Gsa Vehicle Accountability: Fill & Download for Free

When I rode Caltrain daily, Caltrain was far less expensive than driving to work. I rode Palo Alto (zone 3) to San Francisco (zone 1), about 32 miles one way.Caltrain was $179 / month, pre-tax. This was about $9 a day of work.According to the General Services Administration, I could have expensed it at $0.56 / mile, or $35.84 per day - and this is before parking! The GSA rate is a much fairer rate, in my opinion, for the total cost of driving.Even if I excluded all of the wear and tear, insurance, and depreciation that the GSA factors in, and only account for gas and parking, that would have cost about $21 per day ($10.88 per day in gas + $10 per day in parking - assuming 25 mpg, $4.25 / gallon, $200 monthly parking). Again, Caltrain is the winner. And the gas is post-tax money, whereas transit (and parking) is pre-tax money.There are cases where Caltrain is more expensive than driving for just gas - high efficiency vehicles that are driven near capacity and free parking. But compared to average vehicle efficiency, average vehicle occupancy, and factoring in maintenance, wear and tear, and depreciation - Caltrain is a good deal.

I went to do relief/rescue work after Hurricane Katrina when I was 25. I was a bit naive. My political instincts were not strong.I landed in Memphis TN when the winds were still blowing. Nothing closer was functioning apparently, so that is where we landed and staged our convoy of rental cars from.As did every other relief agency.So to say that the car rental place was slammed is an understatement. A mind bending number of relief workers, law enforcement, and insurance adjusters were all getting off planes and heading south. In rental cars.Now everyone in the government knows that it is smart to get a compact. Cheaper gas. Cheaper rental. The tax payers deserve as much. Public perception of how the government is spending their money demands as much.I only realized the cheap part. I was not thinking like a lifetime government worker yet. My mind was on buying a first aid kit and a shovel from Walmart before our pre-bed meeting.So obviously the rental company was out of compact cars.They were out of SUVs. These can also be justified in a disaster area for government use.They were out of midsized cars.They did not rent trucks.So I was given the option of a full sized cop car type vehicle…. Or A sportscar.Carefully avoiding a pitfall I asked about gas mileage. The sportscar got more MPG than the Crown Victoria clone. Technically I should take the car that is cheaper to operateThe rental guy made a big deal about how he was “hooking me up.” No extra charge! My other option was a minivan that was supposed to arrive the next morning. After our convoy was scheduled to leave. But given the whole disaster situation no one was sure it would be returned on time.I called my finance office. I was authorized to take any vehicle at the compact price if compacts were not available.I had the rental agent write a memo that I was getting the sportscar at the compact price.It was all too easy.I should have realized something was wrong.When our convoy arrived in Baton Rouge where we were to be assigned out from, I realized something was wrong. No one had a sportscar. I was getting dirty and/or amused looks from everyone in the parking lot.I stood out. The GSA tends to be very practical.I was a dumbshit.The next day I was driving a bright shiny sports car through the ruins of New Orleans.I was parking a bright shiny sports car at the tent city where we all slept because there was not enough (any) hotel space. There were few staffed hotels.I was getting out of a sports car to inspect potential crisis relief centers in the worst hit areas, where people were filling out paperwork for free blue tarps to put over their homes torn off roof.The rental company was not going to take back the unrentable pimp mobile. Not for several weeks. I was an idiot, but no backsies!So I was understandably the face of terrible, high handed government wasting everyone's disaster relief money when it was desperately needed elsewhere."I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."I was frequently understandably accused, implicitly or explicitly, of exactly that. Wasting the governments money. The money that should be going into saving people's homes. Several times a week. Never once by anyone in accounting- I was good in their eyes.I wasn't wasting the governments money. But I was creating the worst imagineable optics. I brought those accusations on myself.No wonder all the Federal employees on lend from other agencies were scowling and laughing at me back in Baton Rouge!Happily they put my dumb ass into the 5th seat of a National Guard hummer with a half a squad of Military Police weekend warriors to get to my sites.. I left the car and the accusations behind.Older and wiser.These are the sorts of incidents that kill a career in today's culture. I was lucky this was a decade and a half ago. Today I’d have a trending hashtag on Twitter.

In all countries the turn signal lever is moved in the same direction as you turn the steering wheel in under to go round the corner. It has always been this way for the 50+ years I’ve been interested in cars, and it’s done like this to take account of the fact the the turn signal lever is mounted on both sides of the steering wheel depending on the age and make of the vehicle.I’ve also owned/driven vehicles which had no turn signal lever on the steering column. For instance the 1950s Morris Minor has the turn signal switch in the centre of the dashboard, it’s just a big lever switch pointing toward the floor of the car which has the lever pushed to the left to indicate left and vice-versa. I’ve driven a Citroen Visa and owned a Citroen GSA which had no steering column stalks at all. All the controls that would usually be on stalks were push-buttons/latching switches/rotating rings/rocker switches on a pair of cylindrical drums mounted to the steering column. The turn signals were operated using a vertically oriented rocker switch which sort of followed the “move the stalk in the direction the wheel moves” rule: the end of the rocker which corresponded to the direction the rim of the steering wheel was going was the end you pushed to turn on the correct turn signals. If that side of the wheel moved up it was the top end of the rocker you pushed and vice versa. The rocker had a central neutral position where both turn signals were off. All of the cats I’ve just described, and most older cars, did not have self cancelling turn signals.The control arrangements I’ve just described for that pair of Citroen vehicles were actually pretty much my favourites out if all the cars I’ve driven over the last 50 years. All of the controls for lights, screen wipers, screen washers, rear wiper, rear washers, rear screen heater, turn signals, front and rear fog lights and dip/main beam could be operated without taking a hand of the wheel and because they were spread out across both sides of the steering wheel on a pair of drums you could work multiple controls at the same time.