As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great.
But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local public transit.
Expensive. Here in North Virginia (just outside of DC) it was $26k OTD for a 2021 Camry LE. We pay $223/mo in car insurance for my wife and I and $1k/yr in property tax for the car.
Both held a license for 20+ years, both in our early 40s with no accidents in that time.
Car maintenance cost varies - haven't had to deal with that yet.
Depending on the study you look at it costs an owner $8 876 per year and society about 1/3 of the lifetime cost in supporting the vehicle (in the form of roads, pollution, infrastructure etc.)
I never had a car in London (where public transport is used by all regardless of income and background). Here in the US we have a long way to go before we level up our public transportation system.
That said, Washington DC's Metro is very good indeed. I hope they extend it further and further out.
I took the bus for nearly a decade and I drive a car now. My life was greatly improved by having a car and while a car is more expensive technically, in indirect costs, it feels like a break even to me. At least as someone who buys cheap cars, tends to live within 30mins drive of my job and keeps them for a good long time. Even in a good public transit area in the US there is a significant time sink to using public transit for literally every aspect of your life. Getting to work is efficient and not significantly more time intensive than driving, but doing everything else like visiting a friend, going to a hair salon, get groceries can be a huge difference depending on what city you're in. I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive, but getting groceries was a harrowing 45mins journey. Places where getting to work took twice as long, but I could walk to the grocery store. In the US there's just no way to make public transit really work across all dimensions. Especially as we add in specificity. Like needing to bring home a large amount of items or visit humans instead of businesses. EU was much better about this just because of how mixed housing and businesses were.
Really? I feel like this sort of thing is hugely dependant on start and endpoints. Trains crush cars during peak, and are usually still better in dense areas, but add 10-20 minutes of last mile either end and driving quickly ends up faster (although in dense areas parking is not cheap)
Car ownership costs vary widely. If you buy a new $50,000 car every two years, that is obviously very expensive, and then will be expensive to insure, and many of those luxury vehicles aren't amazingly efficient.
Whereas you can usually find a reliable and efficient used car for under $5000 and keep it for quite a bit more than 2 years, with a good driving record and the lower cost vehicle it can cost less than $1000/year to insure, and maintenance is dramatically less expensive if you do it yourself. And I mean the difference is $60 for a part on the internet vs. they charge you $250 for the same part and $500 for the labor to put it in.
By contrast, a monthly NYC subway pass will run you a little over $1500/year, which will in most cases be less but not necessarily a whole lot less. Plus whatever you get stuck paying to Uber whenever you have to go somewhere the subway doesn't.
I also took transit for 1.5 hours each way when I moved to Toronto, Canada. My monthly transit cost + Ubers was around $400-1000 (I had to take two systems and frequently took Ubers when the bus was cancelled or delayed).
My first car cost about $750 all-in, not counting equity in the car. My commute dropped from 3 hours to less than 1 hour, even in the notorious Toronto traffic. Suddenly I could go to Costco, and my grocery bill dropped by half, from around $800 to around $400.
I got a good deal both buying and selling, and on the subsequent car, so my true cost was less than the monthly payment.
Public transit makes sense in very dense areas. Everywhere else it’s an expensive boondoggle and the working class is better off driving old clunkers than the damn bus.
Cars can be expensive, yeah. I live in a very car-centric area (zero public transportation, with many things too far away for realistically walking there).
To throw some numbers out: A "cheap" used car ($5k), financed over 3 years at 8% is $156.68 per month. At my middle age, decent full coverage insurance is around $100 per month (it would cost a lot more if I were still younger). We're at $256.68 monthly just to have a car that we may elect to drive.
But that doesn't include parking for the car (a place to live with good parking tends to cost more than a place with awful parking). It also doesn't include the costs of actually driving the car, like regular maintenance, stuff that inevitably breaks or wears out, fuel, washing the car, and so on. Let's just make up a number and say that these things average ~$150 per month, for a total of ~$406.68 per month to drive a car.
Now, suppose that a commute is 20 minutes each way using that car, or 1 hour if riding the bus. And that a bus pass costs $62 per month.
And let's say that a person "brings home" $25 per hour worked, and that they work 40 hours in a regular week (173.93 hours in a regular month), and that the commute time counts as unpaid work.
The car commute adds 14.49 hours per month, for 188.42 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $406.68.
The bus commute adds 43.48 hours per month, for 217.41 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $62.
The bus seems cheaper and slower at this point, which we all probably implicitly knew to be true.
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But if my math is right: By the time transportation is paid for, the person commuting by car has an effective hourly wage of $20.92 for their time+commute. And the person riding the bus has an effective hourly wage of $19.73/hour for their time+commute.
So owning and driving the car may be a better option than taking the bus, depending on a person's specific situation and proclivities. And of course, it's more nuanced than that in ways that are harder to math out.
With a car, commute time is just lost time. A person driving a car must drive that car the entire time; they don't get to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever, but they're only doing that for 40 minutes a day.
With a bus pass, commute time might be productive time. A person riding a bus might decide to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever. So if a person chooses to do so, they can use some of that 43.48 hours riding back and forth to work doing something that has meaning to them.
On the other hand: Owning a cheap(ish) car means being able to travel to places where a bus doesn't go, and do so on a whim, and (optionally) take a mountain of stuff along with them if that is useful for whatever reason.
So yeah, cars are expensive. But buses are also expensive. (Life is expensive.)
Public transportation isn't exactly cheap when used every day. Then factor in your time and frustration. Nothing is as expensive as your time.
Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper.
Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes.
My ultimate dream for society, as a whole, is for everyone to "be rich". I don't necessarily mean having a disgusting surplus of money in the bank, but rather to eliminate the innumerable aspects of being "not rich" that boil down to an endless string of otherwise unnecessary daily sacrifices, sufferings and indignities. Then, at least, we'd begin to see the trauma of poverty be reduced and hopefully eliminated.
In this case, that means turning a gimlet eye to the human cost of unavoidable mass transport that isn't rail. Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category. This opens up easier access to work, relationships, housing, and food including breaking down the barriers of food deserts.
Thanks. The commute time was more an aspect of the innate slowness bus transportation combined with the unavoidable route through city side streets. In other words, it would be hard to improve upon. By car, the route is thirty minutes.
Then public transport should be way cheaper than driving, as on transit you have some downtime where you can scroll through your phone, listen to some music, or perhaps even crack open your laptop if you're on a proper train. Driving requires constant attention, so you can't relax or do anything else in the meantime.
If scrolling through your phone were worthwhile enough that being able to do it made up for the loss of time, people would deliberately take trains instead of cars just so they could take a little longer but be able to scroll through their phones.
The bottom line is that it is geometrically impossible to get everyone in a city to work by car. End of story.
You can lament all you want, but the difference in space between a car and an apartment/office building makes the problem you're discussing completely unsolvable.
So, if you really care about making everyone richer, the only question you can ask is how to improve public transit. Anything else is pure make-believe.
this is just bizarre. cars are extremely expensive, polluting, dangerous and highways aren’t good for nature or human living.
nobody should live in a sprawl or rural area so far they need to commute two hours. make transit and trains fast and cheap and frequent, build opportunities in cities, and design cheap housing in desirable areas.
No, in most cities most people by far use public transit for their commute. And in most cities, especially where this is not exactly true, car traffic is already hellish at rush hour.
I do agree that work-from-home should be a part of the transit solution. But not even the entire software industry can work from home, nevermind all the other industries that sometimes use computers.
But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local public transit.