amarks563
Aaron M - MasoFiST
amarks563

Deal. In their defense, Hartford is complete shenanigans highway-wise.

Waltham into Boston is my commute every evening. All I can say is Waze helps.

If you see a house in Watertown for sale with a garage, let me know. Only half kidding.

It is definitely predictable, I’ll give it that. My commute was Cambridge-Dorchester the last two years, and Cambridgeside at that, so not much in the way of surface streets (though Land Blvd could get gnarly). Still...if I was unlucky enough to get out of the office after 5:15, it would take 45 minutes to get from

I have sensed more spite in my commute. Both New York and Chicago seemed to be more like “hang on tight and hope for the best”. LA was closer to depressed resignation.

That particular one is terrible even without much traffic. I go 93N to 95S relatively frequently, and both the on and off merges seem designed for provoking either collisions or road rage.

I live in Dorchester. I’m only going from the Pike down to Exit 15 (maybe 2.5 miles), but it takes 15-20 minutes. The alternative is the Roxbury Parkway...which I use when Waze tells me to.

Ironically I found exactly the opposite. In my experience Jersey drivers don’t know how to use mirrors, have no lane discipline, and generally are not aware enough to deal with urban traffic. Even while commuting in Boston proper I’m more likely to find a Jersey license plate behind someone disrupting the flow of

Houston, LA, and New York are all significantly worse than Boston for asshole quotient. New Jersey is roughly the same except no one in that state seems to know how to drive.

And even then, only if your reverse commute is perfect. I reverse commute from downtown Boston out to Waltham, but on my way home the mess that is 93 South undoes how breezy the Pike is (which isn’t even all that breezy a lot of the time).

Given how much flak it gets (“cow paths” and all that), I’m a little surprised that Boston merely squeaked into the top 10 worst cities and had none of the hotspots. That said, I’ve driven in LA, NYC, Chicago, Houston, and DC...can’t argue with those parts of the list.

It’s not that hard to find GE8 Fit Sports in manual. Mine had about 10 months of warranty left (though I’m set to go through the mileage limit in half that), and if you find a 2014 it’ll be more than that.

There’s a lot of details that would need to be examined, but I’m willing to bet that the Century is a model where Toyota still goes “full-fat” like the legendary 90s models were.

Yeah, most likely. If traffic is so bad that you’re barely getting out of stall with the torque converter, your gas mileage could be really awful without much recourse. If you’re able to get past 20mph average, though, I’d think you should still be able to eke out 24 or 25 mpg (which is still lower than the EPA

Yeah. If your traffic is all stop and go, 15mph for extended periods of time, that would definitely hurt it...but I live in Boston, and admittedly jackrabbit to 4500 rpm in first gear at every stop light (a great feature of low-powered hatchbacks, but I digress), so I find it hard to believe that traffic/driving style

I’m basically running down the changes FitFreak members make that ding their gas mileage...the tires are a big and common one (people run 205/50-16 because it’s way more common and somewhat cheaper than 185/55-16, but there’s a fuel economy hit because of the higher rolling resistance).

Alternatively, buy a 2013 Fit for 10k and it’ll last as long as the new Fiesta.

From what I’ve seen of a friend’s third gen, the third gen’s 13 hp bump is eaten mostly by weight. The six speed doesn’t actually get you better gearing than the 5-speed of the GE8, and the 2nd gen Sport came with an actual rear sway bar.

That’s...appalling. My 13 does city at around 30. Is that the auto, did you jump to 205-width tires, and do you use 5w-40?

Thing is though that a typical gas combined cycle power plant has a heat rate of around 7500 (BTU/kWh). A typical gasoline engine has a heat rate of around 20,000. You’d need 60% losses (excluding combustion) to get the combined cycle plant to be as inefficient as a gasoline engine (actual losses are closer to 5-7%,