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Comment by wsxcde | Hacker News Reader

I wish I'd done the math on Uber when I bought my car some years ago. I ended up paying ~$80 a month on insurance alone. Add in the initial cost of the car, maintenance and fuel, it was not at all worth it in comparison to just shelling out for a Lyft whenever I needed one. So by my math if you're spending $100 a month on rides, you're well in the black in comparison to owning a car.

The main (and perhaps only) advantage to having a car is the convenience and the ability to go where ever whenever.

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You can certainly save a lot of money (depending on your location / usage pattern) by going carshare-only; but one thing I've found is that it can result in a sort of cognitive fallacy (not really a fallacy per se; rather a thought pattern that can be tricky to avoid) where every trip you make becomes subject to economic considerations, far more than it would have if you'd owned a car.

For example if you have a friend who lives 15 miles away - it becomes "do I want to spend $50 to visit my friend?". If you drive your own car, the economic calculation is invisible - it's about $2 of gas, a bit of depreciation that you don't even think about, and [huge already-paid upfront cost for vehicle/financing/insurance that you don't even think about] - "of course I'll pay $2 to visit my friend!"

One thing that helped was making a spreadsheet that showed how my total cost of transportation went from $8k/year to about $1200/year when I switched to Lyft/ZipCar and ditched my own vehicle. So even if I were to add in a weekly $50 friend-visit, I'm still paying less than half for my transportation than I previously was.

Based on the standard IRS deduction, a 30 mile round trip would be about $15. (And the marginal cost is less than that--your insurance at least doesn't generally go up by mileage except to the degree it slightly increases the probability of an accident.) But I agree with your basic point. If people had a clicking meter whenever they got into their car, they'd think a lot more before they turned the key.

Some might say this was a good thing. Personally, I think mobility is generally positive.

My insurance has always wanted to know annual mileage to determine the insurance tier to put me in. The tiers are pretty wide though, so I never put any thought into visiting a friend. Just sometimes which of the family vehicles to drive across the state.

> where every trip you make becomes subject to economic considerations, far more than it would have if you'd owned a car.

As it should, as well as an environmental consideration.

A lot of people (including myself) live in locations and have activities (including commuting) that pretty much make not owning a car a non-starter.

But it's certainly true that for people who don't need to drive on a regular basis, a lot of reason to own a car may come down to things like not wanting to deal with Zipcar or a regular rental car every time you want to do a big shopping trip or get out of town on a Saturday or for the weekend.

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