xkcd

And my relatives don't have personal parking spots.

Poor people's time gets no respect, because the rules are made by rich people with tons of time conveniences and they just aren't conscious of how the other half lives.

They ban our shopping bags, failing to realize that for someone with a car and a garage, a disposable plastic shopping bag doesn't have much utility over re-usable bags, or dispsable paper bags. But for a person with no car and no garage, a disposable plastic shopping bag means they can carry like three in each hand and walk miles home in foul weather.

And if you want to just bring bags with you in advance, you gotta carry them with you all day.

It's doable, don't get me wrong. But it's more of a hassle. And the amount of hassle that it adds is far greater for poor people.

I rent a car for Uber. I'm working up to buying a car, but until I do I have to rent. Uber has decreed that all rentals must be electrics. To save the planet. The electrics cost about $100 more per week to rent than the gas cars did, and as a poor person I can't charge them at home because all I have is street parking.

This means that every day I work driving for Uber, I have to stop about once a day to charge the car. So that's about $25 a day I'm losing to charge instead of refuel my vehicle, so $125 a week I'm losing and then the other $100 per week it costs because it's a special car, I'm losing $225 per week due to this decision.

So I'm doing my part, but unwillingly. And I strongly, strongly suspect that the people who made this decision at Uber, that their contribution to climate action was going to come out of my cut, didn't think the cut would be so big because they live in houses or in fancy apartment buildings with chargers.

I just feel like nobody talks about how time poor poor people are. We lack time just as much as we lack money, and when we get new rules imposed on us that take up more of our time to comply with, the people creating the rules don't realize how must time it's costing us, because their own lives are relatively time rich. Many of the forms of their wealth come in the form of time conveniences, and those change the equation. They think the electric car's hassle consists of having to charge it occasionally on long trips, because they have a home charger.

Just across the board, we need to be aware of the time cost of these changes, and also to be aware that the time cost is often many times higher for poor people than it is for middle class people.