LogFAQs > #972795588

LinkPizza posted...

Thats why I said to start it once a week or so. Even once a month. I can usually go home for a month and start my car up when I get back. And several hundred seems high But I guess it can change based on different areas

Generally speaking, you won't be able to renew your insurance for less than a year at a time, and a year's insurance plus a year's registration are likely to cost at least a few hundred dollars. Past that, simply starting the car isn't enough. To keep a battery properly charged, you're going to want to drive it around for at least 10-15 minutes (30 is what's recommended after boosting a dead one), and that is also a good idea just to make sure all the moving parts maintain reasonable coverage of the various fluids and don't rust. You can't really drive around for 10-15 minutes without a valid plate or insurance (or at least you shouldn't).

LinkPizza posted...

You could maybe buy one close to the price you sold it for. But you probably dont have that money. Most probably would have used it for the house. So, you are still probably making payments for it when you could have instead kept it And depending on the price of the new one and how long you went without, it may have been cheaper to have just kept the old one

If the person in question needed the money from the sale of the car to afford a house, then they wouldn't have been able to afford a house with a larger lot that would have a driveway anyway.

LinkPizza posted...

Maybe they need more people to get a bigger fleet, but then that means they should be able to properly clean the few cars that they do have, though And even then, they should point people to cars that they have. Its still weird to send people to an empty lot when they asked for a car

Depends how often they're being used. Like a lot of businesses, there's a feedback loop for quality of service: If the cars get used more frequently, that produces more revenue, which pays for more staff that can inspect cars pre-emptively or respond to complaints about dirt/mechanical issues more quickly, which makes cars more pleasant to use and increases their frequency of use. Naturally, there needs to be a front-end investment to keep an acceptable level of service going until that frequency of use takes off, but with lower demand for the service in the first place, that front-end investment isn't likely to pay off. In the same vein, GPS tracking cars to be able to tell people where they actually are instead of directing people to where they're supposed to be and hoping the last driver parked them there costs money, so offering that from the outset instead of after a stable revenue stream has been secured is hard.

I don't disagree that service needs to be better for the industry to succeed, but those are issues that solve themselves if the demand is there to drive usage even when the service standard isn't quite as high as perhaps it ought to be (especially once there's enough demand to stimulate competition).

LinkPizza posted...

Even with good public transportation, you have to build you schedule around it

Not really. If a train comes every five minutes, you just go to the station whenever. That's a concept that's really hard for people who come from areas without reliable public transportation to wrap their heads around, since I know I've always had to check bus schedules whenever I want to take one and few things compare to the abject misery of narrowly missing a bus and having to wait half an hour for the next one, but that's a service standard many cities have been able to very comfortably achieve, as idealistic as you might think it is.

LinkPizza posted...

I wouldnt say beneficial.

All of the things I listed there are objectively beneficial.

LinkPizza posted...

I was saying I wouldnt want to take the risk of building a bunch of houses with no driveways because public transport was suppose to be good, but then the deal fell through That was the risk I was saying I wouldnt take

That's really no different from taking the risk of building a suburb in a manner that relies entirely on a major road to get in and out, then having another suburb built a mile up the same road that adds so much extra congestion that the residents of your suburb now have to spend twice as long going anywhere. No matter what you do, you're relying on infrastructure that's out of your control. At least with planned transit, you can get a contractual obligation from the city that allows you to sue them for damages if the plan falls through and the value of the development tanks as a result.

LinkPizza posted...

I just wont use it as its not good enough for me

This is exactly what I'm talking about: because you've never known how well a proper transit system can work, you've already decided that it's impossible for transit to ever work for you. You've based your opinion entirely off of personal experience and are unable to imagine that it could ever be good enough, despite countless cities elsewhere that have made it good enough and seen massive improvements for doing so.

LinkPizza posted...
And even if it was better, I absolutely wouldnt get on the buses in my city since I know what happens on them

Presuming you're talking about various violent/criminal activities, that tends to improve with more ubiquitous transit use. What you're experiencing now is largely a consequence of buses often being pretty empty (fewer witnesses) and being used almost exclusively by people who can't afford cars (lower SES being pretty strongly correlated with criminal activity). With more witnesses, more socioeconomic diversity, and more buses running (so not everyone gets on the same one), as well as improvements in security services that become possible with greater ridership, those problems get better. As a secondary benefit, when a city is designed such that people can get around even if they can't afford a car, overall SES tends to improve because more people can get to work without spending more than they make at work to do so, and that also improves crime rates.