As I wrote in a previous post, I bought a car. Was it a good choice? I still don’t know. I mean, I chose a good car, but don’t know if buying a car was a good choice or not. As I wrote in the post, I seriously thought of environmental impact when I decided to buy a car. But this internet article about “dis-ownership” points out another critical issue; people choose sharing over owning not because it is “green” but because it saves money, as the article goes “the new status symbol isn’t what you own–it’s what you’re smart enough not to own”.
Of course I knew it when I bought the car, and now I know it as reality. It costs. What compensation do I get? Time. Is time money? Yes, sorta.
I agree with the author of the article; when I was in Japan and spent more than an hour to commute by public transportation, I read a lot of books. But it does not work here in Orillia. Before I bought the car, I used bus to go to work, but I spent less than 10 minutes on bus and spent way more time on walking and waiting for a bus, i.e., I could do very limited things when commuting such as briefly checking internet news on my Blackberry. Now, with the car, I have more time to do more things. I bought time.
As I wrote in another previous post, I spent more than a week in downtown Toronto, and did not use my car a lot there. Probably in some cities, sharing is a better and smarter choice than owning. This raises another question. How can more cities be smarter ones?
Today I used bus to go to downtown to look for a hair salon; I expected I would walk around to find one in downtown where parking is limited. And I ended up choosing one with parking in front. Oh well.