared away.\u00a0 It left me with a few extra bucks I wasn&#8217;t used to.\u00a0 I fixed the car, bought insurance, and updated my tabs.\u00a0 For the first time in ten months, I&#8217;m driving again.\u00a0 I kinda like it.\u00a0\u00a0 I do <em>not <\/em>plan on going car-free again.\u00a0 But then, who plans on these things?\u00a0And I&#8217;ll still be biking (weather permitting) and busing to work, because as long as there&#8217;s an option, it&#8217;s cheaper, and I just flat-out enjoy it.<\/p>\n<p>It was interesting doing it, and knowing that I <em>can<\/em> do it.\u00a0 And with that said, I&#8217;m more than ready to relegate it to the &#8220;ephemeral anecdote&#8221; drawer.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Really, really ready.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a busy, crazy year at the Berg household. Not all of it in a good way.\u00a0 But it&#8217;s been one of those things with its upsides. Due to a variety of issues dating back a few years, I was in a subprime adjustable rate mortgage that I was having a hard time getting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}