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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?
My car's old enough that I wouldn't get enough for it to cover public transit costs.
Plus I live near Sacramento, which has the useless Light Rail system. The stops are nowhere near where they need to be to be useful, unless you work right downtown.
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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.
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.
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.
For sure - plus, even if you're saving on distance, taking a bus trip from Pasadena to Glendale (neighboring LA cities, about 10 minutes apart) is a 3-hour trek involving taking one bus downtown from Pasadena, another bus across downtown (leaving after a 40-minute wait), and a third bus back up to Glendale. San Diego is similar - occasionally you find a bus that goes from where you live to where you work, but in most cases you're talking about substantial personal cost to get TO the transit, and travel time that takes an average of four times as long.
So, for one thing, the surveys should include "lost productivity" hours or something, since those four hours I lose every day by choosing to use mass transit could be worth more to me than what I spend on the difference.
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.
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?"
This is the problem with rail in most places. Most urban/suburban areas are so poorly laid out that rail is only able to service a very few number of people from "near door" to "near work". This is made several times worse if they are only able to put the rail 'where people will let them', which usually means the rail doesn't service many people along the route - because it's in the boonies.
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.
You get paid for your car commute?
Granted, time not spent at work is valuable too, and I make choices that allow me to spend more time with my kids and stuff.... but your $41/hour equivalent may be exaggeration.
Finally, I can read, talk on the phone, etc. while I'm on the bus or walking. Can't do that in the car. The time I spend driving may be shorter, but that time is spent accumulating stress, not relaxing and regenerating.
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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 $3000/year, but you don't have to buy a new car every year either.
Yeah, I think when I was in DC, it was that the bars shut down at 2am but the public transportation shut down at 11pm. (something like that)
I always thought, "Are they trying to get people to drive drunk?"
I live in San Francisco and walk/train/bus everyplace. (I do not have a bike) When needed I have access to car via a car sharing program. For 50$ 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.
How bad is your driving record (or everybody else's where you live)? I have a 2 year old car that costs me under $700/year, and that is good coverage with State Farm (not some no-name insurance company that doesn't actually back up the claim).
I can't image how that $20k figure is anywhere close to normal
Perhaps not normal, but here's the math:
Add everything up, and it comes to $20200/year.
Perhaps most people just don't realize how much they're wasting on automobiles?
PS: A transit pass (where I live) is $84/month, costing about $1008/year.
Hi there
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!
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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.
Almost forgot to add:
- it takes me 25 minutes to reach work in the car.
- it would take 1:30 to get there via public transportation.
The real problem is population density.
Places (NYC is the poster child) that have a high population density get effective mass transit, meaning subways or good light rail service. Other places get ineffective light rail and/or buses.
In a highly populated area, a single stop can serve thousands of people, where as most places in America measure thousands of people per square mile. It just doesn't work out for mass transit in places like that. What service is available is universally slow and underfunded, usually with heavy subsidization by the local government.
You can thank the suburbs and the 1940/50s dream of everyone owning their own home. The "American Dream", a 60 year old invention that caused the massive economic build up of Detroit and the eventual collapse. It also helped out the environment a lot. Nevermind, I'm digressing.
It's the population density.
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Perhaps not normal, but here's the math:
Add everything up, and it comes to $20200/year.
Bloody hell, where do you live that insurance is $450 per MONTH?
Or perhaps you owned some crazy car, considering $650/mo payments...
I used to pay about $100/mo for two cars...
2) In the US, if you are on a bike, you do not have the rights of a pedestrian. You are bound by motor vehicle laws.
It takes approx. 2 seconds to go from being a cyclist to a pedestrian. It's really easy, I swear.
Hi there
I live in NYC and ignoring travel outside of the city, I probably spend something like $240 a year on transportation (ignoring the portion of my taxes that go to the MTA).
I ride a bike to work. I live in a neighborhood where there's stuff to do, and I can walk to the grocery store.
I think people don't understand the real concept behind public transportation. They live in the suburbs, 5 miles from the nearest grocery store because they're in the middle of an enormous development, and "public transportation" for them means walking a mile to get onto a bus that will take them 4.5 miles to get within a mile of their grocery store. That's the public transportation in their area, at best.
The problem is that we've designed our towns and cities and catered our lifestyles specifically to a culture of each person owning their own car. So looking through that prism, public transportation seems terribly inconvenient. But if we had designed our lifestyle and our towns around public transportation instead of cars, then I'm sure cars would seem terribly inconvenient. People would be saying, "Oh, well there's no road that goes right there, so I'd have to part a mile away and then walk. It's much easier to ride my bike on the bike path." Or whatever.
Location, location, location.
I've not owned a commuter car for the last 10 years. In that time I've biked, walked, and taken public transit to work, depending on the city, job, and distance. Currently, my commute is by bus, which runs at 15 minute intervals at peak and at 30 minute intervals off peak.
Throughout this time I've selected my residence based on public transit and other service availability. It just becomes another attribute to house/apartment selection. "Must have garage" becomes "Must have grocery store within 5 blocks".
Yes, if you choose to live away from public transit, there'll still be a cost of car ownership to get to the station. But if you choose to live close to the transit (just like a car owner generally chooses to live near roads), this is not so much an issue.
I think that the mindset of "transportation services must come to me" needs to be updated on a societal level. However, until the rest of you catch up, I'll be taking advantage of my lower monetary cost, lower stress lifestyle.
Being privatised or not has no bearing on whether you have to pay for it. There are self-sustaining public transport systems, and heavily-subsidised private systems. The problem with fully privatised systems is that they have a de-facto monopoly due to the barriers to entry.
And it's funny how you say private companies are always better when they're all failing.
Just because public transit takes longer doesn't mean it's automatically a waste of time. I used to work a job where my choice was a 40 minute drive (in bad traffic, it could double, but that was fairly uncommon) or a 120 minute bus/subway commute (never varied by more than 10 minutes). While public transit took longer, I never considered those 120 minutes to be wasted. I read a novel a day for months.
I view it as wasting 80 minutes a day doing nothing but driving, vs. using every second "productively".
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Public transport can be fast if it's done well.
If you're living somewhere with high enough population density to make decent public transport practical (London or New York spring to mind) then you're also living somewhere with a population density that is too high to have everyone driving in to the city every morning without causing gridlock (again, see London/New York).
Now that I think of it, the other extreme can be true too: on a long, empty motorway you're still constrained by the speed limit (and general safety/sanity, if you do choose to exceed it) whereas high-speed rail links can average 170+ mph. Even the (not nearly as fast) rail service we have up and down the UK can take more than an hour off what would be a 3.5 hour drive.
On the other hand, poor reliability, infrequent services and unpleasant conditions can easily ruin these advantages. It just depends on what you've got to work with and how it's run, really.
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
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With some things like water mains, telephone lines, rail network and roads you simply can't have multiple private companies running multiple lines in parrallel. It's not efficient and you will tend to get monopolies forming in each area as no company would want to move into an area where someone else already provides lines. With their advantage of already having the infrastructure a price war favours them and besides, a price war is a lose-lose for you and them, as is splitting the market.
Really for situations where there's a certain type of infrastructure from point A to point B there only needs to be 1 provider. That's where government makes sense. The ineffiency of the government is still better than having multiple providers running parralel lines.
I don't live in America but i've heard this is exactly what is happening with your telecom services. Each provider has a monopoly over a different area. No one wants to move into an area that's already serviced by someone else, having 2 services in 1 area makes it not worthwhile for both private companies. Compare to the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency who were on Slashdot a couple of days ago for offering 200Mbps services on the cheap. Swedens population density is lower than the US btw.
New York is tiny. I drive two miles to get groceries in my little piece of suburbia. That's like going from Union Square to Central Park in New York...which is the cosmic equivalent of Earth to Mars. On my two mile drive, if I cut through all the little side streets, I'll probably pass 1000 people. Between Union Square and Central park in a straight shot up 5th avenue...more like 200,000 people.
The car gave us freedom. If you want efficiency move to the city.
The problem with that idea is that people change jobs. What was once a short commute suddenly isn't a short commute anymore. Do you A. sell your house at a huge loss, or B. take it on the chin and commute? Most reasonable people would not pick A. And even with lots of public transit, if you travel very far at all, the best public transit in the world doesn't do much good.
Public transit makes sense in these situations:
In anything approaching normal urban density (NOT Manhattan), as soon as you have to do two transfers, ride a non-express train/bus more than 20 minutes, etc., public transit starts to break down pretty badly in efficiency. A couple of extra hours per day adds up to huge numbers of wasted days over the course of a year.
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While population density is a problem, it is the result of effective mass transit, not the cause. How can you have density with giant parking lots everywhere?
Since those extra minutes would come out of the time I spend with my family, I would consider them stolen, not wasted. My job does enough of that.
Perhaps because the GP didn't want to show up to work in the morning drenched with sweat and exhausted?
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I thought exactly the same thing, until i started commuting by train....
My drive used to vary between 50 and 80 minutes depending on traffic, one way. The train commute (including 6 minutes to drive to the train) was 90 minutes consistantly. One could easily argue i was loosing between 20 and 80 minutes a day with my family.
However, it occurred to me after I started commuting several things:
1) the time in the morning didn't count. I actually had MORE time with my family in the mornings. How? well, I basically had to leave at the same time each morning one way or the other, since traffic could easily put me being late. This meant more often than not I got to work 20-30 minutes early. Also, since I could quite easily (and comfortably) eat breakfast on the train, I was no longer in a mad rush to get my shit together in the morning, and could spend the tome actually talking to my kids instead of barking orders and running from room to room, and cursing when i burned breakfast trying to do too much in too short a time. My whole morning was calmer and more controlled, and I not only had that time with the family, but I ENJOYED that time for once.
2) The end of the day. This was easier in many ways. First, i knew I allways had about 40 minutes on the train doing a whole lot of nothing after breakfast. Most mornings I simply read news, a book, watched a podcast, something like that. Other mornings I was actually working, preparing for my day, prepping for a meeting with a client, reading a tech manual on a new software package, something productive. This extra time meant I was also more focused at the office, and got my shit done. I found I rarely ever worked overtime anymore, and if I had some unfinished work, I did it on the train on the way home.
3) The worst part of the commute was ALLWAYS coming home, not going to work in the morning. As anyone who commutes often knows, people vary on when they go in to the office, from 7ish to closer to 9AM, but nearly every fucking one of them are on the roads at 5:15PM... and on a mission. 50-60 minutes in the morning was the norm, with the occasional bad commute. Coming home was ALLWAYS on the 80 minutes side. So I really only lost about 10 minutes on average coming home. I used to leave the house at 6:40 and get home about 6:30. While using the train I still left at 6:40AM, and usually was home at 6:45 (if I didn't hit the grocery store or something on the way back).
Then, there's overtime. As i already mentioned, i worked a LOT less of it. When i did, it was on the train, or just a few quick e-mails from home (unless some server blew up). Coming in the door I didn't have a head full of crap to do. i used to walk in the door, scream hello, go right to the office, and sit there for an hour smelling food I was expecting to eat cold later. Using the train i came home, sat down, and spent family time with the family far more often than the prior situation. Yes I got home 20-30 minutes later on average, but I EARNED 30 minutes with my family I never used to get anyway!
Also, driving is streessful. Many nights the fise and I got in fights over stupid stuff just because I was in a mood to fight. With the train ride to calm me down, even the side effects of a horrible day at the office never made it back to the house. ALL my family time was FAR more valuable too me, not to mention having more of it.
Would I have prefered to work a lot closer to home and avoid the commute completely? Well, yea, sure. That is, if I could have had a comperable salry and work for a comperable company and earn comperable experience. unfortunately, that simply wasn't possible. My commute, saccrificing what an hour a day, earned my family a nice big house in a great neighborhood. We sold that house, moved south, and I now make a VERY comfortable living at another comperable company in a job my experiences earned me, and we have an even more massive house in a nicer neighborhood, and the money to have truly quality time together. I
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