No, it doesn’t make sense, but I do sympathize with the Ghosh’s circumstances. In one year, while QuantMechPrime was in high school, pre-driver’s license, we put 30,000 miles on our car with QMP in it, en route to some-EC-or-other and university classes. Your mileage may vary!
Most of our driving was in the evenings or on the weekends. But if you figure an average speed of 30 mph, and if our family had followed the suggestion of hiring someone to drive, we’d have needed to hire a half-time chauffeur—and we’re not exactly in *that* income bracket!
By policy, the high school does not provide transportation to the nearby university for math or other classes (post-Calc BC, when there was no math to take at the HS); parents had to arrange the transportation. Public transportation is very limited in our area, and it was not workable. Car-pooling possibilities were also limited, because of the relatively small number of students involved, and differing university class times. Driving took an hour a day, three days a week, in the middle of the day.
Luckily I could work around the specific driving times; but some positions aren’t that flexible, and that could have forced us to make some difficult choices. Yes, they would have been quite different from the Ghosh’s choices—but on the other hand, on a few frustrating days, I’ve thought I might have to quit work to take care of our dog.
