My wife and I work different schedules for different employers in different parts of town. Since mass transit is impractical here, there's no alternative but to either find someone reliable to carpool with every day (but then, I wouldn't be able to teach my night classes) or to own two vehicles.

When I was looking to replace my POS 94 Saturn about 18 months ago, I looked at several alternatives. I considered a small pickup like a Ranger or Toyota. Owning a home, every now and then I need to haul something. Eventually, I decided they were too expensive for the 4WD versions and got too poor gas mileage. I owned a 2WD Ranger for two years here but it just was terrible in snow. I decided that if I needed to haul something that wouldn't fit in my car or my wife's car, I'd rent a pickup for the day. That's a lot cheaper than paying $20K+ for a capability I might need only a few times a year at most.

Being a technology geek, I actually looked at the Toyota and Honda hybrids. Since I use my car mostly for commuting to work and we'd still have my wife's minivan (or my Cessna) for travelling, a small fuel efficient car could work for most of the year. There were no Toyota hybrids available at the time because they're selling very few of them here and the dealers didn't want to mess with them. The Honda hybrid was available (because no one was buying them) but it was built way too close to the ground. It looked like it'd be real easy to get the thing high-centered in snow. It might be a good "California car" but just didn't look very practical for here.

I ended up buying a Honda CRV, a sort of near gutless SUV-wanna be. It's mostly front wheel drive but automatically kicks into all wheel drive if it detects slippage. It does very well in the snow we get here and gets over 25 MPG. It also cost less than the 4WD pickups.

Sometimes, I think many of those who so strongly advocate that everyone should use mass transit are the same kind of people who think beef comes from the supermarket. It seems many of them have no concept of how the millions of people who dwell in "flyover country" actually live.

Many people can't afford to buy a new vehicle so they keep on using their old clunker, even if it's big and inefficient. Back in the early 1980s when I was in the bottom 5% of income earners, I had a '67 Ford van (known to one and all as "Pig Van" after a certain Nebraska obscenity). I bought that thing for $600 and drove it for over 60,000 miles and 4 years. When I factored in all of the costs of ownership like tires (it ate tires because it was permanently out of alignment), gas, liability insurance, and maintenance, Pig Van ended up costing me 10 cents per mile, compared to the 33 cents per mile that a new economy car costs when you factor in things like depreciation. So, even though Pig Van didn't get the greatest mileage, it was far more economical to own than even the most frugal new economy car at the time. This is the kind of economics millions of people face when considering their transportation alternatives.