I take public transportation from my home in the suburbs into the city for work at least four times a week. At this point, public transportation is more expensive than driving my car, which is ridiculous. Also, they are about to raise transit fares here in Chicago AGAIN. So I chose to use buses to draw a dollar sign, indicative of my current feelings about public transportation.

To "leave traces", as per the task description, I took seven one-dollar bills, wrote the SF0 website addy on each of them, and left one on each bus I took. This would not only tie nicely into my overall theme, but who isn't excited to find random money? I thought it would be a nice surprise for my fellow bus riders.

I am really concerned about the rising cost of public transportation in Chicago. I want to help the environment by taking public transport to work, but it's almost cost prohibitive and takes much, much longer than driving. I live about forty-five minutes away by car, but it takes an hour and a half by buses/trains. The thing that has been the deciding factor is parking costs - it's $2 for up to 12 hours at the CTA Park N Ride, and it's $8 weekdays/$23 Saturdays at my work parking garage. The rub here is that I'm reimbursed at the end of each month by my company for what I spend on parking - IF I PARK AT WORK. It costs $4.50 round trip daily to take public transportation, and right now I can fill my car's gas tank for about $20, which gets me four or five round trips. Final totals: $6.50 per day on public transportation, $5 per day if I drive. How crazy is that?

To speak to the end of the task description regarding where I ended up - It's really absurd that driving my car costs less, but I would miss out on things like insane people screaming nonsense or thugs trying to sell me stolen packages of double A batteries if I stopped taking public transportation. And you just can't put a price on the human experience.