Uncle Calculator

I'm about to do some math to try and figure out how much money we could put toward public transportation if we didn't own cars so get your calculators ready.  I come from a long tradition of calculator nerds.  My uncle is the guy you see in Costco with a big calculator figuring out the price of coffee per pound and how much he'll save if he buys the 20 pound tin vs the 10 pound tin.  Then he goes back to his excel sheet attached to the clip board, conveniently stored in his hip pack and cross references it to the other stores in town.  I was driving by an auction sale last Sunday and there was a guy with a 8.5 X 11 sized calculator punching in some numbers.  As I laughed I realized that I wanted one.

Here's a breakdown of the yearly expenses of owning a car.
Gasoline and Oil - $1500
Car Insurance      - $1000
Maintenance        - $1000
License                - $100
Parking, Tickets   - $200
Total                    =$3800
Now an important figure not in those calculations is the cost of buying a car. Which in most people's case will add another $3800 a year to your total. The reason I did not add in the cost of the actual car is to avoid the argument of people saying that they already own a car or that they got a car for free.  To make things even more difficult the book value of my car is actually in the negatives, creating a rather complex equation involving protractors and compasses that I would rather avoid.

This whole idea came about because I read in the paper how there are over 3000 people killed by car accidents every year in Canada.  I'm postulating that those numbers would go down considerably if all we ever used was public transit.  It's a little out there but if everybody put all the money that they normally spend on their car and the money that government spends on roads, traffic signs, street lights, and government vehicles then the whole idea starts to sound more plausible. I don't think it will every happen but why not?  All I know is that my uncle has already gone down to Costco to purchase one of those huge calculators.  What I'm really looking forward to seeing is how my Aunt is going to modify the hip pack to fit a calculator of that size.