[personal profile] jaipur
so yesterday was interesting. My office at work is having problems with the heat in these subfreezing temperatures, so I stayed home to work on a paper. The hubby was leaving at 1 to go off to do something--but his car wouldn't start. Battery's fine, he jumped it from my car just to make sure; but no such luck. Dead.

But as we're looking up tow trucks and figuring *that* out, he realized there was a slow leak of water coming down the garage wall from an exposed pipe. That proceeded to take up the rest of the day! We had to call the home warranty people (who won't cover it, due to it being freezing outside--I continue to live in hope that the home warranty some day will cover something, but seriously I doubt it) to find a plumber, who then was in the middle of something and had to call us back, so the hubby had to drive me to work to drop me off.

The hubby got back home only to discover that the neighbor at one end of the row was *pouring* water from her garage. Luckily we have an all-units email list so when she didn't answer the door he emailed everyone to let them know and she saw her email (turns out she was home but not answering the door?) and got on it. She was actually the third person in our housing group to bust their pipes--ours was a very small leak but the night before one of the other families had had the same pipes just blow and pour water down the block. Much email back and forth about how to turn off the water, and the hubby went over to help her too.

I took public transportation home! Took the subway to the bus--it was really easy and I was home in half an hour. It's more expensive than parking on campus, but way more relaxing. (Am I willing to pay a $45/month tax to take public transportation? It's mindblowing--I've never lived anywhere where driving myself and parking on campus is cheaper than the monthly public transportation.) Surprisingly, the subway runs every 5 min or something during rush hour which is great--but the bus only runs every half hour, so if I miss the 5:07 I'm stuck waiting for the 5:39. I can get home at 5:20 or 6 pm and not any time in between. :P

And when I got home at 5:30, the unit at the *other* end of the block where the president of our homeowners' association lives was pouring water like a waterfall down their garage door and down the block. He was out of town and not responding immediately to email, but eventually got in touch with someone to get in and turn it off. So that's four sets of pipes that blew due to the polar vortex! Our two neighbors emailed the hubby to ask him how their units are doing, since they were out of town too. (Also weird is how many people are out of town--we've commented before it's like we are the only family living here, sometimes.) (of course, for the fellow at the other end, his next door neighbor with whom he has an ongoing feud emailed him separately that his waterfall damaged *their* garage and they expect to be reimbursed for their damages, to which he emailed everyone on the list saying "Suck off and die, bitch." Ok, not exactly, but close. I really wish he would leave me off their emailed pissing matches. He's totally got anger management issues when he sits down at a keyboard.)

So this morning the hubby has to wait for the plumber, and I have to call a tow truck first thing, get his car dragged to the mechanic and take MARTA into work. Hopefully I can do all that before my 9 am phone call...

Date: 2014-01-09 09:52 am (UTC)
ccommack: (Default)
From: [personal profile] ccommack
I took public transportation home! Took the subway to the bus--it was really easy and I was home in half an hour. It's more expensive than parking on campus, but way more relaxing. (Am I willing to pay a $45/month tax to take public transportation? It's mindblowing--I've never lived anywhere where driving myself and parking on campus is cheaper than the monthly public transportation.) Surprisingly, the subway runs every 5 min or something during rush hour which is great--but the bus only runs every half hour, so if I miss the 5:07 I'm stuck waiting for the 5:39. I can get home at 5:20 or 6 pm and not any time in between. :P

Well, my morning just whipsawed from yay!happy to NERDRAGEHULKSMASH! Oh, sunbelt public transportation, how I do not miss you. (That said, twice-an-hour bus service is not the worst out there, but it's pretty bad.)

Does that $45/month include the part where your employer offers monthly MARTA passes at $83.80 pre-tax (with automatic deductions/farecard reloading) as opposed to $95.00 post-tax? Or are you far enough out to have to deal with one of the fragmented regional bus systems? How does the half-hour trip compare to driving time? Am I being a pest with all these questions?


Sorry to hear about all the waterworks. Good luck with all the fallout from that...

Date: 2014-01-09 10:44 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jaipur.livejournal.com
Hi there!! yeah, we were pretty stunned to figure this all out--I was looking forward to taking MARTA until I realized that the monthly farecard is $80-$90 while a monthly parking pass on campus for faculty is $55. So a $30 tax to take public transport, if you like. The time required is exactly the same: the other week the hubby left school on MARTA as I was leaving by car and he got home maybe 2 minutes before I did. It's literally just the issue of whether you want to swap the frustration of driving yourself against $30/month and standing out in the cold waiting for a bus... If the price were the other way around, of course, if there was a $30/month extra cost to parking, I'd be taking MARTA in a minute.

Date: 2014-01-09 11:32 am (UTC)
crystalpyramid: crystal pyramid suspended in dimensional abnormality (irian)
From: [personal profile] crystalpyramid
How much is gas? Or is it close enough that gas is basically negligible. I guess once you have a car you're already paying a lot of the extra costs associated with driving, but it's worth checking.

(Parking at work is free for me, but if you include the cost of gas rail becomes a lot more competitive. I think driving is still technically cheaper, except in terms of my own energy and the increased risk of car accidents due to driving while exhausted.)
Edited Date: 2014-01-09 11:36 am (UTC)

Date: 2014-01-09 12:19 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jaipur.livejournal.com
Good point! I'm less than 5 miles from work, and get nearly 30 miles to the gallon, and gas is $3-$4 a gallon, so a roundtrip of say 8 miles is maybe a buck at most? While a roundtrip on MARTA is $5 if you buy by the trip, and roughly $4 if you count 20 round trips a month for $80 on the monthly card.

So let me see: Driving = $55 for parking + $20 in gas at most (I usually fill my 12 gallon tank every 3 weeks and that's taking into account all the non-work driving, so $20/month for work alone is probably accurate) + the annoyance of driving in Atlanta traffic.
MARTA = $84, which is actually still more. Plus the annoyance of not being able to leave when you want.

It's really actually impressive--not how expensive MARTA is, because it's freakin' cheap compared to the DC metro or Boston, but how cheap parking for faculty at GSU is. Part-timers and students actually end up paying more--if i was paying the student rate I'd probably figure MARTA was cheaper that parking + gas.

Date: 2014-01-09 02:32 pm (UTC)
ccommack: (Default)
From: [personal profile] ccommack
The more I hear about how people screw up parking policy, the more I wonder exactly how it all went so terribly wrong. The average cost for constructing an above-ground parking garage is usually ballparked at around $12-15K per space. (Underground is $30K.) At $55/month, you're only covering half the cost; the University is eating the other half, which means that that's $6K-7.5K that's never going to go to faculty compensation, new facilities, financial aid, student dorms, etc. etc. And that's just the direct costs to the school, never mind the added infrastructure costs that have to be borne by the city and state to accommodate all those cars getting to those garages and then leaving later.

Given the cockamamie things actual people wrote on the internet about parking when the Braves announced they were moving to Cobb County, I can only assume that this is still a systemic cultural problem in Greater Atlanta, not that I'm throwing stones given the parking zombies we have up here...

Date: 2014-01-09 02:51 pm (UTC)

Date: 2014-01-15 10:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] allogenes.livejournal.com
GSU bought most of their parking from depressed property---they got out of building the parking. I suspect that changes the math from *building* parking.

Date: 2014-01-09 02:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ruthling.livejournal.com
that sounds like a horrible pain in the butt. good luck!

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