Cyclist0383

You should have seen the massive SUV he was tooling around in with a large entourage of other vehicles when he visited Riga. If you think he lives a carfree lifestyle, or cares about people being carfree, you're dreaming.

bmclaughlin807

It only makes sense if you actually invest the money you'd otherwise spend by paying cash for the car! MOST people don't do this, they buy the car on credit, and then use whatever money they're 'saving' by not paying cash for the car to either buy other things, or going out to eat, whatever....

bmclaughlin807

Nice. Are you a bookkeeper or an accountant? (Our accountant used to get pissed if someone called him a bookkeeper! )

99% of people DON'T know how to track car expenses like that. I'd say that probably 75% of them WOULDN'T, even if someone taught them how. THAT'S why the other poster recommended the books. He's just happens to be recommending it to someone who happens to be in that 1%.

adgrant

Actually I am a software developer though I did do a short accounting class back in college (it was mandatory actually). I suspect you are correct that 75% of people would not track there expenses. Some people like to invest some of their leisure time changing their own oil (or rebuilding their bike), others like to tackle major home improvement projects. I find the investment in time required to maintain accurate financial records to be worthwhile. BTW Real Estate expenses should be tracked the same way as auto expenses.

There are ways to lighten the load though, If you lease a new car instead of buying it and taking out a car loan, tracking the cost is easier since deprecation is included in the payment and repairs are covered under warranty and sometimes so is maintainance. If you use a credit card, use one that links to Quicken and charge everything to that card. Most of your transactions will be fed automatically into Quicken that way. If you fly a lot, get a card with air miles.

I will be going car free in about 3 weeks (I am currently car light) and (thanks to Quicken) in about six months or so will have an accurate picture of how much being car free is saving me.

gosmsgo

All I know is that you can quicken yourself right into poverty.

Tracking your expenses is not even remotely close to budgeting and controlling them. Its like writing down how many calories you eat without limiting the amount of calories you eat.

I take my expenses (listed every month - bills etc) and my income (same everymonth) minus them and put the rest right into savings.

I put $280 a month into an envelope for groceries for the month (before we were spending about 350) and when its gone....its gone. No more food. It forces you to budget, to buy the cheaper items, to cut couppons etc.

Our "spending money" is also put into an envelope and that is money to spend on things that we do not have to have. For example, if we rent a car or buy any gas it comes from our spending money, so does clothes, going out to eat or whatever.

Also, forces you to make cuts etc.

Helped me go from breaking even every month to saving 40-50% of my take home pay. I dont need quicken because I have cash an in envelope in my safe.

Everybody's got an opinion on money but most people dont have any. I dont take money advice from poor people for the same reason I dont buy Dr. (******) phils diet book.

cheers.

adgrant

I doubt that many people who have gone to the trouble of setting up and using Quicken have "quickened their way into poverty". Unless you track your expenses you can't really plan a meaningful budget. Your cash in envelope scheme is rather crude and unwieldy especially for large sums of money and doesn't really work well in tracking expenses. I wouldn't want to have to run home and count the cash in my safe to know how much money I had. Firing up Pocket Quicken on my Treo seems much more efficient.

I am not sure who you are calling poor but if you were referring to me you needn't worry. I am certainly not worrying about spending an extra $70 on groceries a month.

bmike

money as debt...
interesting vid. just found it, so i haven't really cross checked it yet, but seeing as i try to operate with as low a debt burden as i can i can say that i'm not being a very supportive cog of the economy.

decisivemoment

OK, official troll certification here. You are simply moralizing about other peoples' lives. If you were advocating managing one's own life to the point that you have the cash on hand to pay cash IF that's the most economical option, I would take you more seriously.

Ever heard of low interest financing? Or, when the car manufacturers get really desperate, no-interest financing? Or arbitrage? Or investments that earn a higher rate of interest than what you pay on your car loan?

I hope you're not one of these cyclists who runs stop signs or rides against traffic on a one way street.

decisivemoment

OK on to the main topic of political hypocrisy.

I honestly don't see what Giuliani ever did to promote car-free living, But he definitely used transit. So I don't really see hypocrisy, just a rather flaccid approach to funding and promoting transit and other non-car projects.

Bloomberg is a different story, but let's face it, it is a little embarrassing to be above taking the local in order to get to the express, especially when you have a reasonably fast transit system as opposed to some I could mention. Still, on the Lexington line, I'm willing to cut him a bit of slack until such point as the crowding is alleviated by the 2nd Avenue line -- if, that is, he really continues to makes a serious effort to get non-car transportation projects delivered.

I like Mayor Daley with his pro-bike policies, although the contribution the city of Chicago makes directly to transit from fees/tourist taxes/property taxes is embarrassingly small, and as we've all seen the sales tax is no longer doing the job.

No politician is perfect, but while there are clear cases of slacking with all the names mentioned here, I'm not sure there is a clear-cut case of car-free hypocrisy with any of these three -- just enough backsliding to remind us that we need to keep challenging them to do more.

I personally think there's a case to be made for funding car-free projects from the property tax, given that the one thing we clearly know about transit routes and bike routes is that they raise the value of neighboring property.

Izengabe

When I started this thread I wasn't intending it to be political. But since we got off on a bit of a tangent I will say the one thing Rudy did to make car free living easier was he made the subways in New York a heck of a lot safer!!!!

I remember riding the subways to high school before Rudy was mayor in the early 1990's and believe me it was scary and dangerous. The dramatic reduction in crime he orchestrated made it a lot easier and safer for people to ride mass transit in New York.

I also think by making New York safer he helped reverse the urban flight to the more car dependent lifestyle of the suburbs. After all the more people who live in the City means less people who need to commute by car from the suburbs.

As far a pro bike policies, let me say dramatically reducing the risk that my bike gets stolen is as far as I am concerned a very pro bike policy. These days I feel perfectly safe riding my bike at night through neighborhoods that 15 years ago I wouldn't have felt safe walking through during the day.

I am not saying Rudy would be a good or bad President. I do know as Mayor he was a big advocate for increased Federal funding for mass transit. I just hope that if he was elected president he would use his experience as Mayor of NYC to push to transfer more federal dollars from road construction to mass transit spending.

Roody

Give me a break. Nobody is this naive.

bmike

debatable that rudy should be credited with this.

there's the controversial freakonomics concept, then the general reinvestment of big business into the core of manhattan, and a general rise in the stock market and economy that brought more people back to the city.

more people making decent money (and staying) in the city would bring down crime just as effectively as any one politician's goals and edicts. more people = more taxes = more accountability required by the police to take care of their neighborhoods.

i wasn't there when the subway was scary... i was there in the mid 90's to the late 90's when things for the most part seemed pretty tame from when i visited even as late as the early 90's. when walt disney moves into times square and pushes out the sex shops, you know something is happening.



as to your claim that you didn't want to make this political - you used the words "car free", "rudy", and "president" in the title of this post. how you couldn't see it coming is beyond me.

ModoVincere

Do you really think anybody with ambitions in DC has any real concerns as to the living of a car-free lifestyle?
Kerry certainly does not.
Edwards is a joke.
Certainly can not claim the Clintons would be car-free.
Gore? Worst of them all.
Any republicans are just as bad if not worse as far as supporting of this life style for all americans.

Izengabe

What I meant by wasn't trying to be political was I wasn't trying to advocate for one candidate or another when I started the thread.

Roody

Check out Sen. Mike Gravel from Alaska, a Democratic candidate. He says we can get America off gasoline in 5 years and off carbon in 10.

ModoVincere

off carbon..how?
even if you used all bio diesel, that's carbon....its made from veggie oil..which is medium and long chain fatty acids. The chains are carbon chains.
Ethanol...carbon.
Natural Gas...carbon.

So, where's that energy coming from?

Platy

Electrification of transportation is one good possibility. Electricity can be generated by non-carbon means like wind, solar or nuclear.

ModoVincere

That's a long way's off.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to a less oil/coal dependent energy but I don't think its technically and economically feasible at the moment. Current electrification of transportation is majority coal based. Some energy companies have requested and are persuing nuclear facilities, but that's gonna take 15 years to get online. Unless something changes on the demand side, that will just barely meet the projected growth as is...throw in electrified transportation and it may not be sufficient.

Wind...great if you are in the right place...sucks if you are not in a windy area.

Solar...I'm watching this area with interest. I expect that in the future, most houses and other buildings will be built with a PV rooftop. They will all be tied into the grid and thus relying on the power company for times when there is insufficient light.

Will still be a need for coal/gas/diesel fired units though.

Roody

Liquid hydrogen produced with solar and wind electricity.

Some excerpts from a Grist interview with Gravel:

Carbon tax:
Liquid hydrogen to replace coal and oil:
Outlaw coal powered electricity:
On ethanol:
Sustainable economy (sounds like he read McKibben's book):


BTW, if Giuliani would be the first carfree president, Gravel would probably be the first carlight one with a simple-life philosophy. From the Grist interview:

ModoVincere

Thanks for the post and link...I'll have to read it when I get a chance.
I will tell you this though...I'm skeptical of the liquid hydrogen approach at this point. It takes a lot of energy to liquify hydrogen and a lot of energy to keep it that way.
Not saying it won't happen...just that I have to do more research on it.

Roody

Same here. I didn't know anything about Gravel until a couple weeks ago, and I still don't know much. But one thing is clear--he's the only original thinker in either party right now (Besides maybe Dodd).

ModoVincere

This is why I wont vote dem. or rep. but I don't want to get this moved to P&R, so I'll leave it at that.

bmike

ok... but this thread is loaded.

Roody

I wonder if the mods would let us get away with a "nonpartisan" thread about the candidate's stands on issues that are related to carfree--like environment, energy policy and urban planning. It would be helpful to me to find out what others on this forum--right or left--think about the candidates.

wahoonc

In response to the solar transportation...I can't find the freakin' link but I saw a design idea for an elevated track where small (4-6) passenger cars are suspended from the mono rail and the top of the mono is covered by high powered solar panels. It would not be for everywhere and I don't recall what happened at night or in the less than sunny areas but it was an interesting concept. The pods were computer controlled and loaded at some type of elevated station then joined the ones already on the track.

Aaron