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Your Commuting Costs By Car Vs. Train?
grepdisc writes "Newspapers in Boston are fawning over a report by the American Public Transportation Association that taking public transportation saves money over driving. How can one possibly save $12,600 per year, when the inflated estimates of 15,000 miles per year at only 23.4 miles and $2.039 per gallon costs only $1,310, and a high parking rate of $460 per month results in under $5600. Is the discrepancy made up of tolls, repairs, the cost of buying a car and ignoring train station parking fees?" Everyone's situation is different — and it's easy to have a chip on one's shoulder while estimating prices. But for those of you with the option, what kind of savings do you find (or would you expect) from taking one form of transport to work over another?
If I continue to own my car then it costs more to take public transit, but not by much. If I sell my car and take public transit I save a few grand a year, assuming I rent a car one weekend a month.
huh? b;'
I'll say. Here in southern California, I'd have to drive my car to any form of mass transit, and I'd have to drive farther than it is to work.
I can see it being that much for some drivers easily.
And I think they're banking on things like if you are married and one of you drives and one rides the train or bus, you can cut down to one vehicle maybe:
If you can live with one less vehicle in your household, you would save an additional $5,576 in car ownership cost (full-coverage insurance, license, registration, taxes, depreciation and finance charge).
I like public transportation but in DC, the metro rail sucks. It sucks something fierce. The stops in DC are so so limited. I still end up taking taxis for most of the places I want to go ... or plan for an hour walk. I go to NYC and it's like heaven--I do not care of the condition of the train. DC rails shut down at midnight on a weeknight ... and sometimes you wait 15+ minutes for the next train. Transferring is almost out of the question. Wish it worked for me for my job but it doesn't. It barely works for me on my drinking expeditions.
My work here is dung.
For most people time is money and if it takes longer to get somewhere by car, find a place to put said car, take the car for maintenance once in a while, get it fixed for scratches and other damage magically appearing on parking lots, the cost in time alone can amount to something quite high.
...
Think about it, if you're paid $20 an hour and your car needs to be taken in for repairs, which let's say loses you a whole day of work, that's $160 right there. Money wasted just through time, then there's also the time needed for the repairs themselves and
Also don't forget to take into account the money lost through the car's devaluement over time. With trains the operator takes all of that cost, with cars the owner - you, does.
That's how much I save by taking the train every day. I don't have to front that cost, or the hundreds of dollars I'd have to shell out for payments each month. Plus, I don't have to pay for gas, parking, repairs, insurance, etc. Sure the commute is a bit longer, but not by much given the traffic situation here in Chicago and that I get to avoid all of that by taking the train.
Not to mention the healthcare costs I'll save over the long-term with the extra 2 miles I walk every day.
For me it is simply a question of time - time spent behind the wheel of a car is wasted time as far as I'm concerned. On transit I can sleep, read, email/browse on the blackberry, even get out a laptop. I've made it a point the last couple times I've moved to make sure I have good access to transit options.
Your average new car costs very roughly $3000 a year in depreciation. It may be less if you have a cheap japanese model, and much more if you have a American SUV. A car is very expensive compared to taking trains when you factor in depreciation and insurance.
Is the discrepancy made up of tolls, repairs, the cost of buying a car and ignoring train station parking fees?
I think you're making one rather unjustified assumption: that anyone who takes the train will still own a car.
If you live sufficiently close to the train station or can bike/take public transit to it, you can validly ignore parking fees, car maintenance, and importantly insurance.
Walking 10 miles each way uphill both ways in the snow year-round is cheaper than gas, even after factoring in the costs of shoes.
I'm on salary, the incremental value of my time is $0.
Owning a car costs far more than just your monthly loan payment. I had an old piece of junk which cost me just $1000 a year in insurance since I did not need comprehensive. My guess is that you're looking at least at $2000-3000 a year in insurance alone for a standard newish car (banks require comprehensive for anything they have a loan out for). Add to that a monthly payment for the car of say $300-400, which gives a total of $4000-5000 a year, and you're easily at the $12,600 estimate.
It's mainly the cost of buying a car. The value of a car goes down the more you drive it. Drive it 200,000 miles and the car you might have bought new for $22K is now worth $2K. That's ten cents per mile. If you don't drive your car into the ground, and buy a new one after five years or so, then you probably lost value equivalent to 20 cents per mile. And then there's the cost of insurance. To get the big savings, you'd have to be able to do without a car, or if you're in a couple, share one car instead of having two.
Let's see; I've got a 4 mile round trip, on a motorcycle that gets 35MPG, with free parking, plus $75/year insurance and $12/year registration, say $200/year for maintenance... I'm looking at $350 per year in in commuting costs.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Repairs
Insurance
Vehicle Depreciation/Cost
Consumables
Renting out my car spot
I did some calculations once and it certainly seemed like public transport would be cheaper than owning and running a car, even allowing for a reasonable number of taxi trips.
It would, however, be somewhat less convenient.
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Muni cost $40 dollars per month pre-tax money. Car $9 per day parking + aggravation + gas + maintenance. Let me see. If I could only do math... Of course driving is better because I get to cut other drivers off, flip them the bird and bang on my steering wheel. What more could you want from life?
Insurance will probably cost you at least 1.5-2k a year. And maintaining a car, including washes, new tires, changing the oil, etc., can easily add up to multiple thousands per year. And that's not even getting into repairs...
The problem with these sorts of studies is they lump in the fixed and variable costs for car ownership. The only way you get rid of the fixed costs (like insurance and registration) is to get rid of the car altogether, and there aren't too many areas in the US where that's a feasible option. Where I live public transportation to most of the places I go simply doesn't exist. I can take the train to work (though I'd have to ride my bike to the train station), but if I get called up for jury duty, say, without my car I'm taking a taxi for as long as the trial lasts.
So when I take public transportation I'm reducing variable costs - depreciation, gas, maintenance. But there's no way I can come out ahead this way, since I'm still paying insurance and registration on the car that's sitting at home.
AAA cost of driving formula is based on variable costs and fixed costs. The variable costs include the cost of gas, maintenance and tires. The fixed costs include insurance, license registration, depreciation and finance charges.
The savings assume a household gives up one car.
If you simply look at the bottom of the page you will find that it assumes that a family had 2 cars and will give up one of them. Given that, the savings seem quite reasonable. It costs a lot to own a car once you take into account depreciation, interest, repairs, scheduled maintenance, registration, insurance, etc.
APTA calculates the average cost of taking public transit by determining the average monthly transit pass of local public transit agencies across the country. This information is based on the annual APTA fare collection survey and is weighted based on ridership (unlinked passenger trips). The assumption is that a person making a switch to public transportation would likely purchase an unlimited pass on the local transit agency, typically available on a monthly basis.
APTA then compares the average monthly transit fare to the average cost of driving. The cost of driving is calculated using the 2009 AAA average cost of driving formula. AAA cost of driving formula is based on variable costs and fixed costs. The variable costs include the cost of gas, maintenance and tires. The fixed costs include insurance, license registration, depreciation and finance charges. The comparison also uses the average mileage of a mid-size auto at 23.4 miles per gallon and the price for self-serve regular unleaded as recorded by AAA on May 5 at $2.079 per gallon. The analysis also assumes that a person will drive an average of 15,000 miles per year. The savings assume a household gives up one car.
If I were to commute using public transportation, I would add 45 to 60 min to each direction of the commute.
At my salary, ($41 per hour) this equates to a loss of over $20K per year.
I'll drive my car thank you very much!
In my neighborhood families own three, four, even more cars. The big savings come when you can reduce the number of cars you own.
WTF do you need three or more cars for in a 2-person household?
I suppose they assumed, in a two-earner household, that you could reduce the number of cars by one if one person was a transit rider.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I pay about 500 USD per year for free public transport 24/7 in my city. According to this Swedish checklist, the yearly cost for purchasing and owning a 10 year old tiny car would be about 3750 USD, thus, I save 3250 USD. If I would get a new car, the savings would be around 7100 USD.
(since I don't have or need a car, I will of course have to take the purchasing price into account.)
c++;
Taking the train instead of driving would allow me to save thousands of dollars in gas, car payments, tolls, parking frees, tickets, maintenance, and etc. Maybe not five figures, but still a lot of money. There are non-financial indirect benifits to taking the train too.
On the train, I feel safer knowing an accident probably won't happen and that if it does, it probably won't kill me. I also don't have the headache of police stops and tickets. Additionally, I get to spend the commuting time reading, coding, sleeping, etc. It's much less stressful and allows me to be more productive. I know that my carbon footprint is lower and I'm doing less to support despotic oil regimes. I get exercise walking between public transport stops. Unfortunately, I live too far out in the suburbs to make commuting by train to work in the city practical. It just takes too long (frankly driving takes too long as well). I can only take public transport on the weekends and for personal travel. I'm currently looking for work in the Chicago area, and will strongly considering moving to take advantage of the city's train system.
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and I have to commute in every day. Here's a breakdown, as I did each for two years apiece:
- Drive to local T stop: $5/day parking plus ~$60 for T pass, plus gas.
- Drive and park at work: $240/mo plus gas. I would drive about 15k/yr (work plus other driving)
- Drive 1 mi to bus stop: donation to local church to park in their lot (few hundred/yr), $64 for T/bus pass. In the 2.5 years I've been taking the bus, I've driven about 15,000 mi.
Now taking the bus takes a bit longer, but my employer is nice enough to allow me to work from home one day a week, and I often fall asleep or do work while on the bus, as opposed to getting peeved at the traffic around me.
YMMV. As for me, I'll keep taking the bus.
What about the time wasted in traffic? That time definitely has value.
On a train, I could enjoy a nice book or simply rest, versus estimating how high my blood pressure is rising.
In Houston, it's not unusual to have multiple people in a company drive 40+ miles one-way from their homes. After gas prices spiked (and even now), people are clamoring for more public transit, and it's slow in coming.
The one example we have is a light rail system covering only a few miles in central Houston. Ridership is beyond the original estimates, and people are certainly finding it cheaper to drive part way and switch to public transit. It's ridiculously cheaper to do so than attempt to pay hundreds of dollars in additional gas and parking fees in already crowded Downtown or in the Medical Center. Beyond that, paid parking is not always guaranteed and finding a spot can be impossible at the wrong times of day.
Add to that the fact that our highways are congested enough that a single accident (or several accidents spread across town) can result in major delays, and you get the simple fact that a guaranteed train line saves the economy money in the grand scheme of things.
This isn't true just in Houston. Dallas would shut down if their light rail were to suddenly stop. They no longer have the highway capacity to handle the additional commuters. And when gas prices spiked last summer, their system was at its limit during rush hour. It's certainly cheaper for them to pay for the fares than for parking fees downtown, even with relatively low gas prices.
I take a bus to and from work. It costs $12.80 per day. The car alternative is a 35 mile drive, $10 to park and $3 in PATH train. So save whatever 70 miles in a car costs. Call that 3 gallons of gas = $6. Times 250 days a year = $1500. 17k miles on a car = ?$2000?
I don't pay for parking at the bus stop.
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I already bike to work just about all the time, so I need something different on "bike to work" day. Maybe if I can borrow a horse. Or I could rent the most fuel-inefficient SUV I can find...
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Not for everyone, but my honda gets 35 + mpg.
I put in 20 bucks a month of gas into it, and about 20 into the car, for taking the kids to school, and stormy days.
Rideable 65-80% of the year in midwest. (Depending on your tolerance for cold.)
My "commute" is only about 7 miles each way.
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I think it truly depends on where you live- and the biggest thing is time. Currently I'm jobless in Chicago- train and busses really do cut gas costs. This city is metered like NUTS and residential zones have resident only parking zones designated by a specific city sticker.
Downtown is more nuts. Two hour Parking is 3.00- all day can run between 7-20 depending on the place. So- working in downtown, it would save TONS of money.
When I lived in LA - I litterally paid $600 for 8 months of parking. It averages to about 9 dollars a day. Even if you were a patient in the hospital, if you had a car there- it was 9 dollars a day. Ouch. Public transit was the way to go.
But- when I lived in Baton Rouge Louisiana the public transportation was nil. It took hours to get anywhere, and it didn't necessarily travel through the whole city. So- you really HAD to have a car... public transportation was very inconsistent, and it took forever. Just time lost I think makes up for the expenses of a car. Parking was basically free everywhere except a few places. But, there was always some backlot to park in. A 20 minute car ride turning into a 2 hour bus trip that may or may not be on time... its risky at best.
Overall, its really the location. Big metro areas with well established transportation, it can be a wonderful thing. It does save money. But other places, it ends up being way much of a hassle, and time consuming and may not go to the locations that someone needs.
IRS is giving 55 cents/mile, so one has to assume that's a generic "operating cost" of a car (gas, depreciation, maintenance).
0.55 * 15000 + 460 * 12 = $13770
So, close enough for government work.
YMMV, of course.
My husband recently ran the numbers on buying a second car. We sold my car in 2003, because we frankly weren't using it. We haven't had an absolute *need* for one since then, though there are times it would be convenient. And at $1.25 each way for bus fare (passes would cost even more with our usage), transit isn't *cheap*.
Turns out, though, if we got an older car for $2,000, spent about $200/year on maintenance, with gas for commuting, it would take almost ten YEARS for us to be ahead on that (and such a car probably wouldn't last that long). Then I reminded him that our insurance went down $100/month when we sold my car. Granted, it was a "sports car," but we'd still pay another $25-50/month to add a car to our insurance.
Meanwhile, we get more exercise, which also lowers our health care costs in the long run. ;-)
We also (due to short commutes; we both work about 4 miles from our house) qualify for a low-mileage discount on our insurance. People who switch a car commute to a transit commute may find themselves also saving some on insurance even if they don't get rid of the car, just by lowering the mileage.
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That's a false assumption. Some people buy used cars, which pretty much stop depreciating after a while. You may pay a bit more in maintenance, but you'll make up that just in the cheaper insurance rates.
I'll occasionally take the train, but it just doesn't go where I need to go most of the time. Ergo I need a car, and I need insurance, so the only savings are gas + wear and tear. It would be great if we lived in Europe where mass transit was functional, but in many parts of the USA it just isn't.
Don't forget about those of us in rural areas. I carpool with a friend as often as I can, but I live 30 miles from my workplace. No one is going to be running a train from a city of 250 to a city of 10,000, so personal transportation is the only option.
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because my time is more valuable than finding a bus, getting to it without having to wait too long for the next, and doing what I need to during the day; I tend to consolidate most of my shopping to my lunch hour so I don't have to go out shopping after getting home.
My time is valuable to me. Using public transportation means losing hours per week I'd rather not. It also means losing flexibility. I guess if I had a guaranteed day it might work out... but even then after riding some of the available public transportation here in Atlanta I won't do except to get to the game.
The throw in the weather... well it quickly goes to hell.
Using your example of $20 an hour. I would hope they had a used car which reduces their depreciation cost from the get go.
As for damage and other mysterious things... well I haven't racked up many, let alone a hundred dollars in ten years that I can recall. I tend to favor cars that are reliable so my out of pocket expenses are normal maintenance. If I need to get it fixed I get a lift, if its long term then I rent. Big deal, the freedom is worth it.
I am not saying anything is wrong with public transportation, but from listening to the news I am safer where I live by not being accessible to people who use public transportation. I can leave my doors unlocked at night; done it before by accident to include leaving garage open. I hear only my dogs breathing when I take them out in the morning. Nothing I can save money wise compensates for that peace. I will do my drive (26 miles no interstate one way) and rest easy.
For those for whom it works, more power to them. However don't try to measure dollars versus quality of life. It doesn't add up in the favor of public transportation in my book
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From records of my total car expenses per year, I get 7.5 MPH out of my car including work time at takehome of $56/hour to pay for it. A bicycle is faster.
This study is comparing apples and oranges.
The study assumes you are getting rid of your car to use public transit. There are so many things that are not public transit accessible that still require a car that they are not putting any replacement cost in for.
In Boston, a rental car for a weekend with insurance is ~$300. I use my car 3 weekends a month to travel outside of public transit range. Adding in the cost of getting a rental each weekend and suddenly 12.6k I'm saving is reduced by 7.8k (plus fuel costs and a lot of overhead dealing with rentals). The study is assuming depreciation of the car -- which likely means its assuming a purchase of new car. The cost conscious folks are either purchasing used cars or driving cars for far longer than a normal depreciation period.
And this doesn't even count the opportunity cost of travel time. I live in a near suburb (Arlington) and work in Cambridge. I can walk/bus to the T, and take the T to work. It takes about 1.25 hours each way. It takes me 20 minutes each way driving. I value the ~2 hours per day I save by driving pretty highly. Admittedly, if I have to drive during rush hours, my commute goes to 45-50 minutes each way and public transit becomes much more attractive.
I live downtown in Vancouver, which is notorious for high prices (to own). Rent seems comparable to other major cities. No car. Decent transit system ($1200 / year for me, if work was a few blocks closer it would be $600, stupid 2 zone).
I figure the money I save by not having a car more than makes up for the amount I pay for increased rent (living downtown close to work) with the added benefit of living downtown in a major city. It's not a setup for life, but isn't a bad place to be in your twenties. Walking distance to great shops, restaurants, beach. Transit to local mountains / whistler is pretty cheap (easy to hitch a ride off of someone you know going as well).
It's actually cheaper for me to live in Vancouver, than to live in some other major cities in Canada due to placement of offices for my line work --I would need to own a car and the amount of money I save in rent is nothing compared to the price of a car + insurance + gas.
It all depends where you live though.
That doesn't go on forever though. If you buy a $15,000 car, it can't depreciate $3000/year for more than 5 years (and it doesn't do that anyway). My first new car was a $20,000 Honda CR-V. After 10 years, I sold it for $6000; that's an average of only $1400 per year. If you buy a new car every year, you may see a hit of $3000/year, but you don't have to buy a new car every year either.
It takes me about 15 minutes longer to ride my bike to work than to drive, and about 30 minutes longer home at night (because of geography and prevailing winds.)
It directly saves me $4/day in gas (at $2/gallon, 40 km each way) and probably saves another $1 or so in wear and other consumables.
I can't really factor in depreciation because I've already bought the car and it's not going to depreciate much more slowly with 80 km/day less wear on it.
So in the end it comes down to a time vs. money tradeoff. In my case I'd be doing about an hour and a half of bike riding a day *anyway*, so doing that (and then another half hour) using the same time I'd be sitting in my car comes across as a big win, but that's not true for most people.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I live in San Francisco and walk/train/bus everyplace. (I do not have a bike) When needed I have access to car via a car sharing program. For 50$ a month I get a pass that gets me anyplace (within the city) with in a relatively timely manner. I have access to a car sharing program that regularly costs me 50$ a month or so on average. Throw in a rental car every two months for a weekend at 100$.
So it averages out to 150$ a month (gas included) to get me every place I want to go.
But really what gets me is the lifestyle benefits, I never have to worry about parking/oil changes/gas prices/insurance nor drinking and driving. I walk a lot and it keeps me looking good and in great shape. Not to mention walking is very relaxing vs driving, I read and listen to pod casts. So not only do I save a lot of money (vs a 500$ monthly car payment), I've greatly reduced my carbon impact, I have less stress in my life, and I'm in better physical shape. How can you put a price on that?
Yes, everyone's situation is very different, I consider myself very fortunate, but then again I brought about my current situation by actively choosing to create this lifestyle.
It takes me 12 minutes to drive to work. It takes 10 minutes to walk to the bus stop and 30-45 minutes (damn cripples getting on and off) for the bus to get me to work.
I've been giving public transportation a shot - but I do think it is more expensive than driving. I drive a '99 Honda Civic that gets great gas mileage, has ~ 125k miles on it, and is my 'go to' car for city driving. I drive to the Commuter Rail (about 4 miles - walking is possible, but I'd be a sweaty mess ), pay $4/day to park, then about $4.25 one way on the trip itself... Driving is about ... $40 a month, but that obviously doesn't include insurance, wear and tear, etc.
I'm still giving the commuter rail a shot - but the convenience of driving does win occasionally.
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Now here's the problem in the calculation. Car round trip in heavy traffic is about an hour, and depending on the day the bus can take anywhere from 2:30 to 3:15 to cover the same 40 miles.
That's 390-585 hours per year to save $320.
Until the prevailing wage falls to 50 cents an hour, no thanks.
Ran the calculation for my wife as well. If she were able to take a bus instead of driving, she'd waste only 195 hours per year, but public transportation would save her -$18.
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In addition to the immediate and obvious costs to the individuals who own and drive cars to work, one ought to factor in the price subsequent generations will be forced to pay in harm to the environment (carbon emissions, disposal of metals and plastics, oil and fluids, toxic paints)? Let us not also forget the harm to downtown city cores which are butchered of walking-distance services for the sake of downtown automotive access, the cost to the healthcare system and insurance providers who pay billions of dollars every year to accident victims (and the lost productivity of those victims who are unable to contribute to society by way of employment for the remainder of their life), and the billion of dollars taxpayers dole out every year for roads and bridges that are forced to handle millions of daily commuters.
Food for thought.
I'm fortunate in that there is quite good public transport in my city, Edmonton Alberta Canada.
I live a mere 10 minute bus ride from work so I find it very convenient and Bus Passes run me ~$870 a year, which are also tax deductable.
Assuming a fully paid off car operating it would be $2-5,000 a year in insurance (depending on car/premiums etc.), add gas, regular maintenane, winter tires (its Canada afterall), and any potential repairs and the estimates don't seem unreasonable.
The real issue is that for many people public transit is not convenient or worth their time.
For me, 10 mins to work and I can basically get to anywhere I need to in the city in short order.
This has a lot to do with me carefully planning where I moved so everything is either within walking distance or one bus ride.
This only works because I am able to live in close proximity to almost everything I need.
Many other people simply do not have that that degree of flexibility.
If someone is in the situation where public transportation is significantly more time consuming than driving, or some other mode of transportation, I would completely understand why they would opt out.
I value my time highly and if my bus ride was longer than say 30 minutes each way and a drive was only 5-10 minutes, its possible I would be driving instead.
In the San Francisco Bay area, which is not exactly a low cost of living area, a monthly Caltrain parking permit costs $20. This is assuming you use a car to commute to your train, which the majority of commuters do not.
It costs $.30-.50 per mile to drive a car. Really, who thinks that you can own and operate a car for 4 years, in whatever condition, and spend less than $12,000? You have to buy the car, you have to pay for repairs, you have to pay for gas, you have to pay to register it, you have to pay for insurance ....
It's 27 miles from my home to my office.
I own an inexpensive, relatively new car which gets about 35 MPG -- which would be just about 1.5 gallons per day -- $3 at $2/gal, $6 at $4/gal (which is where gas was when I started riding the train). Parking near the office starts at about $8/day.
Insurance is $200/mo (about $9 per business day). My car payment is $300/mo ($13.80 per business day). That puts parking+gas at $10-$14 per day, and cost of ownership at over $23 per business day.
A monthly pass for the train costs $112.75, which works out to $5.20 per business day. When I catch an express, it's just as fast as driving in good traffic (30 min); if I catch the local, it's just about as bad as a the drive during rush hour (60 min).
As long as I keep the car, taking the train is still half the price of driving (a savings of $1,200/year). If I sell the car (negating my insurance and car payments), I'd save $7,200/year.
They probably divided by 0 somewhere up the line.
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At the worst: Go up on Monday, stay @ office, back on tuesday .. repeat Thurs/Fri
Distance: ~ 2h by car roughly same by train - about ~300 miles
Train: 2 round trip tickets $16-$21
so: 10 gallons of gas @2.50 = 25.00 / week
parking: $30-ish
oil changes: $20 after 5 weeks (3000 miles). $4/week
Train: max $21/week
Car: min $59/week if gas doesn't go up
traffic jams also increase expense, as do traffic tickets. so allow an extra $5 for traffic variability and you're at $64/week for a car that you have to worry about getting stolen or broken into.
$38/week * 50 weeks = save about $1900.00
plus I get amtrack rewards points I can use on tickets. (I could go 3 weeks for nothing right now)
meh
Don't be silly. Ever heard of a "used car"? If you're buying a new car, it's because you're choosing to pay a lot of extra money in depreciation in exchange for the luxury of owning a new car (for a short very time, until it becomes used, by you).
You can buy very nice used cars for a fraction of new-car prices; get a quality car (like most Japanese makes) and it'll easily last you 10-20 years.
to teach. There is a train. I wish I could save money by taking it. I come close.
My car gets 20 mpg (28-30 on the highway, but not in NYC traffic). I have to pay several hundred per academic year for parking (which you'd better buy if you want to actually get to class on time, rather than looking for parking in neighborhoods for half an hour and then walking half a mile). I also have to pay bridge tolls each way, which even with EZPass comes to a lot after I do this every day of the week. The drive is about 25 miles each way. Plus of course there's oil and gas and the fact that my car is 26 years old with nearly 300k miles on it (Volvo) and could give out at any time, so I have to keep an AAA membership (because you don't want to be without AAA's help in NYC if you think you might break down anywhere).
After adding it all up, it came to slightly cheaper than taking the train... Only the train would take an extra two hours a day longer, which I just don't have.
So I drive.
But if the train were to come out cheaper at some point, or if they could reduce the extra time involved, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
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My commute by car is 37.9 miles each way to my job in San Francisco. According to Google Maps, it costs me $22.18 to drive into San Francisco each way, not counting the Bay Bridge toll at 4.00, plus parking at 10-20 dollars a day.
This adds up $68.36 round trip to drive to my job in San Francisco per day.
BART takes 20 minutes longer and costs me 10 dollars per round trip. Which one do you think I take?
Last time I looked, what it cost me to ride the Internet to work was £12 per month. That's way cheaper than taking the car... All right, I confess I actually go into work one week in every two. But that still costs a heck of a lot less than commuting every day, and gives me a heck of a lot more time, too.
Oh - and when you do have to go into work, push-bikes come cheaper than cars (and in urban areas are usually faster).
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Google Maps will help you calculate the cost of public transit vs. driving. After you map out your commute. Just click on the public transit button. About half way down it will show you a public transit vs. driving comparison.
I'm not sure I understand the depreciation issue. I think of it as money out the door that I'm paying to the lien holder, but if I'm planning on paying off the car and running it into the ground, I can't really count that money spent twice, can I?
I guess if you plan to sell your car at some point, then it makes sense to play accounting games... "I paid out $500 a month for 12 months, which is $6000. The loan is for five years, so that's $30,000 total but I'm going to sell the car for $18,000 at that time, so I'm effectively only spending $12,000, or a little over $2,000 per year."
It seems like too much money juggling to me. I buy a car, lose what I paid for it and pay to use and maintain it, gain the value of what it has allowed me to do. If I sell it or trade it in eventually, then that's just icing on the cake.
The CB App. What's your 20?
How can one possibly save $12,600 per year, when the inflated estimates of 15,000 miles per year at only 23.4 miles and $2.039 per gallon costs only $1,310, and a high parking rate of $460 per month results in under $5600. Is the discrepancy made up of tolls, repairs, the cost of buying a car and ignoring train station parking fees?
Well yes, of course they're counting things like that. Why shouldn't they? The cost of owning a car is not limited to gas. If you think it is, then either you've never owned a car or your not paying attention.
Take the cost of buying the car, plus whatever interest you're paying, and spread that over the number of years you're going to keep the car. Add insurance, gas, regular maintenance (oil changes), and any costs of repairs. Add in tolls, parking costs, parking tickets, speeding tickets, and any other costs that you incur from owning a car that you would not incur if you didn't own a car. There's your total cost of ownership.
"ignoring train station parking fees"? I think you're missing the point. You don't have a car, so there are no parking fees at the train station. If you don't live close enough to a train station, then you take a bus or ride a bike. So for the costs of public transportation, add the fare that you pay to the taxes you're paying to support the public transportation. Add the cost of a bike if you like. If you really want to get stingy, you can add the time lost by not having a direct route, but if you have a good enough public transportation system and efficient civic development, the public transportation might be faster.
But if you are stingy enough to add the cost of time-lost to public transportation, then subtract from that time-lost the amount of time you spend at the gym on the treadmill, and maybe the cost of your gym membership. You won't need it so much.
Off my bed and into my chair.
With the technology we have today, there is zero reason to move your biomass to another place unless you have to actually touch something. The whole concept of "going to work" is silly, and a hold over from a bygone era. People seriously need to get behind teleworking with enthusiasm. Can't get much greener/cheaper than that!
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
I personally live about a 20 minute walk from work. It would be convenient (not to mention faster) for me to drive to work. However, the only available parking in the area is $10 a day, which is far more than I'm willing to pay. A bus trip there costs $2 normally. However, I have a current student ID, so I get to ride for free (not really, there's a per-semester fee automatically included in my tuition if I take the bus or not). So for me, public transit is far more cost-effective. However, parking meters are free on Sundays here in Denver, so I do drive to work on Sundays. Granted, I'm within walking distance, but it's convenient to have the car there, in case I need to get home quickly. Plus, with my Civic averaging around 38 mpg, it costs almost nothing.
As a college student in Tampa, I've found that bicycling is the best way to go. It's faster (I zoom by stopped cars on the roads during rush hour), it's cheaper (no gas, insurance, very low up-front cost), it's cleaner (the only greenhouse gases are my own breathing), and it's healthier (instead of gaining the "freshman 15," I gained the "freshman -50"). It wouldn't be ideal if you have to commute more than 20 miles, but for anything less than that, especially in town, it's perfect.
We live in Albany, NY and work downtown. My wife gets free parking, so we carpool. When our schedules conflict, I usually take the bus because she would have to walk through a really shady area to get to work and I don't like to drive.
I could take any of 3 bus routes every day, but they take about 25 minutes in the morning and 30-45 minutes in the evening. Fare is about $30/mo with a commuter card.
From my driveway to my desk via carpool is 10-15 minutes.
If I lived in NYC, I would take advantage of public transit because it is fast and convenient to things other than work and home. Since NYC is one of the few viable cities in the US, you can actually grab food for dinner or run an errand without a car.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
For me it's not the mode of transport but the number of transfers.
When I got my first professional job, it so happened that I could walk three blocks, hop on a bus, and ride it to a point just two blocks from work. I rode the bus a lot.
In a different job, I found a house just over five miles from work and could bicycle to and from pretty easily. So, I rode my bike whenever the weather permitted.
But jobs change, more often and more easily than one can buy and sell houses. My current situation is an ugly commute, but I'm not about to look for a closer job, or try to sell my house, in this economy.
I would have to drive literally halfway to work to get to the park-and-ride so I could take light rail to the bus stop for the final leg of the journey. Besides the time wasted on transfers, I'm not doing the environment much good either, because practically all the miles I'm putting on the car are "warm up" miles, when exhaust pollution is highest.
Due to poor feeder-line planning, it takes two buses to get to the light rail station, one of which is one of these huge two-part articulated monsters which never seems to have more than twelve people aboard. But that's a different story.
So, I have a choice of making the 45 minute drive each way in my vehicle, or spend a little over 2 hours each way, on average, doorstep to doorstep, to take mass transit.
That kind of commute time may be practical for a young single person, especially if they have no social life, but when you have a family, frequent interaction is required. I just can't spend that much time sitting on plastic seats reading Tolstoy. I need to be helping the kid with homework, not just looking from the doorway after they're asleep. If that makes me an environmental criminal, then bring out the plastic disposable handcuffs.
Mass transit is like recycling -- I'll do it if the powers-that-be make it worth my while. If it's quick and convenient, I'm up for some amount of extra effort.
Cost doesn't really enter into it. Light rail is usually heavily subsidized and the fares are often artificially low. But I'd gladly pay the real cost of the fare if I could walk to the station, ride one train, and then walk from the station to work. But it only works like that for a comparative handful of people.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I know many people who do not have a place to park near the office for less than a few hundred dollars a month. They do better taking the bus in, rather than parking miles from the office and then still having to wait to get in.
The issue with most people is parking, secondary issue is gas. If the issue is parking, there often is no choice but to use public transport. With gas, which might be $4 in the near future, I have notice that some people are extremely wasteful, and will complain about gas rather than living within their means. Around here, people choose to live 20 or more miles from work so they can get a larger place for less money. Of course there are cost benefits issues, and one way to make such a deal work is to use public transport. It would help, and lower gas prices, and save many money, if the public transport system was better.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
How about the cost of time. Are these trains leaving every minute, NO. So you have to leave early to get to work and you might sit next to a smelly person. Even if the train leaves every 7 minuets you would be losing 14 mins everyday with your family freinds etc.
I started taking the train to work about a year ago. I estimate that about 75% of my commute is on the train or public transportation (a short bus ride to/from the train on one end). I drive my own vehicle to the train station near my house. I initially took the bus from my house to the train station, but I found that driving myself to the station saves me about 30-45 minutes each way.
I have gone from using four tanks of gas a month to about a tank and a half. A full tank of gas costs me about $35-40 dollars (15 gallon tank, $2.50 a gallon here in CA). In gas alone I save over $50 a month, or $600 a year. I need fewer oil changes because I don't drive my car as much. I used to get an oil change about every two months. Now I get them about every four to five. Figure an oil change costs ~$50. So now I'm spending $150 a year on oil changes instead of $300 and that is a $150 savings. There is less wear and tear on the vehicle so I don't need brakes as often, etc. Parts like that aren't as significant, but there is a cost savings.
The one cost savings that can't be measured is my sanity. I love public transportation. My quality of life is much better because I am less stressed. There was a study I read a few years ago, I believe it was a Swedish study, and they determined that people who commute to work in traffic have a higher rate of heart disease due to the stress it causes. I'm not sure if the study is valid, but I believe it. Traffic is a stressor. It is wonderful to have two hours a day where I can sit and read and listen to music and not have to worry about red lights, using the brakes, maintaining safe following distance, maintaining speed, etc, etc.
I actually turned down a job the other day that would have paid $15,000 more per year, but would have required longer hours and commuting in the car again. I already make enough money to live a comfortable life, and the increased pay wouldn't offset the increased stress.
Another thing: You can receive up to $230/month for public transit as a tax-free employment benefit. Many employers will provide this benefit in one way or another. (Currently I get Caltrain and MUNI passes and a high value BART card each month. So my commuting cost: $0.)
But no one provides a car commuting benefit for ordinary employees, and the expense of commuting to your regular place of work is NOT tax deductible.
The down side the wife expects me to clean the house and do all the laundry, cook, walk the dog and pick up kids from school; kinda cuts into billable hours at times.
Earlier work location:
BART round trip from my house to San Francisco, plus 30 min walk each trip (to station, from station to work): $8.60/day
Driving to SF: 22 miles, 1.0 gal gas each direction observed (currently $2.40/gal for midgrade), $4.00 toll, parking in SF free (when had handicapped tag) to $20/day. Car insurance and repair costs very close to $5/day. Total $13.80 - 33.80/day.
Cost of having car at home for social/shopping but commuting on BART: $13.80/day.
Current location:
Same as-crow-flies distance, but no direct transit links.
Auto to work and back, using other bridge, 22 miles (1.0 gal observed), $4.00 toll, parking free, $13.80 /day
Auto to work long way around w/o bridge 34 miles to / 22 miles back on bridge - $11.10 / day
Given that I can't walk long distances with heavy loads for shopping all the time, having a car is mandatory. Once I do that, the total cost to commute in the car to SF (urban center, pay parking) is more than riding transit, but to anywhere else is less than riding transit.
And there's a hefty fare hike coming from BART.
Oh, did I mention that about 80 cents per gallon comes out of my gas money and about 60 cents of that (plus a bunch of my sales tax money) ends up in BART and other local bus and transit systems?
When you're done factoring in subsidy from Cars to transit, the numbers no longer even vaguely favor transit. But that's apparently not PC.
The Boston Globe article says that the worst city is Pittsburgh, where you can *only* save $7724 per year by taking public transit.
I don't spend anywhere near that much on my car. I bought a used vehicle in decent condition for $5000 about three years ago. It's still running fine, and I expect to keep it for at least another two years. Assuming I own it for five years, that's roughly $1000/yr to buy the car itself, even if you assume the car will be completely worthless when I get another one. I spend about $500/yr on insurance. I've been lucky enough to not have to put in any major repairs yet on this car, but let's just say $500/yr as an average ballpark figure, knowing that it will be $0 some years and much more in others. I just pulled up my Quicken records and I spend about $750/yr on fuel, for about 10k miles/yr. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that I drove twice that much, or had a less fuel-efficient car. That would still only bump the fuel cost up to around $1500.
So, we have $1000/yr to purchase a used car, $500 to insure it, $500 to maintain it, and $1500 to fuel it, for a grand total of $3500/yr. The only other major variable is tolls and parking, which vary wildly between locations. Still, I doubt that tolls and parking in Pittsburgh are higher than the $4224 more that they say you would be saving somehow. Do they actually pay you to ride the transit in Pittsburgh? That's the only way I can think of to bridge the gap. Maybe you could save as much as they're saying if you lease a new Hummer every year, have a 100 mile commute each way, and you get daily valet parking in Manhattan's priciest parking garage. However, for a person who buys a used, relatively fuel-efficient vehicle and lives relatively close to work, their numbers simply don't add up.
That's still a loss of $1400/year, not including gas, insurance, maintenance, etc. The cost isn't insubstantial.
The cost is $0.
Take the day off.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I'm 35 and have never driven, instead choosing to walk, even during cold Canadian winters. The trick is to pick a place to live that is nicely located somewhere close to work, groceries, and whatever else you deem necessary to make yourself happy.
Many people think I'm nuts or something, but then continually marvel about how healthy I am, and how I'm easily able to afford to take off six weeks every year to go travelling. Oh well, to each his own...
They may laugh at me, but in terms of physical and financial health, I'm laughing at them.
It depends on where you live and if you own a car.
I use public transportation and don't own a car. So i don't have to pay for petrol, the car, insurance, maintenance, MOT/Inspection, etc. So it's most definitely cheaper.
Once you start trying to combine car ownership and public transportation then it's not really going to be cheaper and it would be more about convenience.
Even if I owned a car, I think I would still prefer using public transportation. Driving into Cambridge during rush hour is an absolute nightmare and incredibly boring. Even if I'm still subject to it in on bus (train of course doesn't get stuck in traffic) then at least I'm not behind the wheel. I can sleep or, play video games, program, etc.
That's a good point, but I prefer to see it as my car having a lifespan of say 250,000 miles after which it may be more costly to repair/maintain than to buy a newer, less failure prone model.
So for ease of calculation lets say it's a $25,000 car, then that's $ .10 a mile. Then add in gas, (Oil Change)/3500 miles, (Tire Cost)/50,000 miles, other scheduled maintenance, etc and you get the true cost per mile to use your car.
So hypothetically if you come up with $.40 a mile then your 30 mile commute each way costs you $12 round trip (60 miles * .40/mile), plus tolls, plus whatever your driving time which you can't use doing anything else. So your 5 day a week commute comes up to $60 or about $260 a month.
You can also calculate the "salvage amount" (what you expect your car to be worth when you sell it to a teenager's parent, trade it in, or charge people to whack it with a baseball bat) and subtract that from the initial cost to determine the cost per mile.
Of course it's true cars also depreciate per year that you own them, but the assumption here is that you plan on keeping your car until the end of its (usable) life.
I used this when I was commuting to school and realized I was spending almost as much in my adjusted commute cost as it would be to simply get an apartment next to the campus (not to mention the hour and a half I ended up saving each day not driving).
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Unfortunately I cant RTFA right now, but did this take into account the HUGE advantage that individual cars have due to the socialized road system we all pay for? We spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year maintaining the road system, but much much much less on public transit. Any comparison of the costs should take into account some reasonable estimates for these forms of subsidy.
And it didn't work for me. Here's the comparison:
Driving:
35 minutes door to door
$200/mo for parking + $100/mo for gas @ $2.50/gallon = $300/mo
Have car at my disposal for errands or to go to hockey after work
Can leave whenever I'm done, and have freedom to stay after work with friends
Commuter rail:
1:05 door to door
$80/mo for parking at the commuter rail station (2 miles away) + $150/mo for the commuter rail pass = $230/mo
No car after work, which means I have to go home first to do things, wasting even more time
Have to leave at particular times: if I miss the 7:30 train, for instance, it's 90 minutes until the next one
I need a car in either case because there's no zipcar anywhere near where I live and I need a car to perform errands and to cart myself to/from hockey. So I'm not factoring the cost of the car itself into either, though there is an additional penalty on driving for added wear and tear on the car.
So commuter rail is slightly less expensive in dollars per commute, but that doesn't come anywhere close to compensating me for the wasted time and lack of convenience.
I'll drive, thank you.
[ home ]
Whenever, I read these studies, they want to factor in depreciation. Unless you are running a business, DEPRECIATION IS NOT A COST! You bought the vehicle and your money has already been spent. It's gone! You CANNOT expense it a second time. Once the car is bought and paid for, your expenses are gas, maintenance and insurance. The one thing these studies rarely ask is: What is your time worth to you?
I think your method of calculating real cost makes more sense than the GP post. I'm still more for just counting that monthly payment as money spent, but if you must depreciate value over the life of the car rather than over life of the payment, your way is better than a blanket "$5000/year".
The CB App. What's your 20?
choose jobs based on their location in midtown manhattan
cost: $0 (excluding extra wear and tear on shoes and extra calorie consumption)
not exactly an option for everyone, but it keeps me thin to boot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Gah, math fail.
It should be: .40/mile), plus tolls, plus whatever your driving time which you can't use doing anything else. So your 5 day a week commute comes up to $120 or about $520 a month ($120*4.333 weeks/month).
At $.40 a mile a 30 mile commute each way costs you $12 each way and $24 round trip (60 miles *
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
If I take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train into the city, it costs $5.25 each way. That's over $50 a week. If I'm working someplace that provides parking, then it's cheaper to drive. Free parking in San Francisco isn't all that common and can be a bit pricey. Even when I did have access to free parking I almost always took BART to avoid the hell of driving across the Bay Bridge.
Unfortunately, I typically work in the Silicon Valley. From where I live, there is no decent public transportation. Driving to work is pretty much mandatory and is guaranteed to be a major biatch. When I contracted at Google for a year, I was able to take advantage of their shuttle service. A short five mile drive to the shuttle stop and a relaxing trip in an air conditioned bus with videos and wifi.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Most of the costs to drive are hidden. Gas is cheap, even at three bux/gallon. You have to consider:
1) Purchase of the car! Or did you ever stop to think about the 400
or more/month you pay? And even when you aren't paying this, you are probably paying more on:
2) Cost of repairs. Tires, brakes, transmissions...
3) Insurance and accidents. Neither are cheap, one partially covers the cost of the other.
4) Police action. I'm a good driver, with zero serios accidents in 20 years of driving, and two fender benders. I still get a ticket every other year or so, and always have.
Etc. The IRS gives a standard deduction of about 0.50 / mile, and that's about right. It's what my company reimburses for travel on trips. It only costs about 1.5 times as much to fly a private plane!
Cars are much more expensive than we give them credit for!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
My company pays for my monthly bus pass, and I walk to work half the time anyway.
Sold my car and did not look back.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I find that I get fantastic mileage riding my pushbike to work.
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
Some people just do not care about depreciation.
I buy a vehicle because I need to have one. I drive them until they die (usually about 15 years and 450,000 miles). Car != investment. It is a tool for engaging in life. Like anything that I use, I look at 'does it do what I need' and 'how long will it last'.
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
I'll happily pay the extra $$ to stay away from all the icky public transit people!
You know, given that I bike all over the place, when "my" car (defined as the old not epsecially reliable American car my wife's parents sent us off to California in that I need to remind myself needs to be driven) finally dies, I'm starting to think that I ought to buy an SUV. I could buy a hummer and, given my driving patterns, still get better mileage than a hybrid.
Gentoo Sucks
I live 6.5km from work, and bike it both ways as soon as the snow is melted. I probably spend $200/yr on bike maintenance (tires, brake pads, toys and accessories), and $50/mo for four months to take the bus through the winter.
We have no car. It costs $50 to rent an economy car for a three-day weekend, which we might do a dozen times throughout the year.
I get 40 minutes of cardio per day, so I don't need a gym membership. I shower at work so my gas and water bills are lower.
My wife buys a bus pass every month.
Our total commuting bills are (calculates) roughly $1600/year (not counting gas for the car rentals).
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
I don't know what it is elsewhere, but there's no doubt that if you live and work within reach of the NYC subway system, $81 a month for transportation everywhere is way cheaper than it would be driving.
Of course, since a lot of public transport systems are taxpayer-funded, you could easily argue that real price is much higher.
AAA cost calculator (PDF) shows you how to factor in all of your Costs: Fuel, Maintenance, Tires, Insurance, License, Registration, Taxes, Depreciation and Finance (interest). The biggest variables in calculating price/mile are the size of your vehicle and how many miles per year you drive. Do the math. Make decisions. Be empowered with knowledge.
you're doing it wrong
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Parking at work is free. My van is paid for, though I would have to make loan/lease payments anyway, whether I drove or not.
To drive to work every day I would have to up the insurance and buy more diesel. After adding in more frequent distance-related maintenance, it's pretty well even with public transit. The economics would change if my commute was longer (fuel consumption, insurance rates), or if I had to pay for parking at work.
As it is, I drive to work one day a week to remind myself why I take the bus the other four days.
...laura
My route is about six miles. Biking takes me about fifteen minutes longer than driving. The bike is fun and I would ride it anyway. I extend the ride home when the weather is good.
Weekly maintenance is keeping the wheels and drivetrain clean. Savings are huge--especially because the ride is also my recreation and I would spend the money anyway.
Biking works for me because I have reasonable access to bike paths, wide streets, and low traffic streets.
I definitely encourage others to bike to work.
Cost of fuel
Cost of parking
Cost of maintenance
Cost of getting to station (and back)
Cost of fare (round trip)
Cost of rental/transport to destination (and back)
Cost of wasted time
Cost of being a damned loser without a car
Trains are for freight and densely packed urban areas where traffic and parking is a huge issue.
This is why you'll see such huge support by the neo-urbanites.
If you want to add in:
Cost of car
Cost of registration
Cost of insurance
You need to also add in:
Cost of not being able to get out in case of emergency
Cost of having to hire movers anytime you buy a piece of furniture
Etc.
Public transit is $68 a month, while parking alone is $24 a day for a meter (assuming an 8 hour work day) or around $15 for a private lot, if you can find one that isn't full.
Generally the public transit takes about the same amount of time during rush hour. It's even often faster as sometimes you end up wandering around for 15 minutes looking for a parking spot.
I wonder, given a population distributed geographically exactly as it is now, and starting from scratch, how we would go about designing a maximally efficient transportation system? Would we connect everybody with paved roads and require them all to buy automobiles (resulting in something resembling what we have now in the US), or would the solution look different?
This is a big legacy transition problem. We're comparing the cost of cars vs. rail in a place with an immense infrastructure designed for the former, and very little for the latter. How good could a mass transit system be, if this weren't the case?
Using the GSA POV Mileage Reimbursement Rate of $0.55 / mile and including my parking fees, it costs me $16 / day to drive to work. On the other hand, I could bike+train to work for $2 / day plus whatever maintenance is required on my bike which is less than $50 / year. Even though I only work four days a week that's a savings of $2412 / year (counting $50 / year bike maints). If I worked five days a week and had a longer commute with more normal parking fees that number would obviously be significantly higher.
THE TRADE OFF
Depending on the time of day, my one way commute can be anywhere from 20 minutes to 120 minutes (averaging closer to 35) by car and the longer it is the more potential damage my car may endure. If I bike+train my commute is between 55 and 65 minutes depending on how hard I try. So the car is consistantly twice as fast, doesn't require a change of cloths, and I can haul a bunch of crap with me if necessary. On the bike I get my daily workout (twice a day) simply by going to work. In the car I don't have to put up with smelly people, other than myself. On the bike I am more in tune with my town and the things happening around me (this is a good thing!). In the car I don't get rained on.
So it costs me about fourteen dollars per day for convenience. Frankly I don't think it's worth it, but I'm lazy in my old age. I drive when it's less than beautiful outside or I'm running late (most days) and I bike when it seems effortless.
Additionally >>>
I live in Vancouver, Washington, which is a suburb of Portland, Oregon. The train I ride is the Portland Tri-Met. Unfortunately Vancouver isn't one of the 3 metros that Tri-Met services. The nearest train stop to my house is 8 miles away. If the tracks simply crossed the river my daily bike+train commutes would go up ten fold. Who knows - maybe someday.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Over commuting, once Obama puts into place his pro-public-transportation tax plan.
Including massive hidden taxes on operating a motor vehicle during certain hours on certain days.
And tax credits that result in less-expensive public transportation.
The government of the future is about manipulating people, so they are deceived into still thinking they're free, but in fact, their actions are strictly controlled, and their liberty denied, not by laws that put you in jail, but, by the tax code, to do, whatever the government thinks is "best" for the country, best for the environment, best for the political powers-that-be, etc.
Your average new car costs very roughly $3000 a year in depreciation. It may be less if you have a cheap japanese model, and much more if you have a American SUV.
A car is very expensive compared to taking trains when you factor in depreciation and insurance.
True, but if you have a car anyway (for use on weekends, out-of-town, etc.) then you pay for only the additional depreciation of increased mileage. Most of that $3000 will still disappear.
Same deal with insurance; most of the cost of insurance is a function of vehicle make and geographic and demographic risk factors, not on miles traveled.
I computed this for my situation. The cost of gas fuel for my commute is about $80 per month. Insurance is about $60 per month. Maintanence averages out to be about $10 per month (repairs, fluid changes, part replacement (bulbs, wipers, battery, etc.)) based on 2 years of data. Parking is free. Add in the cost of a car is around $20,000 and lasts about 10 years for me, or around $170 per month. Of course you could buy a used car, but it probably won't last 10 years. If your car lasts less than that, or costs more, leasing may be cheaper.
The cost of commuting by car thus comes out to be $320 per month, even though most months the cost is just fuel, or $80 per month.
The train, after reimbursements, is around $90 per month.
So, most months a car is cheaper, but overall it's more expensive. Still, I drive since it makes my commute 40 minutes one way instead of 2 hours due to transfers.
The analysis also assumes that a person will drive an average of 15,000 miles per year.
For this to be a valid comparison, this would require the person to COMMUTE 15,000 miles a year which comes to about 29 miles each way assuming the person never takes a day off. In many of the cities studied, it's simply not possible to commute that far. (All of Seattle and the nearest 31 other cities fit within a 22 mile radius for instance)
The savings assume a household gives up one car.
Which totally invalidates the study for people who own only one vehicle or require the number of vehicles they already own. (IE most people)
The fixed costs include insurance, license registration, depreciation and finance charges
If I got rid of my insurance because I commuted via train, that would prevent me from driving ever. No buying grocieries for me. Furthermore, people who buy affordable used cars pay virtually nothing in terms of depreciation/finance.
I'm sure some people who happen to live next to public transportation and spend too much are their vehicles could save some money using public transportation. For the rest of us this "study" means very little.
Compared to what is spent on roads, mass transit is an afterthought. This, of course, explains sensibly why some areas have great mass transit, and others do not, though I don't think rail is a viable option for much of the country, especially in the "new" West were suburbs span tens of miles.
It will have to be a combination of short route buses to rail systems probably installed above the middle divider of highways, with stops at each exit. The combination of both will probably take as long as sitting in traffic in a car, at far less expense.
During the day, when there are less commuters, half of the trains could drop their commuter cars and pick up freight from outer city points, and deliver them at longer intervals close to commercial areas. This would reduce congestion on highways and wear and tear on bridges and city centers, and probably fund much of the cost of operation.
Upkeep notwithstanding, my car costs half the amount it takes to take the Underground, and takes half the time every day.
That's if I get the reduced rate of a yearly Oyster card.
But Boris has better ideas about keeping the cars out of London.
74.117.115.116 32.97.110.111 116.104.101.114 32.80.101.114 108.32.104.97 99.107.101.114
I live about 22 miles outside of Cambridge, where I have often worked. So that is 44 miles/day@ $.5 per mile (U.S. government reimbursement). Your actual costs will vary; but the government rate isn't far from reality. Parking is about $20/day in Cambridge; sometimes more, sometimes less depending on the lot.
$5500 - Mileage
$5000 - Parking
Round numbers for automobile commute: $10,500
Note that there are hidden costs of road maintenance, etc.
Additionally, it is my time; on the commuter rail, at least I get (at least) an hour of my time back.
$2400/year - Commuter rail ticket (also covers unlimited subway use)
$1500/year - Mileage to train station.
Commuter rail commute is therefore about $3900, before any tax breaks (or lower auto insurance rate, due to less mileage and lower theft rates).
Savings for me (excluding tax break and insurance break) was about $6-7K/year.
I live 40+ miles from where I work. Back when I drove every day (pre-2003), I was spending something like $200 a month on gas and parking - and that's before taking wear and tear on the car into account, or the fact that gas and parking costs have both increased somewhat, or the increased insurance premiums that come with commuting to work.
Even if my employer didn't subsidize my rail pass, at $140 a month it'd be saving me money. At $40 a month, it's a steal. I have to fill up my car (which is indeed a 93 Ford Escort) a bit less often than once a month - plus I doubt it'd still be running if I were driving 80+ miles in it each day, so a car payment probably needs to be factored into all this.
So in my case I don't think there's any argument - transit saves me a significant amount of money. It also saves me stress, since instead of getting frustrated with slow traffic I'm now napping on the train.
#DeleteChrome
I commute between Boston and Houston every week. Definitely faster than driving or taking a train :)
it isn't how much dough it saves my sorry ass that counts. the market isn't going to halt climate change.
$12600 a year? Not even close. I live in LA, my 2006 vehicle (which is paid for) gets 14 mpg in the city, I drive 3 miles each way for an average of 6 miles per day. So... $370(6 month policy) * 2 = $740 for insurance that's full coverage, I just filled up my tank today at $42 that will last around 3 weeks, $728 a year for gasoline, an oil change $40 (I do it myself and use full synthetic oil) My total yearly cost? Wow, a whole $1508 a year and yet I'm in the vehicle almost every day. My time is worth much, much more than trying to save that $1508 (I make around $70 an hour). That means my yearly transportation costs are around 1.5% of my after tax take home budget. Before anyone points out tires/brakes/blah blah blah. Like I said I have a 2006 vehicle, I just rolled over 13,000 miles that's thirteen thousand miles, I didn't leave out a 0 or anything. It's going to be a few more years before I need to even think about those things. Go ahead and pretend taking public transportation, adjusting yourself around their schedule, exposing yourself to sick people, etc is some great panacea. I'll keep driving thank you very much, and patting myself on the back for being such a genius that I chose to live within a couple of miles from work, and I still don't know what crazy rush hour traffic every one keeps talking about in LA. What's next a story using creative calculus showing that stay at home mother's are worth $100k a year?....
Why aren't you people paying a monthly parking rate? Everyplace I've paid to park in upstate NY has both daily and monthly rates; paying monthly gets you a 20% (minimum) discount over paying daily, and gives you a "free" place to park downtown on nights/weekends instead of fighting for curb or "special event" parking.
I dislike commuting, but at least public transit gives me the chance to read, emulate vax or make awkward conversation while I do it. I use the WMATA, D.C.-area system. It costs me $140 to ride both ways every work day for a month. If I park in the garage every day, that adds $90. If I tax the bus to the train every day (convenient), that adds $50. At the moment I have a free ride every day. Parking at work would cost me the same $140 a month, and the total cost of that with gas would be around $200. The savings are negligable, until you factor in extra repairs due to more road miles. This would increase the mileage I put on our car by a factor of two.
White River Junction, VT to Stamford, CT:
Amtrak: $59
gas for car: $19
QED
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
For public transportation, the other variable cost is the money lost during a mugging. Not everyone pays this cost, but it can add up.
There are other reasons, but I think I've made my point. Even when we factor in the costs of owning our car (insurance, registration, etc), it is cheaper to drive to work. Even if we didn't drive to work, we'd need a car anyway. And even if it wasn't cheaper to drive, it would be worth the additional cost to save my sanity. The drive is pleasant and quick, the car is warm in winter and cool in summer, I get to listen to whatever music I like, and I'm guaranteed a seat every morning.
If the state government here wants us to be greener (I can only assume that they don't), here's some advice: upgrade your public transport. We pay enough for it.
from where I work. I have a car and a motorcycle. During bad weather I use the car (sporty car so still not great in snow despite being FWD) but when I can I use the motorcycle. I just recently moved here in February but I was only 10 minutes (7 miles) away before with the same job. I'd ride a bike to work if I could but I'd have to traverse a 2 lane US Route that converts to 4 lanes half way to work. It would be too dangerous and that is assuming I'd be allowed to have the bicycle on the road because there is no shoulder. If I lived in Florida instead of WV it would be easier to enjoy the motorcycle nearly all year round but alas that isn't possible in the nice winters here in WV. My 17.7 gallon tank in my car lasts about 3 weeks which includes about 40 miles of travel on weekends; more than 3 weeks if I use the motorcycle a lot to get to work. Because I still take trips I can't get rid of the car and the motorcycle is a toy (and paid off).
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
First with commuter rail, then with a bike. While those savings quoted above seem shockingly high, they are actually not *too* far from reality. I figured the trains was saving more like $8K a year on gas, parking, depreciation and maintenance. Huge amounts more when you factor in the pure hassle of driving.
The bike was a better deal, obviously, and much more healthy, but you have to be pretty hardcore to ride 40 miles a day.
Please explain to me why, when a car that is "paid for" and worth $X in year Y, becomes worth $X/2 in year Y+4, there was no "cost."
It has the same effect on your assets as if you take money out of your bank account.
But, okay, whatever, about 30% of people in introductory Economics flunk it, and why should you be part of the special %70.
Ride a unicycle
That wasn't so hard (to figure out)
Providence to Boston both ways.
Car note per month: $300
Insurance per month $100
Fuel per month (Car gets 37MPG and gas at $2.11): $61
Maintenance $50 per month
Lost time due to traffic: 2 hours per day, 43.3 hours per month at a billable rate of $80/hr = $3,464
Total monthly: $3,975
Train pass: $250 a month.
Or you could be reading a book, or napping, or using a laptop on the train/bus, while "missing" time spent on the sofa watching TV and drinking beer.
If you have important family stuff to do, the best way to resolve a commuting time problem is to find a job closer to home. Of the various things about raising children, finding a job closer to home (or moving home closer to work) is not one of the harder ones.
Just because the public transportation in a given area is inconvenient or unpleasant doesn't mean [...] that the public transportation in your area has to be unpleasant and inconvenient.
Then how would I go about making the public transportation in my area less unpleasant and inconvenient?
Public: TTC, $2.75 each way. I can get a monthly pass for $105. Assume worst: $2.75 each way, 7 days a week.
Car: 2002 Honda Civic, bought used, $10,000, to be paid over 5 years ($2120 yr) or $5.80 day.
Car insurance: We're old, so we only pay about $500 year, about $1.36 a day.
Car Maintenance averages $800 year (tires, brakes, etc. etc.) about $2.19 a day
distance: 6 miles each way.
Gas mileage on car: in city, 24 mpg.
Gas price: $0.85 per liter, roughly = $3.25 gallon, so Cost in gas to drive downtown each day: ~$1.66
Parking downtown = $8 day. (She has a good lot)
So, per day: Car loan: $5.80
Insurance: $1.36
Maintain: $2.19
Cost Gas: $1.66
Parking: $8.00
---------------------
total per day: 19.01 per day.
x 365 = $6938.65 total cost per year for commuting.
total cost per year for TTC: 365 x (2 x 2.75)= $2007.50
Difference? Almost $5000.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The road system is much more heavily subsidized than all train systems.
A comparison of the consumer costs without considering the costs through taxes is meaningless.
And there in lies the problem. Somehow, we are entitled to 6 lane freeways and highways but urban, suburburban and interstate rail is, wooo, scary socialist stuff that "loses money". Do that for six decades and you get a serious problem. Like Dallas
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
I'm in a fairly unique situation. I live one mile from the train station. My employer also has a train stop on site, with a second opening next year for a new rail line. My employer gets a discounted rate of $38 for a year long rail pass, which covers all trains and buses for both Dallas and Fort Worth.
I can ride a bicycle to the train station, which costs about 20 bucks a year in maintenance(tires, bearings, etc). So it would cost less than $60 per year for me to take public transportation.
A couple months ago, a friend of mine was hired on at my job and we have been car pooling since. We alternate weeks. So at 20mpg in my truck and 40 miles round trip, I burn about 10 gallons at $2/gallon. Also there are $1.40 in tolls each day. $27 every other week, so $702/year not including oil, tires and stuff that I feel is just part of owning a automobile. Even if you're not putting the miles on, those things still need to be checked/replaced. I'm not even going to mention the money saved by not owning a vehicle, because that's just not going to fly in Dallas.
The deciding factor for me is time.
In order to make it to my office by train at 7:30am, I must get up at 5am to leave by 5:45am to catch the train by 6am. Then I must transfer trains once and take a shuttle on campus from the train stop to my office. On the return trip, I have to wait for the first shuttle at 4:45pm to catch the first train by 5pm to catch the second at 5:30pm and make it to the train station at 6:15pm and ride home by 6:30pm.
In order to make it to work by 7:30 via car pooling, I must get up at 6am to meet my friend at 6:50 at my side walk, then take the HOV lane most of the way. The return trip is generally the same, but we usually burn a couple minutes saying our good-byes and wrapping up. So leave by 4:40pm and home by 5:10pm.
So, unless I were able to generate revenue by writing a novel or charge those hours to my job as part of my work day, It's hard for me to justify an extra 10 hours a week to save $13.50 in gas and tolls.
That's right, because used cars depreciate at a lower rate.
I bought my good used car (off-lease from a dealer) in 2003 for $13,000. Today I could easily sell for roughly $3000 (at least I've been trying to!). So about $10,000 of value has been bled out of it (not accounting for inflation, which is negligible)
That's only a real depreciation of $1650 per year, not accounting for inflation. That's far less than $3000!
And if you want to buy a good, used high mileage Camry, let me know.
The bottom of the original report explains the methodology used for calculating the cost difference. It factors in much more than just gas.
Just a note if the train does happen to go to work, and you still need the car. You can often get cheaper insurance rates if you have a low number of miles you put on the car each year (only driving to those other places, not work).
2 miles would be like a 15 min bike trip or less. But off course, the poster is an 150 kilo slacker that starts to sweat profusely while thinking about exercise, so he just needs a reason not to lift a finger himself...
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
what about the recoil of a shotgun that dumps a load of pellets in you backside?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Even if public transport was "only" 25% cheaper than a car, I'd still prefer it. Why? Because of the value of my time. Until we have fully automated self-driving cars, I can't read, nap, work, or simply daydream in a car. I have to actively drive it, and I'm pretty damn sure at least 50% of the other drivers are trying to read, nap, work, or daydream behind the wheel.
The problem here isn't that these newspapers are fawning over this report. The problem is that the point of the report has been mangled by incompetent journalists. The original report is about replacing your car with public transportation, not just your work commute. That's why they end up using 15000 miles (which is absurdly high for an average commute but much more reasonable for a total year of family driving).
I do find the parking rate high but, then again, my commute is the reverse (from the city into the suburbs) and my company has free parking. Even if it would be more reasonable to assume for a lower parking cost, $2.039 is absurdly low for gas (here in the Chicago area, things are up to around $2.50 from a previous low of about $2.19 at the cheapest gas stations).
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Here in the US it's simply not possible for me, but when I'm in Switzerland, I'm paying ~2500$ for a one-year country-wide train-and-bus-and-boat-if-you-really-need-it ticket.
I agree totally.
For me, at say 15k miles/yr, I burn 937 gallons of fuel because of the stop and go traffic. There is public transportation a few miles from home, but there's no parking there. There is also no public transportation to my work. If I walked, I would walk a few miles to the bus, ride it for an hour, and then walk a few more miles to work. In the time I'd spend walking, I'd already be at work and have quite a bit of productive time done.
Parking depends on where you work. Parking at home is free. Parking at work is free. So my parking expenses are $0.
The savings equation is flawed by localization.
For a while, I carpooled, so we cut the total fuel consumption for two people in half (only one of two possible cars on the road). Now, there are no coworkers that live close to me, or even travel near my house. Carpooling could tend to be a pain. If one had to work late, that left both of us at work. But, it was tolerable.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
$450/month is not incredibly unusual... when I first got my drivers license I was living in southern NJ (what could be called the NJ "countryside"), I took drivers ed courses, had no record (no negatives anyway), white/male driving an eight year old minivan -- they were charging me roughly $280/month. absolutely ridiculous.
after moving to a large city in Ohio prior to my 25th birthday, that dropped to about $70/month for the same car with the same record.
My first new car was a $20,000 Honda CR-V. After 10 years, I sold it for $6000; that's an average of only $1400 per year.
You forgot about the changing value of the dollar over time - inflation. Let's say you bought your CR-V in 1995 and sold it in 2005. $20000 in 2005 had the purchasing power of $25,600 in 1995. Let's use 2005 dollars for your depreciation calculations. (We could just as easily use 1995 dollars in all calculations; the results will be identical.)
($25600 - $6000) ÷ 10 years = $1960 per year, in 2005 dollars.
You're right: the depreciation costs of your CRV was way under $3000, but it was a roughly 33% more than your $1400 estimate.
Note that Real Estate brokers also like you to ignore inflationary costs when trying to sell you property. Watch out and do the full calculation. Inflation is "real" and absolutely impacts the finances of everything you buy, sell, or hold.
Train = $36 Peak RT + $11 Parking = $47 Hybrid = ~$8 ( 4 gallons RT) + $24 Parking + $12 toll = $44 It really depends on if I want to sleep/read for two hours or take the train (it's so hard sleeping on the train for some reason).
The personal cost of public transportation cannot be compared directly to private transportation costs. Political decisions, along with federal, state and local tax subsidies determine the cost of public transportation. For some people public transportation is free (e.g. NYC school children). For those who can't use public transportation but are taxed for it, the cost per mile is infinite.
In 2002 federal transit subsidies were over $7.3 billion dollars. This works out to a subsidy of about 12 cents a mile for every passenger. In NYC, Washington DC, Chicago and Boston the amounts are much higher. On the other hand, the net federal subsidy to highway passenger transportation was negative as a result of gas taxes and tolls.
If the government buys the car for you, it doesn't save any money. http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/2009_05_07_Free_cars_for_poor_fuel_road_rage/srvc=home&position=also
It would save me $550 a month.
The only reason I don't do it is it tacks on an extra 45 minutes both ways, and I am limited to when I can come to, and leave work. That and the morning bus is always packed and the only seats I seem to get are with people who have very wide hips.
Working from home has its advantages.
The only major downside is there is no "decompression" on the way home. I leave the "office" and ten seconds later I'm getting kids and bills thrown at me.
On other hand, I built this so I could "stop off" at the bar on the "way home".
you spend too much on your car and there is a train that goes where you need to go when you need to go there and your time is worth nothing.
savings on the gym: $20/month
savings on insurance: $35/month
savings on fuel: $50/month
savings on car repayments: $100/month
saving my environment: priceless
I moved closer to the "train" almost a year ago and I kept the car because sometimes you just don't want to taxi/train somewhere. But not parking downtown saves costs me over $1500 a year and, even from the perimeter (ATL), it's a 2 hour daily rush hour(s) commute which is another $1500 a year in gas. Commute maintenance, wear, and tear from the commute cost more than $500 per year. MARTA 30 day passes work on buses and trains run $50 and get me there in half the time.
So I'd say I'm saving 3 grand a year or so.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Thank you timothy, I'm glad that some people realize that not everyone lives in LA or New York.
If my time is worth $50/hour and it takes me longer to wait for trains then am I really saving anything? I would love less congested roads and better bus routes and train schedules. But at the same time I can't really waste an extra 1.5 hours a day taking public transit. And yes that's really how much longer it took me, I was doing it because it was otherwise totally free for me (my work subsidized it 100%, no paperwork just a 1 year VTA pass)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
My travel to work (it's not called "commuting", because then you're not paid for it), consists of taking Amtrak from a town 20 minutes drive from my house, 2.5 hours into Penn Station in NYC, working 5+ hours, and then back on the train 2.5 hours back home.
I spend (out of pocket) about $16k/year on this travel alone... which I can *NOT* expense. I can't expense my WWAN card that I use on the train while I work (I'm typing this while heading back home right now on that very train), I can't expense my DSL at home for the days when I DO telecommute, and I can't even expense my cellphone, which I use for calls while in-transit.
Driving my personal vehicle would certainly be more expensive, take longer and ratchet up my stress levels to very high levels, so I take the train... and I suck it up. I live 143 miles from my work, each way.
If I didn't accept this job, and this travel and this distance, I'd be living out of a cardboard box in a public park. Literally.
I recently bought a motorbike and stopped using the train so can present a single data point on how much costs increase.
I paid $110/month for a train ticket. However I'd often have to work late and then use a combination of busses and taxis (or very long walks) to get home. As a result I ended up spending around an extra $20/month even though I had a monthly train pass. Total cost then was around $1500/year.
I now pay approx $10/week for petrol and approx $120/quarter for servicing (yes, that means servicing is costing the same as petrol). That's roughly $1000/year. There's about $200 extra in insurance too, and interest on the purchase price is also around $200/year. So in total I'm now spending about $1400/year, a saving of $1500.
Curiously, the bike has saved me a lot less time than I anticipated. The trip takes around 50 minutes by train (including walking) and around 40 mintues by motorbike (including putting gear on/away).
However it's greatly simplified things, I can work late or get delayed on my way out the door without incident. The train's occasional break-downs/delays don't affect me now either - my bike is much more reliable.
Winter on the bike hasn't been the most pleasant, especially heading home in the dark when it's raining and cold and it started making me wish I was in a nice air-conditioned car. So I worked out the approximate cost of 'upgrading'.
It was a lot - I would have to pay roughly five times as much in repayments, roughly three times as much in fuel, and I'd have to start paying for parking. I estimated the total cost at roughly $6k extra (though a far cry from the article's $20k).
There's non financial issues to take into account too... Trains are safter than cars, which are safer than bikes. Trains allow you to read during your commute. Trains and cars keep you dry and warm. That's one data point, YMMV
Try dating a girl and telling her you don't have a car to come pick her up with and see how far you get. Not far. I live in downtown Denver Colorado, and don't really need my car for my day to day living, I can walk and take the light rail pretty much every where I want to go, except to pick up a cute girl who lives in suburbia.
Your coworkers know the smell ... a little too well.
I biked to work 10 miles each way for a few years. Then I got a job that paid over $30K per year and had to where a suit to work daily. Even when I worked 1 mile from work, I still drove to
a) retain professional appearance
b) not smell; houston gets HOT!
c) have the ability to travel to customer locations
d) have the ability to be flexible and combine errands on the way home
e) Show the ladies how cool my Ford Escort was
It is now 20 years later and I gained a little weight. Then I quit my job and lost 65 lbs.
I have a bus that goes right past my apartment building and even with free bus fare I am better off driving to campus. It takes me 5 minutes to drive each way, the bus trip is 1.5 hours. 3 hours a day wasted - 15 hours a week. How many people would find it worthwhile to put 37.5% of their paycheck each week toward paying for their commute?
Time: It takes me twice as long to get to work on public transport that driving.
Health: Taking public transportation is one of the best ways I can think of to get sick.
Privacy: Try having a private conversation while on a bus or train. (I'm not advocating cell phone use here unless the car is equipped with Bluetooth.)
Stress: Traffic doesn't bother me. Having some yahoo with an iPod cranked up so high that the ear buds are rattling their teeth does.
Yeah, that's about right. I have 60,000 mile tires on my car, and I paid about $48,000 for them.
Verizon math alert!
Generally estimates of transportation by car are done at a fixed price per mile, around 55 cents or so per mile. This amount assumes wear and tear on the car, including costs of repairs, as well as cost of regular maintenance such as oil changes and average depreciation costs of the car itself. (The specific number of 55 cents per mile was pulled from the official IRS tax code.)
If we assume 15,000 miles per year, then at 55 cents a mile it works out to be an annual cost of $8,250/year.
How this somehow turns into a $12,600 year savings make no sense, unless you're getting $4k/year payment to ride the train.
>Using Windows is like walking through Middle-earth. There's a freaking wizard lurking around every corner.
You really need to try a different example. There are only 5 wizards in Middle Earth (6 if you want to count Sauron (I don't know why you would count him, but he is a Maia)). And only Gandalf, Saruman and Radagast (and Sauron) live or travel in the area covered by the LotR map.
All in all, Middle Earth has a very low wizard density.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
I pay $70/month for my bus pass. Even insurance around here costs at least that much, not taking into account gas and maintenance.
Karma: Non-Heinous
By car this would be 90 * 2 * 5 * 52 = 46,800 mi / 25mpg = 1872gal * 2.20/gal = 4,118.40 just in gas.
Figure $400/mo. for parking in Manhattan = $4800 in parking.
Tolls, just for getting to the NYC line, would be $8.55 * 2 * 5 * 52 = $4,446.
That's NOT including the onerous wear and tear of putting about 50k miles per year on your car JUST to get back and forth to work (hope you never drive anywhere else). If we use the IRS rate for that ($0.55/mi), that's an additional $25,740 in expenses (although that seems a bit high, so let's just take ONE QUARTER of that, or $6,435)
So between gas, tolls, and parking, it would cost $13,364 to commute in via car each day, plus wear-and-tear of $6,435, for a total of $19,799.
My monthly nut to take the train in? $612/mo * 12 = $7,344. A difference of about $12,000.
I live in NJ, close to NYC and take the train whenever I go into NYC. This is because parking is a nightmare in NYC, the train is usually faster and I'm usually going to have a few drinks in NYC.
I work in NJ, I drive a few days a week (part time telecommuter). Here's the math:
Car Insurance Cost: $100/month
Gas Mileage: ~24MPG
Round trip to work: 45 miles
Commute time: 30-40 minutes, depending on traffic
Assuming about $2.50 for gas, which is above what I'm currently paying, I figure it costs me 1.875 gallons, or $4.68, plus insurance and maintenance. I have an older car, so let's say maintenance costs about $100 a month, or $1200 a year. This seems high. I drive to work 3 times a day for 48 weeks, or 144 times. For a years worth of driving, this is $3073.92. Not surprisingly the gas is only $600, the other $2400 is insurance and maintenance.
The train is a different story. The train starts right next to my apartment (3 blocks) and drops me off at work (about a 5 minute walk). One of the biggest problems is that I have to transfer, making the ride kind of a nightmare that doesn't allow for a peaceful ride.
Cost of round trip ticket: $13.25
One-Way Time: 55-70 minutes, depending on time of day - rush hour trains are faster.
Train frequency: every 45-60 minutes
If I lived in a perfect world, I could ditch my car and take the train every day (let's ignore that I like to use the car for weekend trips). So I wouldn't have to pay for maintenance or insurance - awesome! I would have to buy train tickets, a whopping $1908 worth of them (13.25 x 144 trips). This means that I'm saving $1000 a year taking the train.
So why don't I take the train? The commute time. I would waste, on average, 40-60 minutes a day taking the train.* Let's assume I value my time, even a little bit, at $10/hour. This is another $1440 a year that I would be "spending" in terms of time. All of a sudden, driving doesn't look that bad.
*For those of you who say that I can get work done on the train or other such non-sense, you need to actually take the train to understand. It's broken up by a transfer so I can barely get my laptop open on the 55 minute trip before I have to move - it turns out to not be worth it. I've found the train slightly more relaxing than driving and usually bring a book. However, I'm also fairly relaxed in my car, listening to music. Finally, in the car I can be on conference calls or personal calls and not feel like I am being rude to those around me. At best, the comfort level of the train is equal to that of my car.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Yes, that is a dumb question. Most city buses have a rack for bikes. European countries also have racks on their trains. Time to get out of your little slice of suburbia, no?
In many cities, buses have bike racks on the front so you can bike and ride.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Where I live, I can take two buses and a light rail trip either way to commute, that's approximately 45 minutes to an hour to travel what amounts to 5 miles driving.
It costs $75 for one month's unlimited pass, and if I wanted to park my car at any of these train stations, there is no fee (however, there are no guards on duty so crime is very high there.)
To contrast this, my driving commute takes approximately 20 minutes, and is 5 miles each way, as mentioned. I spend, as a total since I don't keep track of miles driven for commuting vs. otherwise, $60 average per month on gasoline for all driving.
On top of this I can't go everywhere on pubtrans, it's just too poorly implemented here, especially at night. It practically shuts down entirely after 6pm in my area.
My car does cost money outside of the travel itself, though. I no longer have a payment but I did have a $14k loan that I paid in full at 3% interest (yay interest wars in 2003.) On top of that I have maintenance, approximately a minimum of $90 every 3 months for oil, tire rotation, etc. Occasionally, maybe once every two years, there is more advanced maintenance and since the car is now 6 years old I imagine I'll hit some expensive maintenance costs for things like clutch replacement (manual trans) and another set of new tires.
I drive a Subaru so the lifetime is expected to be long, I am nearing 100k miles, and as the car performs, I expect another 100k before it goes to scrap (or is banned from the road due to draconian EPA restrictions...)
So as a lifetime estimate of the car's costs, I'd say conservatively over the course of a 10 year lifespan, I'll have paid $30,000 to own and operate this car. That's fairly conservative, as I'm not including registration fees or unforseens or even accounting for the high fuel costs over the last few years. That gives my car an average per-year cost of $3000 over its anticipated lifespan.
Now for the public transportation, I don't have to buy this, though one could argue I do through taxes. The fact is, my tax costs have changed insignificantly in my entire life and the amounts for pubtrans are highly variable (a matching strategy) year to year so, as I did not include taxes in my car cost estimate I'll leave them out of this. The cost of a monthly pass has risen $10 every two years that I've used public transportation. Furthermore this does not include express buses or commuter rail. But otherwise, this is an easy estimate to make for that same 10 years, it comes to $7200 for all 10 years, $720 per year average. However, that's not quite as accurate as the vehicle cost per-year in the near term. The first year of this estimate is $480, while, this year, it will be $840, and probably more in another 2 years.
Even if you pad and make excuses, $840 vs. $3000 is a no-brainer in costs from a statistical standpoint. But how can you really compare things this way? I think this is where the real contention comes in, especially for people like myself who have horrid public transportation options. I could go boost the pubtrans numbers vastly if I considered that any non-route travel would have to be done via taxi! But still, I could triple the public transportation costs and still not meet the car costs and the car could die on me entirely, or be wrecked and cost me far more to replace it. There are many aspects to this argument.
There's the emotional one too. In a car you can drive where you want when you want, you can always go alone, you can keep things in it like tools or equipment. You can drive to the store and bring home a plasma tv in the back seats. If you have the right car, you can even move with it, or go camping.
You can do zero of these things using public transportation.
That said, on public transportation I can *SLEEP* on my way to work. I can read a book or watch a movie, or play a video game. I have no worries about traffic with assholes cutting me off, morons uselessly tailgating me, idiots running red lights to shave 2 s
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
I happen to live less than half-a-mile from the train station, which is an easy walk or bike ride. Where I work is also conveniently next to a train station (about 50 yards away). In addition, I live about 5 miles from where I work. So, I could actually bike all the way to work. The train ride is usually not more than 10-12 minutes. So, for me, all these factors make it very easy for me to decide to take the train. I am not really saving much money -- largely because I live so close to where I work.
At $2.30/gal plus insurance and oil changes, cycling saves me about $1300 a year, and that's assuming a bike overhaul, new tires, and new rain gear every year. It counts my car as paid off and never needing repairs, tolls, or parking. It also counts a Clif Bar per trip plus a stack of transit tickets for emergencies.
Because my job requires a degree of physical fitness, I'd probably need a gym membership or home exercise contraption if my commute didn't double as a workout.
This doesn't consider pollution. Or traffic frustration. Or the pure joy of getting to work under my own power, even in the snow. On the fast route, cycling is about 15 minutes longer than driving; the scenic or mega-workout routes are longer but even more fun.
I expect none, because what the proponents of mass transit always fail to tell you is how heavily subsidized all forms of it are by the government. Amtrak, for instance, has not made a profit in 40 years and just got another billion dollars in the stimulus bill. And it isn't just Amtrak... it's mass transit buses, light rails, etc, just about everywhere, except perhaps in the extremely densely populated areas like New York City. Even medium sized city groups like Minneapolis/St. Paul have to heavily subsidize fares for their light rail lines and bus lines, or no one will ride them.
If you are for mass transit, fine, but lets at least have an honest debate about it with some real numbers. Anything based on average fare prices is inherently dishonest. You must include the billions spent in taxes too.
And here's a thought that ought to settle the question about which is cheaper once and for all: if mass transit was really a better deal, wouldn't we all ride it? Could it be that the reason they have to pay us to take mass transit (by subsidizing it) is that it isn't that great, and we wouldn't naturally pick it if we were left to our own devices? So yeah, I expect there is absolutely zero benefit to mass transit, or it would have caught on in the marketplace long ago. People aren't stupid... they don't choose to do things that don't benefit them over things that do.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Well I did realize. It's another self-serving report put out by an organization that profits
from it. This is the same thing as manufacturers for sugar running ads extolling "Sugar is Life!"
or another study by Auxigro that "proves" MSG is healthy or another one put out by Rumsfelds
former outfit telling you Aspartame is sweet and safe and wont give you brain lesions.
Why do we even have to discuss corporate press release crap like this on slashdot?
I got a new midsize sedan (Hyundai Elantra) which gets 36, and it keeps the rain off of me. (It's also a company car, which is a major benefit in a city with such crappy public transportation as NOLA.)
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I mean, never ever. We understand your NYC existence, but it DOESN'T RELATE to us. We aren't naieve, we are as practical as you are.
You just don't get it on what it takes to make your lifestyle in NYC possible, not really grokking it.
There is NEVER going to be some sort of universal "mass transportation" that will work for the population in general, and our towns and cities are designed the way they are because that is what has worked.. It is not going to happen, there is never going to be any sort of huge change. There are *millions and millions* of us out here who need to carry more than a laptop and some takeout from the deli. And that's that. That's reality.
Public transpo does not work for much more than that sort of very light load. And you might not believe it, but our work, involving moving big quantities of stuff, is both useful and necessary and isn't going away. And it is a big list,and it makes your ultra urban lifestyle possible. Without us, your huge cities don't exist. Period. So just stop with telling us what we "don't understand" and stop giving us advice on transportation, it got old years ago.
Some of us live rural, some live suburban, and we are going to drive personal vehicles, because that is the only thing that works for our lifestyle, and once in awhile take public transportation, but not very often. Some of us live on farms, others work in factories (some still anyway) outside the major urban areas, some in mining some in energy related fields some in logging and so on. And we need an even higher number of folks to then work retail and services and etc in the hundreds of thousands of local communities that service these necessary and productive pursuits, and that covers a huge area of the US, much larger than the top 100 urban areas combined, where mass transpo can be somewhat practical (including your cabs).
Maybe 5% (guessing, some smallish number) of the US land area can be served well with mass transportation, the other 95% will need roads and trucks and cars. And that 5% is already at least partly covered with that sort of transportation, buses and trains, etc.
Bicycles are useful as well, I like them, I used to own and operate a bicycle shop, but they in no way manner shape or form can contribute to much in the way of bulk transportation and useful necessary work that needs to be done outside of light duty courier work and very small and very local small size delivery.
For everything else, cars and trucks for the most part, excluding railfreight, which mostly has to be tied to the road network anyway for most purposes.
You want to make a REAL difference? Lobby your bosses and companies (if you are a shareholder and get to vote on such things and make a point at shareholder conferences) to institute more telecommuting for those folks who really only sit in front off a screen and telephone and get rid of those huge wasteful SUV styled energy hog buildings that are nothing more than big dick statements for your Cxx class of overpaid and stupid offshore specialist job killing buffoons.
Stop insisting that those folks who want to live with a bit of green around them and to actually have yards travel "downtown" every day to do what they could be doing in their home office. Moving bits and bytes is a lot cheaper and would make more of an environmental impact for the positive than trying to come upo with yet another hugely expensive way to move people every day so they can then go move bits and bytes, even if they are "taking the train" or riding a bus or a bicycle. Wasteful as all get out..
THAT is a real practical solution to commuting for millions of people, building out our broadband infrastructure better, not trying to make some small scale mass transpo work across the broad land.
Broadband for the Broad Land should be the number one priority now, not these "everyone take the bus" arguments. Stop moving people AT ALL if it isn't necessary.
Oh, no. Of course mass transit often takes longer -- especially with a transfer. But instead of listening to crap on the radio, I can't begin to list the books, magazines, papers, mail, work documents, etc. I've read over decades of mass transit.
GIGO, man, GIGO. Driving isn't that sexy if you look at it that way.
To be sitting on a bus reading, on a road legally -exclusive- to buses, watching thousands of cars go by on the road that runs parallel to it.
Except, they don't go by. They crawl along in the traffic. They all look angry, and there's never more than one person to a car. Traffic that stretches for kilometres (I'm in Australia) could be solved with ten buses.
I guess people really like driving, or something.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
In Winnipeg (that forgotten pergatory somewhere between North Dakota and Siberia) parking downtown is EASILY $80-$120 or more. A monthly bus pass is $72 (before the federal tax credit, which puts the net cost closer to $62 / month).
If you use your car to drive to work, expect to pay an additional $50 / month for a beater - more if you drive something new.
Running a car is $0.15 / km or more. (My Geo Metro was $0.11 including insurance, but I never did much maintenance and it ran forever on fumes). Typical commute is 10km each way, so figure another $3 / day or $60 / month (20 working days).
So, driving is over $200 / month and the bus is $60. That $140+ / month saved. Drive a nice car into the heart of downtown where parking is closer to $200 and the price difference is higher.
I bike, and so I'm saving even more. My annual commuting costs are about $500 (that includes maintaining my bike).
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
Any car costs a lot more than the alternative in ownership, except perhaps owning a boat or plane. Old cars have very high maintenance costs that do add up. If you do the work yourself that cost is hidden but still huge (time, energy, space)
The cost of parking a car you own is huge and usually underestimated especially because often public parking is given away free at a hidden cost to all taxpayers. (non-car owners pay more than their fair share)
Public costs for roads are incomparable but I assume we are ignoring those. The whole ideology of the motor car system is to hide public costs in order to make the individual perceived cost seem affordable. Advertising deludes us into thinking we are independant when we have a car when in fact you are just as much tied to the tracks as a train.
Using a bicycle in combination with public transit can be particularly cost effective alternative, sometimes even in areas with inadequate public transit infrastructure.
However, we can all agree that public transit isn't an option where it doesn't exist (far too many paved places)
Stupidity is its own reward.
But then again, our bed is in the attic with our home office. I do own a 1999 Saturn, but I rarely drive it as we live in Chicagoland. Bikes and the RTA can take care of most of our transport needs.We also have a bike trailer, backpacks and a little red wagon for shopping trips.
"What would men be without women? Scarce, sir. Mighty scarce."- Mark Twain
As in useful time vs. useless time. I commute here in Chicago, and while time via public transit is slightly longer, I wouldn't drive if I could do it for free. The train is almost always a predictable amount of time each way, with traffic, one never knows from day to day.
Living 15 miles from the closest bus stop, down a narrow but 65MPH highway, I can't even pretend to think about using public transportation. It would take me perhaps 3 hours just to get to work. A couple of hours to walk in the grass to the bus stop, then several line transfers through the city, then walking another 3 miles from the closest bus stop to my work.
However, what about taxi versus a car? I wonder how much one could save by using a taxi daily versus a car? Of course, if everyone did this there wouldn't be enough taxis for rush hour. But that doesn't mean some of us here can't do that?
5 times 52 is 260 work days. I assume the wife keeps her van, I loose my car. We need one vehicle in a rural area. So if I can get to work for $8, which is probably low, then we are talking $4160 a year, plus some lost time for waiting. The taxi will not always be there when I am ready.
Insurance is $600/yr. Gas is around $2000/yr. Taxes around $250. Oil changes et al is around $400/yr.
It's only advantageous if I factor in a car payment.
Most important cost to account for are the marginal injuries and deaths associated with the choice of mode of transport. Most economists agree on the social cost of the average American's life being around $5 million in total costs to society, and the order of magnitude of losses for a hospitalization from an auto accident on the order of $50,000.
Traffic related deaths in the US are about 43,000 per year, or around $200 billion per year, and around 3 million hospitalized injuries, or around $150 billion in injuries. 6 million accidents cause property damage on the order of $10,000 per accident, or a mere $60 billion. So just from property damage, injury, and death, we're at around $400 billion in costs, with 100 million cars, or about an average of $4,000 per driver per year.
But we aren't concerned with the average - there's a large distribution in risk, from drunken blind 90 year olds, to car safety instructors. The key is the risk profile of the marginal driver. If you take senior citizens, high school students, college students, alcohol consumers, and habitual speeders off the streets and put them in mass transit, you cut out the riskiest drivers.
Alcohol and drug related accidents are about forty percent of the damages, so mass transit that takes people from campuses to bars and back, for example, is worth vastly more to society than mass transit that takes a middle aged commuter from home to work (assuming he isn't Irish). Mass transit between the hours of midnight and 3 am costs more per person (fewer riders per train), but they get home alive.
This is NOT proportional to the miles driven. People who have the longest commutes are typically driving through more sparsely populated areas, and thus safer, areas.
brake pads: -200 $
tires: -200 $
gas: -1000 $
wipers: -20 $
oil: -400 $
filter: -40 $
wash/clean: -300 $
other: -400 $
20-40 min power nap that leaves me fresh and ready to play with my 2 yr old when I get home: PRICELESS
Yea, sure, I was all about public transportation. Then I got mugged by a group of "youths" who beat me to a bleeding pulp. I was too naive then to really understand what happened, but after two more muggings I figured it out. Being downtown in many american cities after dark, being the white guy in the suit, makes you a target, plain and simple. Hard reality: Public transport is dangerous. If you are a white female, forget it after dark, you will get raped or killed eventually. If I kept at it, the only way I would do it is heavily armed, but then I would end up hurting someone very badly, or worse. It's just not worth it. That's what no public transportation fan wants to discuss, but it is a fact, public transport is dangerous if you are white, so whites choose to use cars instead. The only place you can say that today is anonymously on an internet forum.
This is not true in Europe and places where public transit is taken seriously. For instace Slovakia is a fairly poor country but has excellent affordable rail service. This includes single car trains that resemble busses and go into very small towns.
Land use and ownership patterns in North America make such sensible cheap solutions difficult. Change could happen here if we had the political will. However, the huge river of public funding to the private automobile (easily our largest material expenditure, traditionally tied into military-industrial) would have to be diverted. Private discretionary spending would also need to change, the $8000/yr private car cost (very conservative figure) would have to be redirected at least partially.
The good news is that public transit DOES save money overall. A lot. A simple analogy would be train vs. car: Cost of one efficient train engine pulling many cars is a lot less than -- Many cars each with their own small (impossible to be very efficient) engine often colliding with each other.
To turn the slashdot convention on it's head ---lets have a computer analogy for the car system! Imagine the inefficiency if each user on the internet had to individually do all the work of all the web,mail servers, switches, DNS, spam filtering etc. etc. Instead of now where fairly well designed data centres (with VMs etc) do a lot of the heavy lifting and can afford to concentrate expertise there.
(I'm sure someone will think of a better computer-car analogy below)
Stupidity is its own reward.
For me a car would take 3-4x more time to get where I need than biking and roughly the same amount of time compared to public transit. The choices of where you live make a big difference. I'm sure I could pay hundreds of dollars less per month in rent if I lived way out in the suburbs. But the time and energy to commute and probably need to own a car would be thousands more per month so this way I save lots of money and can afford to work part time.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Sweaty maybe but not exhausted. And it depends where you are going. I would be much less prepared for my job (physically/mentally) if I had to drive there.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Actually, 100 years ago most places in North America had worse density but better public transit. (Streetcars were everywhere!) Density is certainly a big issue. But political will is a bigger issue. If you can collectively afford to pay for many paved roads and disposable private automobiles you have more than enough to pay for some train tracks and long term light rail trains. The automobile system is more expensive overall and only has a wider reach given certain assumed subsidised costs (roads everywhere).
Stupidity is its own reward.
Public Transportation is just like anything else, it has trade-offs. For most people, the trade-offs of moving to it do not outweigh the tradeoffs of operating a private vehicle.
The government has a goddamn woody for making itself useful and it needs to stop. I wouldn't take your buses and trains unless I was desperate to get somewhere, and everyone else feels the same way.
First off, the train is free for me since I get a pass as part of my tuition.
I would have to buy a car and lets say it depreciates $1000/yr.
$100/yr for plates and registration.
12mi/day roundtrip, 300 working days, 24mpg, and $2.50/gal gas adds up to $375/yr in gas.
Lets say $500/yr for maintenance.
$800/yr for parking at work.
I'm currently renting out my home parking spot for $40/mo -> $480/yr I would lose.
Total cost: $3255/yr
The Globe "story" is a true "rip and read" (or in this case, rip and post) item.
The newspaper failed to do the math, and failed to include the enormous subsidies which the transit "authority" running the scheme up here sucks from the public revenue stream.
Case in point is an unwanted commuter rail line, built over considerable environmental and community objection, whose true cost is yet to be fathomed - but using the numbers when it was in work one organization determined that the transit authority could purchase a home closer to the city for each of the projected 1,700 riders and still have some cash left over.
The disparity between what is charged for what passes as service and the actual costs would be untenable in almost any public and certainly private business setting. But here, where the streams of revenue are always ready to be tapped, and where there are plenty of the otherwise unemployable ready and willing to loaf, we will have what somehow passes as "public transportation".
So our situation is pretty special... we moved to a pretty small condo near a Metro subway station and got rid of our second car. Our remaining car was used and bought in cash 7 years ago, and since we have a clean record and it's the only car in a family of 4, our liability insurance is like $33/mo. Since it's an old midsize, it runs up a gas / oil change bill of about $160/mo., plus occasional repairs that tear out a few hundred a year (esp. around emissions testing time :P ). If we spread the purchase cost over the expected 10 year life of the car, it's running us just under $200 a month.
So our car is pretty dirt cheap at $400/mo. all said and done. But my wife and I take turns taking public transportation to work while the other drives the kids to daycare. My transit bill still comes out to ~$120/mo., and that comes out pre-tax due to IRS incentives. My wife puts in about $50/mo. and also uses transit to go to school on the weekends.
Ostensibly we're suffering a bit to live in a small condo, but since it's near a metro station, the value didn't change much with the housing bubble.
So I daresay we have a pretty good thing going with a combination of both car and rail... we have a pretty cheap car that gives us the flexibility we need to raise kids and run errands, but can rely on transit for the humdrum commute and occasional nights out on the town. Plus I get a lot of reading done on the train, or get caught up on sleep if I've spent the evening gaming while the kids are sleeping.
Also, since we live by a Metro station, we have a few Zipcars available as a safety blanket, but haven't really had much use for them. But it's nice to know it's there.
...all of you are fixating on the USA, which is infamous for having a generally good road system, and some of the shittiest embarrassing public transit systems in the world.
Basing your "public transit won't work for me" whining on a known-bad system isn't useful. OF COURSE our transit systems won't work for you because THEY SUCK, but look around (perhaps even to, gasp, other countries) to get an idea of what COULD BE.
I don't own a car, and I live in a suburb about 20 miles out of Melbourne. My bus to the train station is a 3-minute walk from my house, and the bus takes me directly to the train station. The train into the city takes me directly to the tram stop that takes me to work. Everything I do for fun, I do in the city. I get my groceries and pizza delivered. My monthly transportation cost is a flat $170, or $2040 a year. It costs me 25 minutes extra commute each way. In exchange, I am rested when I get to work, and more importantly I'm rested when I get home. I have the energy to cook, tidy, and enjoy my evening. To drive, my annual costs would be $1000/year for insurance and registration, $8000 for fuel, maintenance and depreciation, and $3000 for parking, so I save $10,000 post-tax dollars a year not owning a car. It obviously takes planning to live a sorted life. If you buy a house in some random neighborhood, and accept a job in some random business park, your commute is going to be screwed. That's literally the trouble with "you Americans". You all drive random directions, and then you act surprised when nothing moves.
Using the site recommended in TFA, I crunched the numbers for my annual driving habits. I assumed that every single mile I drive could be replaced by public transportation. I drive a 1/2 ton truck that gets 15 MPG in the city (25 highway, which is half my driving, but I went with 15 all the way in the calculator). Seems that using public transportation instead of driving would cost me $86.40 MORE than driving. I used $3.00 a gallon for gas cost and $3 both ways for public transportation, both the actual numbers where I live.
They then went on to add, in part two (under "You Save") "If you can live with one less vehicle in your household, you would save an additional $5,576 in car ownership cost (full-covereage insurance, license, registration, taxes, depreciation and finance charge)."
Call me crazy, but I happen to know exactly what those costs, and all my other vehicle costs, are, because I keep track of em all.
That Five Grand exceeds not only my costs for insurance ($344 annually for basic plus $205 annually for package policy with $50 deductible), license ($20 annually), registration ($45 annually), taxes ($0), depreciation (at 20% per year, this year would be $196.61), and finance charges ($0), but all my repairs, oil, parking, even gasoline. In fact, I can throw in the cost of the vehicle I bought four years ago in there and have a few dimes to the good.
I made $644 worth of repairs this year, including 2 new winter tires (2 per year, new winter tires in odd years and 2 new summer in even years), and passed a safety with flying colors. Oh, and that "one less vehicle" would leave me with exactly no vehicle, unless you count the boat or motorcycle, which I don't, because I have to deal with what they call winter.
Does public transportation require I go buy a new BMW to get rid of, to make it financially feasible?
Transporter.
Or maybe he put his bike on the bus on the way to work, but a transporter would be faster.
paintball
I live and work in Seattle.
I gave up my car when I went back to college, mainly to save on insurance costs. After college was over, I didn't have any money to re-insure my car, so I kept commuting by bus. And then, I just never stopped.
Practicality & Convenience:
Now, my commute to work is just under 3 miles. It takes 10-20 minutes by car, depending on traffic, and 20 minutes by bus no matter what. Times of day with heavy traffic, the bus moves faster than general traffic, because the city has dedicated lanes in places, dedicated traffic lights in others, and various other advantages designed to keep the bus moving when traffic is gridlocked.
There are several bus routes with stops within a quarter mile of my home. From "my" stop, it's about 5 minutes to a major transit hub, where I can transfer to virtually anywhere. However, "my" buses only run at 30 minute intervals (and are synchronized in their departure times by some perverse coincidence), so I have an average of a 15 minute wait for the bus, each way. Most of the buses I transfer to at the transit hub run with much more reasonable 10 or 15 minute intervals, so I rarely have downtime waiting for a transfer. So time-wise, I don't lose much more than I would looking for parking.
I can read while I ride. Can't do that while I drive. Many of the buses have free wifi; I can post to /. while riding.
The buses run from 5 AM until to 1 AM, leaving me a 4 hour dead-zone. Obviously I can't haul large objects on the bus.
For these inconvenient occasions, I have a couple options. I can call a taxi if I'm in a hurry or the buses aren't running. For hauling things, I can rent a pickup or a van from a nearby U-Haul.
I can always just walk. And I can always (illegally) drive my uninsured car.
Financially:
Insurance on my cheap, heavily depreciated American economy car costs just over $100/mo. That price is for only liability and "uninsured motorist" coverage. I'm sure full coverage with a low deductable on a newer vehicle would be at least twice as much. There's of course gas prices, as well as regular maintenance, which can about double that price, but insurance is really the big cost (for me). I have free street parking at home, but monthly parking around most workplaces can run upwards of $100.
A monthly bus pass, on the other hand, costs $63 a month. That buys me unlimited rides anywhere in the city. On the occasions when I leave the city, I pay a highly reduced rate, usually $.50, but it can be a full dollar or more if I cross a county line. Obviously, that's not part of my daily commute.
Taxis for special trips are affordable, at a rate of $2 + 2.50/mile. For extended downtown errands, it's often cheaper to call a cab than it would be to pay for garage parking, with a car. And if I'm running late and miss my bus to work, it's only a $10 cab fare to get me there. So I can ride a taxi to work several times a month, and still come out on top versus a car.
Renting a pickup, or van, or even a box truck only costs $19.95 plus $0.70/mile. Well worth it on the very rare occasions that it is necessary; I don't have to register, insure, and store a pickup truck just for making dump runs or buying furniture. Most furniture and appliance stores offer free or highly discounted delivery, anyway.
As for these people complaining that transit doesn't work for them, because their service is lousy:
That's not a problem with transit in general, that's a problem with your local government. Get your government to fund and implement a reasonable, modern transit system, and you will find it practical and useful.
Unless you're one of the people with a 1-hour by car freeway commute. Jesus Christ, you seriously give up 2 hours of your day every day for nothing? Damn. I couldn't stand a fraction of that. ANY commute option for you is going to suck; you made that lifestyle choice already. Lobby your local government to implement express inter-city bus routes or something. Or just move to a reasonable distance from your workplace.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
My commute time to work by Train: 30 minutes including the walk to work/to home at each end.
My commute time to work by Car: (Average) 1hr15min + 15-20min to find a park.
My chargeout: $245/hr (They give me: $75 of it - and people think Lawyers have it good?).
Yearly gain in income for me?: $18,000 from catching the train instead of driving.
Also, you can't answer emails while driving - trust me.
I live in the midwest, where having a car is a necessity if you want to get anywhere in life. Literally.
In a big enough city, it might be theoretically possible to get around town on the bus or carpool to work. However, not owning a car is simply not an option here. There's no subway, train, or taxicab service running 50 miles out to auntie's home. There are no grocery stores and other necessary businesses within walking or biking distance of most residential areas.
It's nice that some people are finally thinking about putting some high-speed rail in the U.S. (thanks, auto industry, for setting us back about 60 years on that, btw), but due to the way the country is designed, that's not going to reduce the need for every single person to own a car in America. It's only going to reduce the need for air travel.
Hi!
Some considerations, car cost include:
-) value amortization. Any given car has a maximum lifetime in years and miles.
-) maintenance costs.
-) repair costs.
-) insurance costs.
-) parking costs.
-) tolls, fees, taxes.
-) gas costs.
Usually, it naturally depends upon what car you drive, your circumstances, local price levels and so on, gas costs are rather a small part of the total cost.
That are now European (Austrian/German which differ somewhat again) costs, but for typical new cars, gas costs where less than 20% of the total even last year where even Diesel was costing near two USD per liter (not gallon).
Another indication is how much the tax authorities pay per km: 0.30EUR per km. Now on my Passat station wagon, I'm needing at most 0,06EUR for the gasoline per km. So the tax office are accepting that 4 times the gas costs as other costs, and it's commonly known that you can operate at best a really small, really cheap car on the costs the tax office reinburses.
So assuming German costs: 15000miles are 24000km => 7200EUR ~ 9.6USD, and that's a minimum for a really small frugal car based on the tax authority rate. A Passat station wagon would be more than double this.
So public commuting is cheaper, and you gain (at least for long distance commuting) time to sleep/read/work on the train. You loose the time with your family.
The crux of this is, that in many places (and in almost the whole of North America I guess from my small sample of examples), it's not really feasible to commute by public transportation: direct connections (what's the point of commuting 2 hours by train for a 20 minute drive), around the hour sensible intervals (it might be ok to have to plan to get a specific train say between midnight and 5am. But all the other times I should expect that I can get to the station and hop on the next train without much delay), and so on.
yacc
I don't work full time and my part time job is just down the road from me, so I drive there, but I go to university too.
I drive 10 Km to a shopping center and catch a bus that goes direct to uni. Petrol costs me a little under a dollar each way and the bus costs $1.16 each way, so it costs me $4 round trip.
If I were to drive I'd have to pay around $3-4 in petrol along with $4 for the cheapest daily parking at uni (there are multiple zones).
Driving in the middle of the day would take me about 30 mins (including parking), while driving to the bus takes 15 mins and then 20 mins on the bus, plus up to 10 mins of waiting, so I'd save a bit of time driving in. However, in peak hour, driving in or home would take anywhere between 40 mins to an hour and the bus would take 5 or 10 mins more (it uses bus only lanes and a special "Busway"). When an upgrade to the Busway is completed hopefully this year or early next then the bus will probably take less time than driving in off peak as well as peak, as well as saving me $4 a day.
I have been using my bicycle to commute to work for >15 years, in different cities and even different countries (of Europe) with a two year period in between were I was forced to use a car. It is doable if you make this the most important criteria when selecting your job and home. Maybe I don't get the best places to live because of that limitation (the jobs were always there first because I moved after switching jobs), but so far I have never lived in a hovel either. ;-)
Of course I am lucky in that I have never had a problem finding a job, my wife can just move with me and we don't have any children to take into account here.
The money I saved with not having to buy and maintain a car:
10000 Euros for buying a cheap (new) car every 5-8 years on average
I don't know the exact numbers for the following since I never paid it:
100 Euros per month for insurance
300 Euros per year for maintenance
100 Euros per year in taxes
50 Euros per week for fuel
20 Euros per month for parking fees
(I guess I missed something here)
On the downside I must rent a car whenever I want to go somewhere that is not or difficult to reach by public transport, which is about once a month and costs around 40 Euros per day + fuel. There are also some inconveniences such as having to carry (or push on my bike *1) home crates with beverages (beer, water) from a shop nearby instead of buying it further away where it might be cheaper and then carrying it from the car to my home.
But overall I like it that way.
(*1 This earns me quite a few astonished looks every time I do it with two crates of water (24 1 litre bottles) on my bike's carrier)
I take the Train (2 of them) and save about $230 a month over taking the car, and that includes buying the (annual) bus pass...
made by government officials. They don't realize that normal commuters don't have chauffeur driven BMWs. I usually hear estimates around 45-75 cents per mile for operating costs for a typical vehicle including all costs (insurance, repair, initial purchase, gas).
to jump the gates at my local subway station(s) and the fact that I can walk there in about 10 minutes, I'd save a good bit of money. I did it for all my teenage years and still do it sometimes.
Sometimes having a car it's just a habit, because you could live well without it or by just renting it during week ends. Of course not every place is the same and not everyone live in the same condition, there are a lot of people for who having a car is a need because there isn't a public transportation system, work is too far from home etc. etc. but there are a lot of people too who are just too damn lazy or too damn stubborn to get rid of their car while in fact they could ease a lot their life by just using public transportation. Do not forget also that for many people having a car is a status symbol.
Assuming that you hardly ever need a car (grocery shopping, parent-teacher conferences, ...), so that you do not own one, that you have been fortunate to be able to work close enough to home or live close enough to work, that you live in some place where drivers actually see cyclists as something other than targets (if they see them at all), where there's a place to secure a bike wherever you need to go on one, and that either the commute times are similar to driving or the extra time on the bicycle doesn't cut into having a life, then you may well have a point that riding is the best choice for you. Very few of us are in those circumstances.
Further, what's the cost of two showers per day (one to be tolerable at work and one to be tolerable at home), 'specially in the Southwestern US which is in the umpteenth year of drought?
If you can't do that then don't claim to live in the real world.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Any other country you care to name invests heavily in public transport.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you expect to change jobs frequently don't buy, rent.
If you intend to be in a job for the long run, you can buy something close by after a couple of years.
There are no certainties of course, but you can make educated guesses.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I know My time is money and taking the Train/Bus would make a 18 minute commute into a 3 hour commute and would only save me about 30$ a year at these gas prices, not to mention the nearest bus stop to my home is roughly 13km away! makes it totally pointless to take mass transit for me cause I have to go better than one third of the distance just to get to the bus! so yeah Mass transit is out besides I don't want Pig Flu! and all those dirty Poor drunkards are on the bus...In their rages and stinking the place up with their vomit and not having showered or bathed in weeks let alone days GROSS
If each person can save between 8,000 to 12,000 USD per year with an average income of around 24,000 USD, more than 50% of income in the US is currently being spent on transportation!
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
Driving a 1986 Dihatsu Charade - 3 cylinders of throbbing powaaa! $20 petrol gets me about 350 kilometres. Catching the bus to work (about a 5Km trip) costs $2.90. Conclusion: Queensland Transport is a rip-off.
The following events took place over the course of a year or so.
I used to bike to work - that is - until my employer banned biking to work because of "safety." See, they have no bike racks, and people were tying up their bikes to fences, signs, or whatever else they could, or just stashing their bikes in their cubes, which are plenty big enough. This was deemed a safety hazard, so one day, while everyone was working, they had a contractor come in and cut all the bikes loose and haul them away... while everyone was working... I had to take a taxi to the depot to get my bike back.
So, I just parked one of my cars at the office that had a locking bike rack on the roof. That way, I could ride to work, then put the bike on the roof of my car for security. Since I have 4 bike racks on the roof, I allowed 3 of my co-workers to also put their bikes on the roof of my car.
Well, my employer figured out we were doing this, and decided that what we were doing was "unfair." They passed a new rule about leaving vehicles unattended in the parking lot and towed my car. Another ride to the depot, and $250 to get my car out of impound.
SO... I made arrangements with the Veterinary Hospital across the street to allow us to park our bikes on their bike racks outside. They had plenty of them - space for about 20 bikes. Everything went great for about a week. Then, my employer again caught wind of how we were managing to bike to work, and suddenly there was a police car parked on the side of the road one morning. When I arrived at the Vet's office and went to cross the street to my office, I was ticketed for jaywalking. My employer had filed a complaint about pedestrians jaywalking and was concerned about liability (what if someone were hit by a car while trying to get to the office?). It's 1/2 mile to the nearest intersection where there is a crosswalk - for a 1 mile total walk to the office from the Vet's office across the street.
So, out of protest, we all decided we'd start getting to work at the same time and walk together the 1 mile. After a week of that, the police stopped coming. Although we thought we had it figured out, little did we know that our employer had sent someone to the local legislature to petition them about "dangerous intersections." They went so far as to commission a study about how the roads around our office complex were poorly designed and generally unsafe for pedestrians, specifically, they said the crosswalk we all used was unsafe.
We couldn't believe it when the legislature agreed and spent $100,000 to remove the crosswalk from the intersection. They took down the lights, put up new ones (without pedestrian signals) and installed "No Pedestrian Traffic" signs at the intersection.
While they were doing this, they also petitioned the zoning board to outlaw bike racks being outside because they are an "eyesore" and "a detriment to the beauty of the public grounds." The zoning board of course agreed, given our employer is a behemoth multinational corporation and pays lots of taxes and has lots of jobs in the area. The Vet hospital was forced to remove their bike racks after having been fined $1,000 by the township the morning after the zoning law was passed. Seriously, the measure passed at 7pm on a Thursday night and, by the Vet's account, the township code enforcement officer was waiting at the Vet's office the next morning for him to arrive to serve the citation. ...
so, after all this, you're probably wondering why our employer is such a bitch about riding to work. Well, it's because we are in the oil and gas industry, and it makes us look like we're not fully supporting our customers if we don't drive to work. Fun, huh?
I think one problem with all this analysis is the fact that if you really want public transit to be a viable option, people have to live in cities with where much of the is located in a small area such as New York City, Chicago, Boston, etc.
However, that means you have to live in cities approaching the population density of Manhattan or Hong Kong for public transit to be a true alternative to the automobile. In Hong Kong, most people can commute to work without needing a car, since the population density can support subway (MTR on Hong Kong/Kowloon side), commuter rail (KCR on Kowloon/New Territories side), light rail (New Territories side), trams (Hong Kong side), buses, minibuses and taxis.
Given the American penchant for disliking living in very high-density environments, small wonder why public transit is not viewed positively in the USA outside of a few big cities.
I own a car, but I bike to work. I don't have to pay for parking, and despite having a deskbound job I don't get winded running up stairs any more.
The money saved is just gravy.
--saint
Just to park my car at home and at work would cost me $2400 a year. That's not including car insurance, maintaince, or gas.
I own a car, but it's just not affordable to have one here, so it's parked at my parent's home and they use it.
I'm an American studying at a university in Europe, and though I normally am ecstatic about the extensive public transportation network built up here in Europe, sometimes it ends up being more expensive traveling that way rather than via car.
Last week I was in the northern part of the Netherlands and had to travel to Vienna to meet some friends. Due to the awkward location of the city where I was (Groningen), there were no well-connected public transportation hubs nearby. I booked a flight out of Düsseldorf, with the only alternative having been a more expensive (and earlier) one out of Amsterdam.
Fortunately, as the story goes, I missed the appropriate train out of Groningen, which would have gone well south and possibly somewhat west in the Netherlands, before changing several trains and heading east to Düsseldorf.
I was traveling with a friend who suggested we rent a car, once we had missed the train. The car cost us 45â plus however much diesel to fill it back up (probably 20-30â) and got us there in about two and a half hours, while the train would have taken at least an hour longer and would have cost us around 55â per ticket--a savings for the two of us of around 40â.
Cross-apply that example to people who "live" in one city but work during the week in another (the father of a family I know in Germany, for example, lives in an apartment in Brussels during the week and returns home to Bonn during the weekend). If I worked in Düsseldorf but wanted to continue living in my hometown of Groningen, it would be nearly even for me simply to rent a car every Friday evening and Sunday afternoon and drive to the respective place than spend more time and money riding the train between the two cities.
Maybe this example is just relevant for the Nederlandse Spoorweg (Dutch Railways), which has struck me as providing only mediocre service at a high price with middling connectivity. The Deutsche Bahn and Ã-BB haven't disappointed me much (yet)--I seem to get good, punctual service at a somewhat reasonable (or manageable) price.
I was just amazed that it took less time and MONEY (most of all) for me to rent a car in Europe than it was to take the train between the two ciites.
I know my situation in Atlanta is that if you work in downtown, the "extra" time (the time you could be dosing or getting work done or relaxing) taking mass transit is well worth avoiding the aggravation trying to drive through downtown or midtown and paying through the nose for parking. Plus to can get a local govt. rebate for taking mass transit.
On the other hand, if your job is not intown Atlanta, or you live beyond the mass transit systems, you don't have a real choice but to drive and face the daily traffic nightmare.
The problem with cars are that, in over 95% of America, it is the only viable option for transporation. But I think it would be stupid to the extreme not to consider mass transit or carpooling for the daily commute to see if it is possible or feasible.
To drive to work would cost me $4 in gas ($2/gallon) and $6 for parking 8 blocks away. If I wanted to park next door it would cost me $20 per day.
By contrast, I ride the bus for $5/day and I get to sleep or read during that commute time.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Work distance RT = 22 mi.
Gas cost = $2.36 per gal.
Motorcycle MPG = 52 MPG
Motorcycle insurance $330 per yr / 365 days = $0.904109589
Bus Round trip = $3.50
So $2.36 per gal. / 52 MPG = $0.045384615 per mi * 22 mi. = $0.99846153 gas cost per RT + $0.904109589 insurance = $1.902571119 per trip.
So $3.50 - $1.902571119 = $1.597428881 LOSS riding public transportation.
The only advantage is I can read while on the train. For a 4 wheeled vechile it work out about the same due to parking fees and lower MPG. Still there isn't much of a savings.
Its strange that you don't hear promoting the riding of motorcycles and motor scooters to save money and gas. I save around $200.00 per month just on gas riding a bike instead of a car. Plus insurance is cheaper.
I would "expect" to save at least 50% of what I spend in traveling in a car (driving, non-carpool).
Unfortunately, that's not the reality.
Where I live, in the Boston metro area, the MBTA is rumored to be hiking their fees soon.
Recently, I had an accident (their fault!) and was sans a vehicle for about 3 months or so. I compared the fees of my daily trips. At the end, I tallied them up and was shocked to find that I wasn't really saving ANY money at all.
It's a double-edged sword of sorts. It requires a significant amount of money to upkeep any transportation system. That money has to come from somewhere. Unfortunately for the commuters, a chunk comes from our fees.
I don't really see any way to easily resolve it, either. I do like the aspect of public transportation and if it were better designed in my area, I would take it. One of the problems is timing: 40mins of driving vs about 1 hour 25mins taking the MBTA (which includes connections in between and a not-so-flexible schedule).
In this case "do the math" applies to living circumstances, too.
Nearly everybody gets this wrong. Depreciation is primarily a fixed cost (due to time) rather than a variable cost (due to miles); consider how much difference you get on a 5 year old car driven the average of 12,000 miles per year versus, say, 6,000 miles per year. The difference in the value of the car at that point is negligible compared to the amount of value you lost due to the 5 years of time you had the car. http://mdahmus.monkeysystems.com/blog/archives/000440.html
I consider commuting to be billable time to the client so I make money no matter how I get there or the "costs" to do so. I always come out ahead.
I'm a satanic clam.
Driving in traffic for 45 minutes twice each day causes stress, which is a leading cause of heart disease, which is a leading cause of death. Driving is a little cheaper for day to day expense of gas and tolls, but probably a wash if I considered mileage and the depreciation of the car. But I'm definitely a lot less stressed out after an hour on the train than 45 minutes of rush hour traffic.
I live in Reston VA. (Suburbs outside of DC). The Metro works nicely for me, there is a park & ride that has an express bus straight to the Metro station. (I could ride a bike there, but I work in a suit & tie every day). It makes the commute about 15 min longer, but far more enjoyable. Parking (alone) would run me $24/day. For weekday commuting, train & bus wins by a long shot.
In addition, the last two firms I've worked for have offered a private bus from the train straight to the office. I think this should be a required benefit for companies that call themselves "green".
The city of Reston is great about having sidewalks and paths. Many of them do not run next to the road and provide a great way to walk places on the weekend without sucking down exhaust fumes. I hated suburban living before I moved here, but I think they really provide the best of both worlds.
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MA area transit (trains, buses, subway) are in spite of local opinion to the contrary less than most of the rest of the country. I lived in Boston for ten years and never needed a car! Of course, additional weight against Mass as a baseline is the high cost of auto insurance. My first car purchased in 1985 cost $1,400 per year to insure.
At least 3 drivers per day actively try to kill me while commuting, or maybe it just looks that way.
Factor in the life savings. If I could take public transportation to work I would, even with all the angry people. At least on a train they can't run you off the road or cut off a semi, and cause it to jackknife into me.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Population density? yes, it matters, but the culture matters too!
Portland Oregon has had public transit (light rail and bus system) for almost the past century. It's a sprawl of a metropolis, and to me, it has a very different feel than most other cities.
People who live there grew up with it, and don't mind taking a hop on the bus for groceries or taking the light rail to the airport, and is also host to one of the -few- debt-free public transport systems in the US (since so many others here look at tax assistance as free money).
By the way, Portland has a population density of 1,655.31/kmÂ, less than the population density of Sacremento quoted nearby.
The average person in Portland (at least to me, this is just an observation) is much more social and much more relaxed compared to the typical suburbanite.
Population density might matter, but the culture matters too! If people in a town chose to use it, it would grow.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
I think the OP wildly underestimates the cost of driving a car, though they are not alone. Regular maintenance and repairs are expensive, and the more you drive the more quickly and more frequently you need them. Moreover, the cost of purchasing a car is absolutely a valid consideration - the more you drive the more quickly you come to the point of needing to buy yet another car, and they aren't cheap. Moreover, people who drive tend to consider the car more important then those that take public transport, and so they're likely to spend more on a more expensive car, perhaps in an effort to make their daily commute more palatable.
Since I started taking the train and bus to work each day (occasionally still driving), the miles I've put on my car (and the maintenance) has dropped massively. Plus I know long care what I'm driving. I'm driving an ugly beige 1997 Ford Escort and it does the trick! With the limited miles I'm putting on it, and the limited needs I have for it, I hope to be able to get another 5 years or more out of the car, and I can't say that it is working perfectly. When it's done for I'll pick up a cheap, probably ugly, used car that no daily-driver would set foot in. I don't care!
I'm fortunate in having a pretty nearby train station, although where I'm not lucky is in the need to connect with a bus. The actual ride on the bus isn't so bad, it's getting the two schedules to mesh that is a problem. That limits my choices dramatically. We need a ton more money to be put into public transportion so that the pain of connections goes away. If buses I could take arrived at the train station/work every 15 minutes during rush hours, and every 30 minutes at other times, it would be *so* much better . Plus with added convenience and a shortened commute, more people might choose to take public transportation instead of driving. Fewer cars on the road also means lower road and facility maintenance, less pollution, etc.
--- What?
I know DC was mentioned earlier, and I think the Metro system is fairly adequate, but the catch is that if you live within reasonable walking distance to a Metro, you pay between $200 and $300 more per month for your apartment than similar accommodations over a mile from the nearest Metro station.
Everyone's situation will be a little different, but here's how the cost of driving breaks down:
For most people, these expenses will be after-tax expenses. Commuting daily on public transit does not affect the car payment. However:
On top of those savings:
As an end result, my car costs went from $530/mo to $310/mo; my transit cost is only $60/mo, and that's pre-tax. I save $2000/yr, and my commute is relaxing, productive time instead of a stressful, all-consuming drive. It's not $12k, but it's still a significant savings.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Cycling is bar far the best way to commute. In dense traffic situations, its as fast or faster than driving and way faster than taking transit. Here is an informal race to demonstrate the point: http://www.calgaryherald.com/Cyclist+beats+motorist+race+work+downtown/1533758/story.html And it makes double use of your time. You get exercise while commuting to work. And it saves money. A lot of it. $460 per month in parking fees alone in the example above.
I live in Toronto and I don't have a car. I live midtown and use the public transit to go to work. Here is what I pay monthly for transportation: - public transit pass - 109$ - 2-3 times a month I rent a car or use services like autoshare.com for shopping - 100-170$ Total: 209-279$ If I owned a car, I would pay per month: - approx. 300$ for insurance (I don't have an insurance hostory in North America and the premium will be ridiculous) - 85$ for parking in the building where I live So far 385$ just for having the car and not driving it ;-))
- If I use the car to go to work, that will be another 120-200$ monthly for parking at work
- Gas, repairs, maintenance + the cost of the car itself are all extra.
In my case it does not make any sense to have a car. That's because I live and work in a city with a relatively developed public transit system.
Now, if I moved to a suburb, the situation would be very different. Then the cost of commute might not even be considered as driving would be my only option.
The argument that supposedly American suburbs aren't conducive to a rail system are very weak. Have you been to Japan. Japanese cities may be dense but the sprawl extends for miles and miles. And the suburbs extend out beyond that in every direction.
The average Japanese commute is in the range of 70 minutes which is more than double the average American commute. Many people live closer to central urban areas, but many more live out in the suburbs and ride the train in.
Several times, I've ridden the train from one end of the Tokyo metropolitan area, closer to the suburbs of Yokohama out to the Narita airport area. Over the 2 hour ride you're pretty much passing through densely populated areas. And this level of development pretty much extends in a massive circle around Tokyo bay. I've said it many times, Americans have little comprehension of what massive over-development is.
If anything, it should be more difficult to establish rail lines in a nation like Japan because of the all the heavily developed areas these lines have to cut through. And yet they manage it.
Has anyone taken a look at rail maps of Japan? Those trains go over where. People give directions to where they live according to train stations. Around Tokyo, and probably many other Japanese cities, you're unlikely to be further than a 20-30 minute walk from a train station. And it also helps that the trains are extremely punctual. About the only thing that causes a train delay is the occasional suicide. Compare that to here in the Northeast US where we're stuck with a single rail line where the trains are constantly late and they routinely pull down the overhead power lines.
I can't speak for China or South Korea, but in Taiwan the government has invested heavily in expanding the subway system in Taipei and they already have a decent rail system which services more outlying areas. From what I've been told, however, China and South Korea seem to have similarly extensive rail systems. In addition to that Taiwanese cities do have have a decent bus system which unfortunately does get bogged down in heavy traffic. But at least they run buses every 5 to 10 minutes depending on the line.
This is not to say they don't own cars, because in Taipei, for example, there apparently are something like 2 cars for every officially designated parking spot. And a lot of people still drive. But the important thing is that the government is serious about providing good public transportation. And perhaps, more importantly, the people embrace it.
I think that is the biggest problem in the US. Nothing can get done because of either residents who don't want anything to change in their neighborhood or environmentalists who seem intent on hindering progress on any level.
The solution isn't just building out the rail system, but improving the highway infrastructure as well. For as good as Japan's rail system is, they've got an excellent and extensive highway system as well.
But again, whereas in Asia they generally embrace development, in the US there are constantly efforts to block everything. It's kind of pathetic, actually. And I'm not optimistic that things will change because it seems to be more of a cultural problem.
I live in Boston proper, and can provide some very solid numbers to back up the study's claims. Granted, it is just one man's example, but I don't think it's too far off of the norm. I must point out that I live IN THE CITY, not a suburb. I also don't have kids, or parents that require care. But Boston is a great example due to the HUGE number of city dwellers that use their cars to get from one point in the city (home) to another point (work) every day, even though there is viable public transit.
Another caveat is the Boston proper has an incredibly high insurance rate, and I had a high theft car, and liked to get caught speeding...
Two years ago, my car was stolen. I decided not to replace it, since I could just take the bus/train. I still had 2 years left to pay on it (insurance pay out was more than enough to cover it):
$350 for car payments
$300 for insurance
$125 for parking AT HOME
$75 for fuel
$10 for oil
$10,320 per year spent on car before repairs/tires/speeding tickets/car value dropping/excise tax/registration/inspection/parking tickets/tolls
I had company provided parking, so am not including that, but can attest to the $460 per month sited in the article being a reasonably good rate. I would assume the average is a bit higher, but that is just from briefly looking around, not actually paying it.
Now I have a link pass (subway/bus). Those cost $59 per month, but my company covers $50 of that. So monthly cost of public transit:
$9 for pass
$81 per year
Savings of $10,239 per year.
Now, for full disclosure, my wife and I spend about $100 per month for a ZipCar. I also spend about $100 per month on cab rides home from the bar. I can also admit to spending a little bit more money at the bar, because I don't have to drive home now! But I will chalk those differences up to the parking at work fees that I didn't have to include. I also read a LOT more now. I feel like I'm a part of the city. I have more opportunity to stop and take pictures. I have a good half mile walk every morning before entering the office. And I can take time to watch pretty ladies without worrying that I'm going to crash my car.
That being said, I really miss my car. If anyone has a chance to own an Acura Intgera Type R, I highly recommend it.
From the APTA report:
"
The cost of driving is calculated using the 2009 AAA average cost of driving formula. AAA cost of driving formula is based on variable costs and fixed costs. The variable costs include the cost of gas, maintenance and tires. The fixed costs include insurance, license registration, depreciation and finance charges. The comparison also uses the average mileage of a mid-size auto at 23.4 miles per gallon and the price for self-serve regular unleaded as recorded by AAA on May 5 at $2.079 per gallon. The analysis also assumes that a person will drive an average of 15,000 miles per year. The savings assume a household gives up one car.
In determining the cost of parking, APTA uses the data from the 2008 Colliers International Parking Rate Study for monthly unreserved parking rates for the United States.
To calculate your individual savings with or without car ownership, go to www.publictransportation.org.
"
Heavily subsidized? Are you being serious?
Please compare the tax money that goes into the road system with the tax money that goes to trains.
"... but lets at least have an honest debate about it with some real numbers. ... . You must include the billions spent in taxes too."
Exactly. Compare with the tax money spent for the road system.
If I take public transit, my 30 minute commute to work becomes 1.5-2 hours. Let's assume a ridiculously low $20/hour value on an hour of the average person's time. 2 hours/day lost * 5 days/week * 50 weeks/year * $20/hour = $10,000 on top of what public transit advocates admit in their costs.
First off, in the DC metropolitan area we have it worst than most. The Metro rail is pricey for any reasonable distance, and it is unreliable in terms of when the train will come and whether it will be delayed along the way. More to the point, the cost of using a train for me personally would be that I would lose my job. I live in northern Virginia and work in Columbia, Maryland. It's a 40 mile commute. I took on this job because it was too good an offer to pass even with the long drive. If I had to rely on the train I wouldn't be able to have this job at all. There are no trains that could take me directly there, and I would have to devote HOURS of my day to travel if I wanted to go from bus to train to bus, especially considering there would necessarily be train switches in the middle. I'm not even sure a feasible combination of trains and buses would be possible. So I save time and money by not taking the train, and I also make more money by having a better job than I would be able to get to by train.
I think this wonderfully illustrates why subway systems don't often venture to far beyond major city limits. I live just north of the last stop of a subway to a major metropolitan area and I drive to work every day. To take the subway, with all of it's stops and congestion, would take me twice as long to get to work everyday... not to mention the annoying transfer of trains half-way through the commute. Until transit via train can be more convenient than driving, I see no reason to shell out for the parking pass once a month and "take advantage" of mass transit.
So, the point being, subway/train systems have a natural limiting factor on them. Place too many stops on them, and they become cumbersome for those outside of city limits to use. Place too few stops on them and nobody wants to use them because of the inconvenience to get to one. It's a balancing act to be sure in order to extend the track to it's maximum usefulness. It is, ultimately, a severe limiting factor though, as demonstrated by my own situation.
I drive 7.5 miles each way to work in Houston, in an eleven year old car with 160,000 miles on it. It takes about 25 minutes each way in rush hour, and I don't use a freeway or a toll road (there is a toll road, but it takes just as long and costs more). My direct operating cost is mostly fuel. I get 28 miles per gallon on average, so I use about half a gallon (currently about $1) per day. Parking is free.
If I travelled by bus, it would cost $1.50 each way, and would take about an hour (not including time waiting where I change buses), not counting the time to walk the half mile from my house to the bus stop, and the mile from the bus stop at the other end to the office.
Not only does the bus cost more than twice as much, but the fares only cover about 25% of the cost of providing the service: the rest is paid by local sales taxes.
The walking part would be good for me, no doubt, but for six months of the year the temperature and the humidity tend to be both over ninety, even when it doesn't rain. I'd need to change clothes and shower when I got to the office.
I live in LA. I spend as much in gas as I would on a montly metrolink pass. Also my 3 hour daily commute would go up to around 6 hours.
Not to mention needing to wait for my roommate to come pick me up 2-3 times a week after work holds me late and I miss my bus/train.
I'd be happy to take public transit if it saved me anything.
A little help for the OP, quoted directly from the article:
"APTA then compares the average monthly transit fare to the average cost of driving. The cost of driving is calculated using the 2009 AAA average cost of driving formula."
And here is a link to the appropriate AAA publication:
http://www.aaaexchange.com/Assets/Files/200948913570.DrivingCosts2009.pdf
APTA's study is skewed as it assumes if you ride public transportation, you don't own a car and won't need to pay for insurance or maintenance on the car anyways. While that may be true in homes where your spouse needs a car as well (for work, errands, whatever), most single people that use public transportation I imagine keep their car.
Despite that, it is still a huge savings in many areas.
San Jose -> San Francisco (Financial District) means $200/mo for caltrain+muni pass + ~$50/mo for gas to the train station.
Or ~$300/mo gas + ~$300/mo parking + additional maintenance and insurance costs to drive.
Ignoring maintenance and insurance, that is still a savings of ~$4200/year.
Real savings I imagine are somewhere in between that number and APTA's claim of $11k/year.
I pay exactly $81/month for a Metrocard in NYC, and can get anywhere in the city with that. So my total costs are about $972/year.
I don't own a car, or have a license.
Move to Winnipeg - seriously.
Your truck is $1900 / year to insure to drive to work in the city with all the options you can throw at (and that is before good driving discounts). (http://www.mpi.mb.ca/Irc/intro.asp)
Not to mention the real estate difference means you can probably sell you Calgary house and buy a much nicer house in a better neighborhood for cash.
We may never boom, but we don't bust either.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
I was talking to someone about making society better and he replied, "fuck off with your startrek ideas."
I have a 400cc scooter and commuting is easy. No traffic jams, spends very little gas, I can park it anywhere. They even let me park it in the office underground parking that's reserved for directors because I can park it behind a pillar where no car fits in.
I have enough room for my laptop and a few other things I may need to carry. I even carry my groceries from the supermarket in it.
It's a bit worse in the winter but better thinking, when it rains the traffic jams are a lot worse. I almost feel pity for the poor jerks inside their cages (cars), stopped in the middle of the highway. They feel warm and dry but will be 1 hour late for work because it's raining and the roads are all blocked. I even get less wet than the caged guys, because they have to park 1Km away from the office and walk in the rain. I just ride with a waterproof suit over my clothes, and since I park indoors, I take the suit off and there I am, dry and warm.
I have a car, only use it on weekends to go out with the family.
It is easy to look at an individual, and say that costs are lower, especially if you doctor the numbers to assume everyone lives in New York City with high parking rates.
But that is only looking at part of the picture.
A fair comparison would included taxes paid to the city and state, and would include an assessment of what would happen if a majority of individuals started using public transportation for their given locale.
One must include car parking costs for park-and-ride lots, because not everyone can walk to a train station or bus stop.
One must include additional travel time costs, because public transportation is often slower than direct travel via car.
I'm not arguing for, or against, public transportation.
I only ask for a fair comparison.
I live 50 minutes outside of Boston (no traffic) and commute everyday into Boston for work. These are the costs:
Drive:
70 miles (round trip)
Average of 20 mpg (Maxima) due in part to traffic
Cost of gas $2.10
Gas Costs per day: $7.35
Tolls (round trip): $5.00
Parking:
Option A (more convenient): $25 per day
Option B (10 minute walk): $12 per day
37.35-
Total cost of driving per day:
With the best parking: $37.35
With average parking: $24.35
Commuter Rail:
Monthly train pass: $235 per month or $11.75 per day
Daily train pass: $14.50 (round trip)
Parking: $4.00 per day
Gas costs: negligible
Total cost of Public Transportation per day:
With Monthly train pass: $15.75
With Daily train pass: $18.50
Public Transportation Savings:
Monthly train pass vs Best parking:
Daily: $21.60
Yearly: $5,616
However, if I take the train it's a 10 minute walk to work, so this best compares to the cheaper parking.
Monthly train pass vs Cheaper (and always available) parking:
Daily: $8.60
Yearly: $2,236
If I don't buy a monthly train pass and instead go for daily (which allows me to have the option of driving when I want to), these are the savings
Daily train pass vs Best parking:
Daily: $18.85
Yearly: $4,901
Daily train pass vs Cheaper (and always available) parking:
Daily: $5.85
Yearly: $1,521
In reality, I almost always take the cheaper parking and since I sometimes drive in, I buy a daily train pass when I need it rather than a monthly...so my actual savings tends to be $1,521 per year.
However...even in the best case scenario the most I could save is $5,616 per year...I have no idea where this article could get $12,600 per year. Unless they're adding in depreciation for the car, but even still...your car depreciates regardless...I don't think commuting would make it depreciate an extra $6,894 per year
I rather doubt anyone will be swayed by these findings. First, there's no special insights here into hidden costs of driving, and second we all have a good idea how much commuting costs, both ways. Who hasn't spent time while sitting in traffic figuring this out? Who didn't think this through before they bought a house or rented an apartment? There are simple ways to make huge progress on the issues of traffic congestion and pollution, but they're not all politically palatable. My own view is we should stop letting people deduct their mortgage insurance payments (and I have a mortgage). You really need to live on a half acre plot, fine. Just don't make me subsidize it. Notice, also, that the story is focused on the gain from one person switching. This ignores the network effect. If everyone around here used the train, it would make sense to have a denser network. That, in turn would lower the relative value of owning a car.
Your average new car costs very roughly $3000 a year in depreciation. It may be less if you have a cheap japanese model, and much more if you have a American SUV. A car is very expensive compared to taking trains when you factor in depreciation and insurance.
With a 20-year-old Toyota truck, depreciation is a non-thing. Saps buy new cars; people with an ounce of financial sense buy a recent-model used car in good shape and thank the sap who paid the steep first couple of years of depreciation.
As for improvements in cars, I have to laugh at the idiots in Detroit and elsewhere who advertise "five models which get over 30 mpg." When I gave up my 86 Toyota Corolla LE with fifteen years and 220K miles on it, it was still getting 33 mpg. And that was not on the flats of Kansas. I lived at 600 feet, went to sea level, then over a 900 foot grade to get to work 28 miles away, again at sea level. I basically can't go anywhere from home that doesn't involve lots of hillclimbing.
By he way, neither vehicle has ever failed a California smog test. In fact they come out well below emissions limits every time.
Buying a car can cost you in the thousands range. Maintaining the vehicle such as, oil change, spark plugs, filters, etc can be like in the 100's range per year. Add fuel costs too. Then add the costs of having problems with your car. A freaking alternator can cost like $40- $60. A tire in the other hand costs betwee $70-$200 and that is just one freaking tire. Buy 4 tires if they all have worn treads and you are paying $200-400+ bucks These numbers are like if you can fix the car yourself without paying the technicians. If you take your vehicle for repair, then it's going to cost more. Then add what if your car doesn't start on the highway. Your going to face a $200-$300 towing fee plus extra to fix the car. Now taking a Public transportation, you don't need to worry about fuel running out, changing tires, worrying about the alternator going bad, or getting the vehicle robbed. On one hand, you would buy a car and face with all the costs of maintenance and fuel costs? or on the other hand, would you just take a train or bus and sit relax and read Slashdot on your notebook?
I rode the Chicago Metra 40 miles from my home on the Fox River to the Loop for 18 months, every week day. To drive that, getting 25mpg + a minimum of $15 / day parking + wear and tear on the car, would have cost me about $60 USD per day - or $1500 per year. The Metra cost me about $125 / month + $2 per day for parking (and $105 per month was tax deductible - so total was net about $75 / month) - or (after deductions) about $1400-1500 per year. So, it's a wash, except for the intangible aspects of less stress, less pollution, lower insurance rates, the ability to work or visit with people on the train. Heck, that's how I met my lawyer and now bluegrass band partner! That's how I found out about Sparx Enterprise Architect for UML modeling and system design, and met a lot of really nice people when I was new to this area. So, when I have to go into Chicago for business, I usually take the train. It's just as fast as driving and lets me off right by the Loop within walking distance of the Options Exchange where I do some consulting.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
My commute by car takes 65 minutes each way. When I click Google Maps' Public Transit button, it tells me that the same commute would be 4.5 hours each way.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
15000 miles/year is not inflated in the west. Most people I know go significantly further. But let's work with that.
It is disingenuous to assume that gas is the only cost.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Train costs: $2.25/day
Bus costs: $1.50/day
Total: $950/year
A car would cost me around $300/year in gas or less, $1000 in insurance, plus some for maintenance. So it would be less than double my current costs, once I owned the car; and it would give me an extra four or five hours per week.
state/city registrations
maintenance
insurance
cleaning
parking tickets
i sold my car last year because i wasn't using it and it was still costing me about $2k per year just to keep it around. had i used it as my primary mode of transportation, i probably wouldn't have been spending $12k per year, but certainly at least half that.
Yeah, I don't know why cyclists and horse riders wear such ridiculous helmets and think they're good protection.
If they want a helmet that provided protection they'd be wearing something that looks more like a full face motorcycle helmet.
Won't be exactly the same of course. Cyclists probably need better airflow for breathing (and cooling), so design a better helmet then, I'm sure they can have airflow and protection.
As I said, they pretty much stop after a while. Yours depreciated at $1650 per year because it was still fairly new. If you start out at $3-5K, you have to really try hard to make it depreciate too much further. I moved last year and ended up buying a $800 truck to help with the remodeling. It still runs so I don't think it's depreciated any.
I live 35 miles outside Boston. I have 2 choices:
1. Commuter rail - very limited schedule and a $14 round trip cost plus the cost of the subway to wherever I'm going - $4.00 round trip on the T - I don't have to park - I can walk to the station as its 1/2 mile down the road. So the minimum cost of using Commuter Rail is $18 a day.
2. My car gets 23 mpg and gas costs $2.09 - a 70 mile round trip costs me $6.36 in gas. parking is either free or $7/day at the MBTA garage (Higher if I park in town). Alternatively the IRS allows $.58 a mile - if that's reasonable then my 70 mile round trip costs $40 plus parking ($7). My reality is that my car costs me about $25 a day (payments, insurance, chronic fixes [I have a Saab]) plus gas so driving to Boston by car costs:
a. $47 according to the IRS
b. $38 ($25 + $6.36 (gas) + $7 parking)
I still drive because all I really get to see is the cost of gas and parking (less than commuter rail and far more convenient) - the rest is fixed overhead that I'd spend anyway. I'd still prefer to use the train if it ran more frequently. On Saturdays there are only 2 trains each way. If I miss the last one I'm SH*T out of luck.
DRIVING:
Parking spot at our condo: $170/month
Parking spot in downtown: $400/month
Insurance in Boston: $300/month
Car Payment (depends on car): $300/month
Gas: $100/month
General maintenance: $100/month
TOTAL = $16,440/year
NO CAR:
MBTA Pass: $59/month
ZipCar for occasional trips: $75/month
TOTAL = $1,608/year
DIFFERENCE SAVED: $14,832
Even if some of my numbers are slightly off (insurance, maintenance...I don't know...never owned a car) cars are clearly a waste if you live and work in Boston.
I live on the far north side, inside the city.
Drive downtown in rush hour traffic (gas, aggravation, traffic jams, accidents...)
Pay for parking, where I see daily "early bird specials" of $18 or $22 per day (I've heard per month rates, but they're around $100 or more, sometimes way more, depending on how far they are from the office buildings).
Drive home in rush hour traffic (see above)
Or
Spend $60/mo, and either drive or ride my bike the 2mi to the train, and once I'm on the
train, get downtown in 20 min.
And, occasionally, look at at the "expressway", and shake my head at the idiots who drive that every day....
msrk