Rogier Van Biekel says the tires on his fairly new vehicle are bad:
Which is as good a time as any to report that the tires on my 18-month-old Toyota RAV4 Limited are as bald as the eagle who nests in the trees across my house. The car (and the tires) have just 30,000 miles on them. I'd never heard of modern tires that (properly inflated and rotated) last fewer than 30,000 miles. All the tires I've bought in my dozen years of car ownership have, in fact, had warranties in the 50-60,000-mile ballpark.
The tires on my 2007 Mazda 3 (with just under 36,000 miles) are also in need of replacement. It'll be nice to have new tires (my car's handling has decreased dramatically but I'm guessing I've adjusted and forgotten how good it once was), but I'm not looking forward to spending $500-600.
The user experience of public transportation seems much more fixed and predictable than the user experience of driving/owning a car. Once you figure out your route on public transportation, travel times (especially on non-bus options) and costs are pretty fixed. But with a car, just when you think your car is good to go, some unexpected problem inevitably shows up. I used to think the IRS rate (currently around $0.50 per mile) of owning a car was higher than what it should be, but the longer I've owned cars the less I've thought this.
All this just reinforces my desire to live somewhere where I can commute via some combination of walking, biking, riding a subway/light rail/bus. I like driving, but I could live with only driving a couple times a week. Driving 35 miles to work each way every day is too much.
Image from Flickr user dmitriyo available under a Creative Commons license
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