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Comment by safgasCVS | Hacker News Reader

For me to take the train to work every day from London to Sunbury it works out to just over twenty pounds per day. For what I pay in commute fares is less then leasing and insuring a new car (which also won’t decide 5 minutes beforehand that it won’t be stopping at your station because it needs to make up time). I’m very pro getting people to give up their cars but I don’t see it happening In the U.K. until affordable alternatives exist

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Ouch. I'm curious about the details. Do you have to pay the congestion charge or any tolls when you drive? Do you have free parking at your office? What's the petrol cost of a day's driving? How do the leasing and insurance costs break out daily?

I'm asking because when I ran the numbers for myself in a major US city, it turned out that driving was expensive enough that public transit and Uber would have been superior. But then our transit tickets were only a few dollars and most parking downtown was $20 a day.

Wow that’s London-expensive parking.

So the normal congestion charge is around £11 per day but because I’m a resident and live in a congestion zone it’s £1 pound. However the CC only applies to the most central parts of London so many people don’t have to pay it. Daily fuel works out to £4.5 and my office has free parking. My Annual insurance for a newish Mazda 3 is £500 and while I bought my car outright i think a lease on a similar car would be around £220pm. B

Thanks! So you're looking at roughly £15 a day in overall costs. (Maybe a touch more when you add in maintenance and repairs.) It's interesting that if you had to pay the congestion charge or for parking, the scales would easily tip twards the train. So in conclusion, it's really too bad the transit tickets in London are so expensive since it's clearly pushing a lot of people to drive instead.

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