Something of significance happened this past week that I'd like to write about. For the first time in 16 years, I am now living without an automobile! I've never driven an expensive car -- always driving used (paid for in cash!) cars. But lately, the city of Chicago seems to have "declared war" on owners of automobiles. A few years ago, they put up traffic light cameras to send out automatic tickets to people who run red lights or roll through a right turn on red (while at the same time, reducing the yellow light times to the extreme legal minimum of 3 seconds.) This year, they started putting up speed-trap cameras. I received one of those notices in the mail because I was driving 36mph on a 4 lane (2 in each direction) divided road! Hah! Combine that with the aggressiveness of other drivers, the extremely high gas tax in Chicago, the high insurance rates here, high cost of parking anywhere, cost of city stickers, etc -- It was not difficult to make the decision to get rid of my car. (I actually gave it to my parents. My father is very handy, and he is fixing up the car, and my mother wants to drive it when he is done fixing up all the minor problems with it.)
I'm now relying on public transportation for commuting to work and traveling around the city. (I do walk a lot -- usually if the weather isn't too bad, and my destination is within a mile or so.) I have some observations about my first week using public transportation. There is a lot of good, and bad.
The good: It's cheap! I can pay for a whole month of unlimited bus and CTA train rides for $100. Furthermore, I should be able to pay for that with pre-tax dollars, bringing the effective cost for me down to $67 per month based on my federal and state tax rates. A little over $2/day for unlimited transportation? Bargain! It's also very extensive. I can get a train or bus anywhere in the Chicago area. There are great phone-apps that help me efficiently navigate the system, and track bus and train times.
The bad: When the system is running fast, it is fast. But sometimes, it runs slow. And the slowness compounds on itself... Slow trains leading to missing bus connections and having to wait longer. They also haven't seemed to figure out yet that the public schools are back in session and there are huge crowds of students, which the bus routes seem to be unable to adequately handle so far. Furthermore, the payment processing system "Ventra" is pretty terrible. The card readers are very slow to read the fare-cards (can take up to 5-6 seconds sometimes -- which is a big deal when there are 30 people waiting to board the bus at rush-hour.) Their website is also quite unintuitive. I transferred money from my employer's payroll into my account, expecting to buy my 30-day pass with pre-tax dollars. Unfortunately, their "system" decided to charge my credit card for the pass, instead of my existing pre-tax balance on their system. Calling them up on the phone did not resolve the issue -- the representative was very understanding and apologetic and said she "would be very frustrated too if it happened to her", but there was "nothing she could do about it, their 'system' would not let her reverse the charge to the credit card." Lame. Their website would not let me remove my credit card info from their website either... but it would let me change it -- so I changed it to some old pre-paid debit card that has long since been drained. Next time I need to buy the 30-day pass, I am just going to call them and request they fund it from the 'pre-tax' balance. (I guess this turned into kind of a rant...)
But on the whole, I'm fairly happy with my choice to ditch the car so far. We'll see how I feel after a month or so
I guess that's enough for now.
(And what do you know... today it was 45F degrees and raining, as I walked outside!)