Coffee heat rising

public transportation

Car upkeep!

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Gawdlmighty! The 90,000-mile service on my aging Toyota Sienna is gunna cost $1,200!

It’s enough to make a strong woman faint. Well, luckily I knew about this and set the money aside. But that doesn’t make me any happier about having to sink 12 C-notes into a nine-year-old vehicle.

For the money, Chuck the Mechanic Par Excellence proposes to do the regular 90,000-mile service, change the timing belt, and replace the water pump, it being an opportune moment to do that—while the front end of the motor is off, anyway. I happen to know, too, that he’ll lubricate the squeaking steering wheel, probably for not much, and that he’ll check the brake pads, rotate the tires, and change all the hoses.

Suspecting that Chuck’s estimate was a little high, I called a couple of Toyota dealers. One proposed to charge me $350 for the basic 90,000 service; another wanted $300 for the same thing, claiming it was a “special” markdown from the usual price of $360. Uh huh. Then it’s another $300 for the water pump plus another $300 for three seals that may or may not need to be changed plus $65 for “outside belts.” Plus $335 for the timing belt. If I’m not mistaken, that would be $1,300 to $1,350, depending on which stalwart Toyota dealer one chooses to do business with.

Makes Chuck’s fee look like a bargain. And I know he’s not going to cheat me. Past experience suggests that is not always a given with automobile dealerships.

{sigh} So I made an appointment for a week from Friday.

Well, it’s a heckuva lot cheaper than buying a new car. Normally, I’d trade in a vehicle at ten years. But now that I’m about to be canned, with no hope (or desire…) of getting another job, this car is going to have to run until it falls apart. Chuck thinks it will easily get 150,000 miles, which should carry it another six years. And it could, in theory, run to 180,000 miles, or another nine years. Barring an accident, of course.

A crash that results in the insurance company totaling it (which right now would probably be a fender-bender) will leave me up the creek, since I do not and will not ever have enough cash to buy another car. Nor will I ever again have enough cash flow to make car payments. Every penny in savings, including the $18,000 I had set aside for the next vehicle, now will have to be rolled into the funds intended to support me in my dotage. If I can get this car to run ten more years, it will be the last car I’ll ever own.

Really, in ten years I’ll only be 74, and so I may still be competent to drive. What’s $18,000 now will likely be $36,000 then…hmmm…  With no steady job, I’d have to set aside $3,600 a year to collect enough extra money to buy a car in 2019. {snark!} Now there’s a realistic goal!

😆  😆  😆  😆  😆  😆  😆  😆  😆  😆

Oh well. Thirty-six hundred bucks would buy 180 twenty-dollar cab rides. That’s a trip to the grocery store about every two days.

Too bad we don’t have decent public transportation here. Thirty-six hundred bucks—just one  year of car savings—would buy 2,057 all-day bus or train tickets. That would be unlimited rides every single day for 5 years and 7 months! Alas, in these parts a single trip to the grocery store and home on the buses would consume a whole day. I could fill the entire remainder of my life with waiting at bus stops and then waiting for buses to get where I want to go.

Image: 2007-2009 Toyota Sienna, public domain

Cash for Clunkers: A boondoggle?

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A billion dollars gets soaked up like water into a sponge, in four days, and then Congress appropriates still more billions of bucks to get people to buy new cars by paying them more than their junkers are worth? Fantastic. And I do mean that in its true sense.

How many more billions of dollars are going to run down the Cash for Clunkers drain?

Wouldn’t it have made more sense to use that money to build a decent public transportation system for one major city or one geographic region that doesn’t have one? Since almost no major US cities have anything that resembles viable public transport, surely it wouldn’t have been difficult to find a place to build one.

And if we want to get the gas-guzzling, emissions-belching junk off the road, there’s a simple way to do it: don’t let people register them. It wouldn’t take umpty-umpteen billion dollars to pass a law saying a car that’s X number of years old and that gets less than Y miles per gallon cannot be driven on the public roads. And no exceptions for “historic” vehicles. Then fine the bejayzus out of people who leave them rusting on private property or beside public thoroughfares. This would force owners to turn them in for salvage. Then those who can’t afford to buy a new junker could ride the lightrail, high-speed trains, and buses our taxpayer billions would be freed up to build.

It’d put a lot more people to work than a batallion of car salesmen, too.

Light rail is AWESOME!

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So yesterday as a lark SDXB and I rode the city’s new light rail train from uptown Phoenix to the end of the line in Mesa; thenon the return legdropped off in Tempe for lunch at the Great Desert University’s new “local foods” café. What a hoot! The trains, being brand-new, are clean and shiny. The ride is smooth and surprisingly fast: from Tempe to our stop was about 40 minutes, no longer than it takes me to make the drive in moderate traffic. And it was great fun.
Check it out:

trainatcback

Starting Monday, I am going to park my car near AJ’s (my favorite purveyor of overpriced foods) at Central and Camelback and ride the train to campus. That will save about 30 miles of wear & tear on my car plus almost a quarter-tank of gas per trip!

buyingtix
Buying tickets

As an old folk, I can get a round-trip ticket for $1.25, somewhat less than the cost of gasoline for a round-trip drive. They have various packages that save a little, but unfortunately the tickets are for consecutive days, and I don’t necessarily go to Tempe five consecutive days a week. Ditto the university’s cut-rate package: you have to buy a full year’s worth; they take it away from you when you’re canned; and it covers consecutive days. So any day that you don’t ride represents wasted money. With the senior-citizen fare, the best deal seems to be to purchase a ticket from a vending machine for each ride.

But it gets better!

Presently, the end of the line on our side of town is in a shopping center with a Costco and a Target, within walking distance of M’hijito’s house. On days when I need to do make a significant shopping trip, I could leave my car in the Park’n’ride there and, on the way home, hit Costco and Target. This would save an extra trip for supply runs.

Also along the way are a Safeway, a Walgreen’s (both in reasonably safe areas), and the wonted AJ’s. In other words, I could combine about 98% of routine shopping with light-rail trips!

It would cut the use of my car by a good 75 to 80 percent. And once The Hartford hears about this, it will cut the cost of auto insurance: they specifically ask whether you commute on public transport.

In about 18 months or two years, this train is going to run right up the main drag just to the west of my neighborhood. I will be able to walk to the station—or ride Xoot the Xooter, or, as I get more decrepit, ride an electric scooter.

So! In retirement, I will barely need a car.

Good thing, since the amount of savings I’d earmarked to buy the new car was incinerated in the Bonfire of the Bush Vanities, and so I’ll have to make do with my ten-year-old van. Chuck the Mechanic Par Excellence informed me that its next scheduled service, at 90,000 miles, will set me back $1,200. Great timing, eh? I really need a twelve-hundred-dollar bill just as I’m about to lose my job. Well, it’s a lot cheaper than a new car.

And if this light rail system actually works to cut mileage by, say, 60 to 75 percent, the old clunk may survive another ten years.
Frugal and green!
🙂