I missed my car. ...really missed my car. A lot. I love to drive, and I like the "freedom" I get from having a car here back home in America...
However, I'm glad I have limited access to a car in Nagoya; I only use it if I need to get someplace far and have to take things with me, or if I have to move something awkward. Most times though, I'm on the subway, train, bus, bicycle or my shoes. I think we Americans are too damn sedentary anyway. We eat in overly-large portions, too many times a day, and the food we eat is too high in calories. And to top it off, we're too car-centric. We live in cities that make it all but impossible to walk or take transit to get anywhere or do anything. And it's simply cheaper to own a car here than most places in the world...
US/State of Georgia:
Road Tax: $200/yr
Inspection: $25/yr
Gasoline: $2.87/gallon (63¢/liter)
Parking: Home--FREE ...and most places are also free too. when you do pay, its around $1.25/hr or LESS.
Highway Tolls: This varies where you live, but in Georgia, we have one tollway, and it's just 50¢ to use.
Japan/Aichi Prefecture:
Road Tax: $200/yr ($331.44)
Inspection: Depends on what they find; each car MUST be within factory specs, so if there's something wrong like worn brakes or bald tires, they add that to the cost of the inspection. The average is around ¥70000 every 2 years (about $773)
Gasoline: EXPENSIVE! ¥125/liter or $6.35/gallon!!!
Parking: Free on your own property... But I live in an apartment... There's no on-street parallel parking ANYWHERE in Japan as far as I know. Right now in my neighborhood in Nagoya, a spot in a parking lot is about ¥13500/month ($150). Parking elsewhere like shopping areas, business districts, etc, vary... But you will pay. In malls, as long as you purchase something and validate the parking ticket, you'll get 2 hrs free parking. But if there's nothing like that, expect to pay about ¥150/$1.66 EVERY 15 MINUTES!
Highway Tolls. Just about EVERY highway is tolled in Japan. Tolls are calculated at around ¥26/km (45¢/mile) So that would make my drive from Atlanta to St Louis a $248 tolled drive... Wow. If you have ETC (like GA Cruise Card or EZPass) in the car, on the weekend or holidays you get a good discounted rate; around 30~70% off... Still distances are closer together in Japan and again, anywhere there are people, there will be trains and busses, so its very unnecessary to drive most of the time.
That being said though, I am gonna enjoy my 2 1/2 weeks of freedom until I have to get back on the crowded subways and trains of Japan in April... This is the foolishness I get into with my brother in the car with me...
This is an experiment of sorts to try to tie together my online identity and my offline personality. I've made plenty of business oriented sites, but I have never actually put together one for myself personally... With the advent of social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace along with blog sites like Blogger and Twitter, I find that I have cut a wide swath here in the internet, in terms of being actively online, but there isn't one place to really tie that information together. So this will be an attempt at doing so.