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Originally Posted by freeweed
Is saving a few minutes worth $20/day?
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Potentially, yeah. Not really in my case, but for some people it is.
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Also depends on how well-serviced your area is by transit.
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Which is what I was getting at. I think it's a pretty safe assumption to say most of the 'burbs have comparatively awful transit service, which is a combination of distance and god-awful suburban roads explicitly designed to keep people off the roads.
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For me, it's about a 10 minute difference - assuming the roads aren't backed up due to an accident or weather conditions (so most days driving is admittedly quicker).
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Same with me, but then again I live in North Glenmore. Even so, because of the bus schedule I leave earlier than a hypothetically would have to if the bus showed up at
exactly the right time to get me to work at 8.
If I lived in, say, Evergreen, I'd seriously consider driving to work every day no matter the financial burden. Better to waste $20 a day for a parking spot than spend an extra hour or two on a bus every day. A few hundred dollars a month would be well worth it if it kept me sane.
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Never mind the fact that unless you already have a reserved parking spot (and waiting lists are now years long for these), you have to get to downtown before around 7am to get a spot.
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Oh balderdash. I can get a spot next to work after 8, let alone 7. Granted, I work in the West End near the train tracks...
And, while I don't
personally have a reserved spot, I have access to a few on certain days of the week, so once in a while I'll drive.
Some people really do have to drive to work though. My bosses do so not just because they have reserved stalls, but because they're in and out of the office all day. If they have a meeting downtown they'll take the train usually, but if it's in Victoria Park or any further it would waste too much time to take transit, and to take a cab would be much less cost effective.
How about all those contractors? Tradesmen will often take transit, but the contractors need to bring in equipment all the time. Most people here obviously hold downtown hi-rises near and dear to them, and are loving the fact that more are going up all the time. At the same time the lack of parking is making every single construction job more expensive. Hell, on one of my jobs the contractors were trying to bring two AC units into the building, but the delivery truck couldn't get in at the loading dock: under normal circumstances the truck would have parked and waited for a few minutes for space at the dock, but there was no parking so they turned around and went back to the warehouse! It delayed the project
two weeks, all because of a lack of parking!
Anyway, back to the original point: transit is not always a viable alternative. To say to people 'shut up, quit whining, take transit' isn't fair, because for many people transit is crap.
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Originally Posted by h0twired
Transit out in the suburbs (especially if you have an express bus) is really not much slower than driving.
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...if your bus shows up on time...
(I've spent many a winter night standing at my bus stop for an hour and a half, waiting for bus. Fortunately they showed up most of the time. Sometimes it didn't, in which cases I was SCREWED and it took be almost four hours to get home.)
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I prefer transit over driving in the winter because you don't have to worry about lousy drivers.
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I prefer driving under any circumstances, as I love to drive. But I especially prefer driving in the winter in order to prevent the aforementioned scenario where I'm stuck waiting in -30 weather for some bus that might or might not show up.