Public Transportation
Using public transportation instead of driving your own car can be very helpful to yourself as well as the environment. First, you would save yourself a hell of a lot of money on gasoline. Gas prices now are still around $3.00-$3.10 a gallon here in Southern California, and the crude oil prices are still hovering around $77-78 a barrel. Think about all of the things you can do with the money you save from driving your car less. Of course, using public transportation instead of driving as a commute to work every day would have to depend on where you live. If let us say you live in Orange County, and your workplace is all the way up in Los Angeles, for sure you will have to sacrifice the time and money that you spent on your car’s mileage and gasoline while going back and forth; there is no other choice as far as that is concerned.
Using public transportation such as the public county’s bus line or even walking for that matter (depending on how hot it is outside), can have its advantages and disadvantages. Yes, you may be “saving the environment” by riding in a form of public transport which uses 100% natural gas which emits less carbon monoxide into the air instead of petroleum; another advantage would be that you could get some exercise from walking from one bus stop to the other and wait for another 15-20 minutes in the scorching heat. The disadvantage to public transportation nowadays is that the workers had been laid off, and there would be little to no bus drivers to help the people who do not have a car to drive (because of California’s state budget cuts). Furthermore, if there are no drivers for the buses, then the bus riders like us would have to wait even longer than the scheduled times, and we could get kind of antsy.
With public transportation and driving, there is still a little thing that we probably remember from our Economics class(es) called “opportunity cost.” We have two problems to solve, but there is only one answer that can only solve one of them. If we use public transportation, we would have to sacrifice in getting to our destination in a shorter time because sometimes we have to use our two feet to walk over there. If we keep driving our car, we have to sacrifice the amount of money that we need on our car’s mileage and the money that we need to spend in order to pay for gasoline at $3.00 a gallon average. What can we do to solve this without all the hassle? Like I have mentioned, all of this has something to do with the area that we live in. If we commute to work within a 5-mile radius, then we should consider taking public transportation. If we commute to work within more than a 10-mile radius, drive the car.
