After 10 years of using public transit (seven of light rail to my office, three of bus during graduate school), I am now officially a full-fledged car commuter. You see, my office relocated from the downtown core to one of those 'nice' suburban office parks. Unsurprisingly, it is not well-served by public transportation. Perhaps it was time anyway--the kids are getting older, and we're starting to see the beginnings of multiple, overlapping extracurricular schedules. It was a bit sad to break our 13-year run of being a single-car household, but there was at least one fringe benefit: We cleaned out the second car space in our garage, and threw away about six cubic yards of god-knows-why-we-were-keeping-it junk.
So the bad news is that we're now buying two tanks of gas per week. The good news is that the new mode of transportation has 300 horsepower and no less than six beautifully-proportioned, manually-selectable gear ratios.