My new Subaru demonstrates how broken our roads are ...

My 1995 Toyota Celica died this past Wednesday. Those who know me can imagine my insufferable grief at the loss of this vehicle, which I've been driving for so long because I absolutely love it.

But with change comes the opportunity to learn new things. Sometimes you learn things you don't expect. The 2008 Subaru Imprezza I bought is a spiffy car. I has a all sorts of neat gadgets, one of which is a little computer that calculates my average MPG. This doo-whatsit is tied into the trip odometer, which lets a geek like me do all sorts of things. For example, I can set the trip odometer, and see what my average MPG is to the grocery store, then I can reset it and see what kind of MPG I get coming back from the grocery store.

Since there are two trip odometers in the car, I can measure my MPG over the course of the week while simultaneously measuring each commute. I can drive the car aggressively and see what kind of MPG I get, then drive conservatively and see how much difference it makes. I'm expecting to be entertained by this one feature alone for several weeks at least.

I was able to easily average 30 MPG on the highway, and that's on a crappy stretch of highway where traffic slows and speeds back up a lot. I don't know who from the EPA drove this car and could only get 27 MPG ... must have forgotten about 5th gear.

But the thing that's come into sharp focus is just how much our crappy road system and overcongestion is costing us as individuals. Driving in the crappy stop-and-go traffic of Monroeville I was unable to achieve better than 18 MPG, and that's making a real effort (starting in second gear, accelerating slowly, etc.)! So, at $3.00 per gallon, a 10 mile trip through traffic to the store is costing me $.66 more than it should. If I make one trip to the grocery a week, that adds up to an extra $35/year, not to mention the additional greenhouse emissions. Doesn't sound like much, does it? But how many of us make that type of trip only once a week? I estimate that every weekday I drive 20 miles on shitty stop-and-go roads that are overrun with more traffic than they're designed for. At that rate, I'm paying an extra $6.66 each week, or $346 per year.

If everyone out there is doing the same, how much does that add up to? More money than the combined salaries of all the political jerks who have been stonewalling highway improvements in Pittsburgh, I'm sure of that. Maybe they should put some of their salary back into a pool to reimburse drivers for their pain. Or maybe we should just kick them all out of office and use the money we save to build new highways.