Holy smokes, that's like 4-5 hours a day driving. I can't imagine a commute that long. Is housing really that expensive or scarce in the area of your workplace? With my gas prices using my car, that would be nearly $400 a month in gas purchases.

I like to ride to school -- about 3 miles round trip. I ride on the road - which is fun when you're dealing with the enormous amounts of college students on the road with you :P It's fun when they speed around you just to hit a red light :rolleyes:

I probably average 10 miles/day in my car.

95avusblue -

Keep an eye out for a 5-speed Civic HX coupe too. They just stop making them in the current generation of Civics, probably because they competed with their hybrid model :thumbdown: . Those were 36/44 MPG (Old EPA), so I am guessing a good GasSaver could push them up to 60 MPG on the freeway. The darn thing is lean-burn right off the lot!

That would be one of my fallback cars to search for if things went belly up for my SW2.

EDIT : PS - Sorry about the miles, dude, that's gotta hurt.

CarloSW2

I wont live in a biggish city to make my bread. I will live in a sub. way down the road. I would rather be dead than have to live in Tulsa. Its real nice Tulsa is just up the Beeline. But I wouldnt live there if you paided me. I did the big city thing in my youth. Fact is they can have it! I wont do mass transit and dont support tax that supports it. Not the place of slumber the homeless use it for,,, The begers and ten can fans. I will not but up with urban life at any level. I will pay 30 bucks a gallon for gas or opt for a 15 min. charde EV that will go 500 miles a charge...

I went to an urban planning seminar in my first year university and remember someone saying that Texas has some of the most expansive suburban sprawl in the USA. I wonder what makes it that way? Is it just a huge population and people are more choosy to where they live?

Peakster -

In LA I took an urban planning course in the mid 1980's. The professor stated that in every city, there is a fundamental "force", aka the main economic engine that shapes the urban environment. For example, Pittsburgh would have been steel, NYC would be Wall Street, Dallas would be oil, and for LA, it has always been real estate (Hollywood came later).

Segway ... People like to jump up and down and say how LA used to have the best public transportation system in the USA, and that is true, But! The trolley car systems were originally created in order to facilitate sale of real estate. They were created with bonds in order to be able to sell the previously worthless land that they led to. Real estate brokers would use access to the "Modern Trolley Car" as part of their ad campaign. Then they were pawned off on people (suckers) that would try to run them for profit. The problem was, the debt load of the bond was such that it was impossible to ever make a profit. Since the trolley car line was not built with the intent to be profitable, it was "pre-doomed" from the start. The oil companies did help "push" the trolley cars to their doom, but they were always easy prey, and probably would have gone extinct anyway.

Now, what does this mean for LA? Since the force of real estate wants to sell LAND, sprawl is inevitable. To keep the engine going, you need more land. To get more land, you need to go farther out. To go farther out, you need to commute farther in. Quid pro go.

In Texas, what would be the main economic force? In my opinion that would be big oil. I would think that in Texas, "cheap oil" would have been a birthright assumption of urban planning.

CarloSW2

Commuting : 13 miles each way - usually more during work too - which costs about $5/day.