Monday, December 17, 2007

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

There’s something terribly wrong with the transportation system here in the U.S. I live about 30 miles south of New York City. My family lives just south of Washington, D.C. The distance from my house to theirs is about 200 miles one way. The cost of tolls and gas makes the total round-trip cost of visiting my family about $75. The drive takes me just under four hours with normal traffic (that means two slow areas and the rest smooth sailing).

Now, if I want to take public transportation from here to D.C. it costs me almost TWICE what it costs to drive. The round trip tickets are $130 and that doesn’t even get me all the way to my family’s place. I still have to take another train to get within 20 miles of home and then have them pick me up there. After all the driving to train stations, parking, taking a second train, and driving the rest of the way the total time is nearly six hours one way and the total round-trip cost is about $140. That’s just ALL WRONG!

It should be backwards. The cost of the slower, public transportation should be half of the cost of driving. In fact, in most countries the train would be faster, but that would just be a miracle here. I look at the Japan train system as a stellar example of an advanced economy that has managed to build a cheap, fast public transportation system. I wish the U.S. had done the same.

The thing that really annoys me the most is that, if we had a train system similar to the Japanese one, I could live in D.C. and commute to New Jersey every day for work and it wouldn’t take me more than an hour and a half to get to work. I drive nearly that amount of time today and would gladly commute that far if it meant living in my home town.

I’m baaaaaaack…

Note: I wrote this post back in the middle of November using Word. Just never posted it until now.

So, I haven’t written in a long while. I’ve been back from India for almost exactly two and a half months. In that time I’ve been all over and done a ton of stuff. Most of it had to do with getting settled here in New Jersey and in my new job. I managed to fit in some really fun stuff in between though.

The first hurdle to jump upon getting back from India was the housing hurdle. I actually found the place that I was to end up in on the first day I looked but the guy who owned the place dragged his feet about letting me move in so I had to wait a week and a half before I could move in to my new place. That pretty much bit the big one, as I felt like a vagabond for the whole time I was “homeless.”

Once I got settled, in I started to work on feeling comfortable at my job. That has taken some time, and I honestly don’t think I have “arrived” yet but I feel much better about what I do and my work in general than I did when I was just recently returned from India, so that is good.

Wow, this blog entry is like, SUPER boring. I’m sitting here typing it and I’m bored. That’s just terrible. Here, lets change gears and see if we can’t make things interesting.

The other day I was at Taco Bell and I ordered some food and a drink. When I went to fill up my drink I tried the ice machine once, and nothing. The second time…again nothing. Now, usually I only want a few cubes of ice, as I don’t like my drinks really cold; I prefer cool. I could hear something rattling around inside the damn machine so I tried a third time thinking, “Third times a charm, right?” Well, on the third try the machine decides to make up for the two previous barren attempts by spitting out enough ice to drown in.

I grimaced as the ice almost filled my cup and thought to myself, “I HATE these damn machines.” I swear they were designed by some nerdy, demented engineer who had no friends and nothing better to do than design a machine that will torment poor innocent people like me who are just trying to get a few cubes of ice in their cups.

There, that was much more interesting. I suppose you could say it's pretty sad that my rants about different things I hate are more interesting than the last two and a half months of my life. If anything, that probably means that I lead a boring life. Hmm, if the realization that I lead a boring life really fazed me at all I might change my life, but it doesn’t so I won’t.