Friday, November 08, 2019

private vehicle ownership or not?

Last night I went to my van, which I am driving less and less and when I turned the key to start it, nothing happened. My suspicion is that the starter battery doesn't have enough charge.

I needed the van last night to do a Costco run to get food that at work, we would be preparing all together as a meal team that some of us from work would tomorrow serve to the homeless at a shelter.

I did not end up doing that last night. I will leave work at lunch time today to hopefully get the van issue ironed out, go to Costco, and then return to work in the late afternoon/evening.

Today I'm going to discuss this with my father-in-law who has dealt with automotive issues often. Specifically my question is if I get a boost to get the van started and then drive to Costco, that is only about an eleven minute drive. Is there a risk that it won't start again from there once I leave Costco. Or, optionally, I can always buy a new battery at Costco while I am there, but I am hoping to spend as little as possible on this van as I want to get rid of it soon.

So, getting rid of it; does this mean replacing it with a new-to-me vehicle, or ditching private vehicle ownership altogether?

The reason I am not driving so much any more is that I only get the kids half of the time and during the time I don't have them, I use public transit pretty much exclusively. When I have them, G-bot and C-ling both have transit cards that get them wherever they need to go, and where I live is within walking distance of V-8's school, so this is what we've been doing since the school year has begun.

There are and there will be some mornings that driving V-8 to school would be preferable (to walking) due to icy road conditions, or very cold windy weather, or heavy downpours. This could happen perhaps a dozen times throughout the school year, maybe less. My idea for this is to hire an Uber to bring V-8 to school.

Perhaps about once a month I go to Costco for my own groceries; I could use public transit to get there, and hire an Uber to get me home. For regular groceries I am within walking distance of a grocery store.

A few times a year (May Long Weekend, Family Camp, Spartan Race) where in the past I have really needed to have a car as the destination is not transit reachable. In these few rare cases I could rent a vehicle.

For these times (and other pre-planned times where having a car would be handy) that I am having to do a big Costco order for my work's meal team, perhaps I would sign up for Commun-auto, a car sharing service. An issue with this car-sharing service is that their zone for vehicle retrieval and return doesn't go as far west in the city as I live by about 15km; so any time I need to use this service there is an extra 30km added on to whatever my needs are.

I guess I will take a closer look at what my car-usage needs have been over the last year and do a cost comparison between what it would take with private car ownership and what it would take with Transit/Uber/Commun-auto.

1 comment:

HabsFan47 said...

An advantage to living in New York City is the public transportation is available 24/7/365. This makes it extremely easy to avoid owning a car.

Down here, we have Zipcar (https://www.zipcar.com), where you can rent by the hour. There are parking spots all over the place, and if you have the app, you can simply unlock the car and go off on your own without needing to talk to anyone. It seems Montréal has something similar (https://www.communauto.com), but the cars are more downtown than the suburbs. Perhaps, you could rent one near your work and go from there.

In the meantime, good luck with the van!