We're so poor.

The CEOs of the big three car makers all turned up in Washington this week to plea poverty and beg for billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money. All three of them turned up in corporate jets - at about $20,000 round-trip cost. And all three of them refused to take a cut from their $28M salary to $1 and just receive the benefits and stock options.
Then they said they were running out of money.
Maintaining seven private jets each (plus a fleet of King Airs and other light aircraft) will do that to your cash flow. It would of course be cheaper to fly commercially in first class, or heaven forbid, coach. Or even chartering someone else's private jet - these are all cheaper options that would save money.
They've laid off 51,000 employees between them. If all three CEOs took a $1 salary then that would have saved 16,800 of those jobs. Getting rid of 21 corporate jets with their associated maintenance and operating costs would have saved the other 34,200 jobs easily.
I have the same opinion on this as I did on the $700bn bailout package - vote it down. As a taxpayer it's not my responsibility that the car makers have squandered their cash and can't make a car that does more than 25mpg. Screw them. Let them fail. I don't see Honda, or Toyota, or Daewoo, or Hyundai begging for cash. Why reward Ford, Chrysler and GM's poor business ethic with taxpayers money when they clearly couldn't care about actually saving money?

Ditching the car for a weekend.

I'm a great fan of public transport when it's done right. Case in point, Portland's MAX light rail system (read: tram). We decided on a short weekend away and rather than renting a car, we decided to rely on public transport instead. There's a MAX station right at Portland airport, and the red line goes into downtown Portland, within a block of most of the hotels. We hopped on, paid $4.60, and hopped off 40 minutes later within two minutes walk of the hotel. On the way, we watched gridlocked rush hour traffic, nose-to-tail on I84 and when we got to the hotel, we discovered overnight parking was $29. In this case, it's a total no-brainer. Sit in traffic, pay three day's car rental ($150), two nights valet ($58) and half a tank of petrol ($15), or spend a grand total of $9.20 on public transport to do the exact same thing.

Think about it next time you go away somewhere - do you really need that rental car?