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Comment by elijaht | Hacker News Reader

I live car-free in NYC. A large appeal of NYC to me was not having to park. I don't ~mind~ driving, but I absolutely hated having to deal with finding parking when I lived in other cities. Parking generally makes me feel stressed (competition for free spots), or makes me pay (using something like SpotHero makes it easy to find a spot, but costs me).

It's not even just major cities either- I'm frequently in a college town in Illinois and parking downtown is a nightmare, and can easily add 10 minutes to your trip time, AND it's paid. Visiting a city I'm not familiar with can add some stress too as you don't know the best parking, unlike cities you are familiar with.

NYC has problems of it's own (trains are generally reliable, but tend to have delays right when you need them), but for $33 a week I can get to most major neighborhoods in 30 minutes, walking straight to my destination. Add in $40 for a couple cabs when I prioritize a quicker trip, and I have amazing access to my city for less than $100/week.

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Sold my car years ago and moved to Boston. I'll never go back to live anywhere that requires me to own a car. I bike or walk everywhere, and what makes me hopeful is that biking infrastructure in Boston (and neighboring cities like Cambridge) has improved dramatically in the years since I've been here and just keeps getting better.

Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022. Between my partner and I, we're saving $20,000 per year not owning a car (and that's assuming a generous expenditure on bicycle TCO). High rents mean nothing when considering how much you save on not needing to own a car.

I did the math for my aunt recently: she pays more in rent and car expenses living in suburban South Florida (Kendall) for the same square footage I get in Cambridge, MA. Living paycheck to paycheck sandwiched between a super Walmart and the Florida Turnpike, it's not exactly glamorous.

She's considering ditching the car and moving north. Gas, maintenance, and car payments are silent killers. Most people equate them to rent and cannot imagine a life where they don't pay for their car.

This is the same reason I moved out of the city.

Rents are very high because they assume you can live there without a car, but as someone who frequently drove far out of the city I was paying for the worst of both worlds.

I agree with your TCO assessment, thanks to pandemic/WFH myself and my partner were able to switch to sharing a car and we saw about 10k in annual savings.

> Rents are very high because they assume you can live there without a car

Rents are very high in cities because there's not enough housing for everyone who wants to live there [1] not because of an assumption about car ownership.

[1] Ironically, in part because of an assumption that people will have cars, which is one limitation on how dense housing construction is allowed to be.

ten thousand dollars???

Look I get that I probably don’t do cars the way other people do cars, but like - ten thousand a year? I spend maybe $800 on gas in a year. What are these people doing? Buying a new set of tires every Christmas? Yearly visits to a detailing shop or something??

I mean like no offense but if you guys were spending twenty thousand dollars annually on cars… that’s on you. You don’t need to live that way. I bought my Subaru used ten years ago for $3k, and I’ve managed just fine without spend a small fortune on… whataver it is you were spending yours on.

Your number seems very you-specific. Back-of-the-envelope math, seems like you drive <7K miles per year, which is less than half of what an average driver does. You are also accounting for $0 in tolls, parking, insurance, repairs or maintenance, registration, inspection, an occasional ticket, etc.

I totally believe that it is possible that these are indeed your costs but I'll give you a counter-example.

My Highlander was about $50K all in. Let's say I keep it for 10 years, that's $5 per year right there. Insurance is about $1.5K so we're at $6.5K and that's a good deal for around here. If we drive into Manhattan on a weekday, it's about $50 to leave the car in a lot somewhere in Midtown. If I do that just once a month, that's another $600, so we're at $7.1K already. We actually don't put a ton of mileage on and it's a hybrid so our gas costs are about the same as yours. That's $8k. I am leaving out a bunch of other stuff (registration, inspection, tolls - can easily be around $10 to cross into or out of Manhattan, an occasional ticket, parking meters, etc.)

I think my car usage scenario is pretty light (wife and I both WFH) compares to most people but I can easily get to $10K for one car based on where we live. Some of this can be avoided (eg sit longer in traffic to avoid a toll road, go slow to avoid tickets, only go into NYC on Sunday when you can get a free spot more easily, could have bought a used car, etc.) - just making it obvious that you can EASILY get to $10K.

> My Highlander was about $50K all in. Let's say I keep it for 10 years, that's $5 per year right there.

Not really, the car doesn't evaporate on year 10. On a quick search I see 2013 Highlanders (you didn't mention a year but those are 10 years old now) selling from ~14K to ~20K. So looks like you'd get about a third of the purchase cost back when you sell it.

That's a 50K car though. If you like to spend on that, great. But it doesn't mean that owning a car has to cost that much. People who like to minimize car costs (like me) will buy a 5-8K used car and drive it forever, bringing the annualized cost down to just a few hundred dollars.

> I can easily get to $10K for one car

Certainly. Or 100K, or even more. I know someone who spends well over a million dollars a year in cars! The sky is the limit. But nobody needs to do that. If all one needs is a car for transportation, it can be had for under 1K a year.

Agree. Nobody needs to do that. And I am not complaining.

I am simply showing that it's easy to get to that ballpark number with relatively generic car owners behavior.

Half of your cost is your $50k car choice, though, and doesn't include resale value of around $15k (I'm looking at 2013 highlander prices. It's probably more because you chose a bunch of upgrades, see below). Drops your yearly costs by $1.5k right there.

Get a reasonable car for $25k-35k and your costs drop significantly. Hell, your $50k number means you chose to have a bunch of upgrades. The base MSRP is $36k, and I'm seeing dealer advertised prices of $37k near me. I have to go all the way up to the "Platinum" tier to find $50k prices.

Thank you. I am extremely happy with my purchase and it's well worth the cost.

My point to the GP was that it's trivially doable to get to 10k a year ballpark car cost without doing anything too crazy.

If you are curious, it's a hybrid XLE with AWD. I wanted the hybrid, AWD is standard here in the north east and XLE is the lowest model that comes with (fake) leather seats which we wanted due to having small kids.

Yeah maybe so. I wfh and only do a couple of road trips a year - tolls are inapplicable, I barely ever need to pay for parking, and of course there’s occasional maintenance costs but I just cannot imagine those adding up to anywhere near $10k, that’s off by an order of magnitude in my experience. If I spent more than a grand on my car per year, I’d be doing it wrong, in my book.

Maybe if you buy a really expensive car, and you drive it all the time, and it’s really expensive to maintain / repair - I guess. But like - aren’t you choosing an expensive route, in that case? The person I was replying to made it sound like doing away with cars altogether was the reasonable option, rather than what seems like a no-brainer to me: just keep a less expensive car. I suppose that’s a luxury (ha) I can afford?

I dislike car culture, but owning a car is not that expensive unless you own a newish one.

Yeah I paid $10k for a car 10 years ago, and I spend all-in (insurance, maintenance, gas) about $2k/year on it. Long-run, it probably depreciates by a few hundred dollars a year as well.

And buy a new one every few years like some Americans do

I LOVE the new bike lanes on the Mass Ave bridge. Total game changer on how often I actually want to bike into Cambridge now.

I wish the other sides of the bridge were better for bikes, too, but I'm sure they're coming with the next re-paving/maintenance of those roads.

Don't you feel confined to your little area? In the weekend my wife and I drove out to a rural hike, 40mins out of town. I couldn't imagine giving up that kind of convenience and missing those kinds of opportunities.

What if you don't live near a pool? Your kids just don't learn to swim? My local pool is a 15 minute drive, but a harrowing cycle route.

Note OP, but I'll try.

    In the weekend my wife and I drove out to a rural hike, 40mins out of town.

How do local tourists get to that hike? Probably buses or trains, which in decent systems are usually competitive with vehicles. It's how I did hikes in the rural Himalayas and Latin America.

    What if you don't live near a pool?

You build the pools where people live. They live closer together in cities designed before cars. Even rural towns used to be fairly dense and walkable. I picked a random suburb of Boston called Beverly. There are 3 public pools and a number of ponds that may or may not be swimmable. No one is more than approx 1mi from a public pool.

Also, commuter cycling should not be harrowing. It becomes harrowing when planners don't properly invest in the infrastructure and mix modes in dangerous ways. Imagine if we did the same thing with planes and used local highways as runways. Narrow the streets to reasonable, 3m lanes and even a 2-lane road can fit a dedicated cycle lane. The streets in my california neighborhood use a horrifying 12m for only 2 travel lanes, yet still can't find room for a cycle path.

I lived in a country like that. The "rural hike" was a Big Deal: you'd wake up early, pack your lunches carefully, take a bus, then train, then another train, and eventually arrive. Then hike for a nice, long time (having hike time < commute time seems such a waste), and go back home the same way. By that time, you'd be pretty exhausted, nothing else "big" would get done this day, and you'd take the next day easy too. And you probably would not want to do this too often.. maybe choose a more boring local park instead. In the dense city, one is likely only half an hour away.

Compared to that, now every time I drive to a remote hike it blows my mind how much stuff gets done -- the distance is the same, but it's just a long-ish morning trip. You can hike for a bit, then get back home, get groceries on the way, have lunch, and have the whole evening free. And you are not limited to destinations next to the train line either!

(One thing I miss however is the ability to enter into the forest on one train station, and exit on another one. It's pretty nice when you don't have to do a loop)

These are good questions. If you're a hiker/camper who needs access to a wide variety of remote locations, then that's a good reason to own a car. That said, from where I live there's plenty of green space that I can access without a car. At the end of the orange line (one of the local subway lines) is Forest Hills from which you can immediately access the Arnold Arboretum and Franklin Park (not to mention a huge quintet of adjacent cemeteries). If you want more wilderness rather than manicured greenery, then the green line terminates tantalizingly close to Middlesex Fells (not quite as close as I would like, admittedly, it's still a ten minute ride from there to the green line). If you want to range further afield, the commuter rail spiderwebs out for 30 miles in every direction. And if you don't want to ride either a subway or a train, I can ride all the way from Boston Common (in the heart of downtown) to Concord (where Walden Pond is) using nearly 20 miles of dedicated bike trails (mostly on the Minuteman bikeway), which hits up plenty of state parks along the way.

I live car free in Seattle, and with the combo of Amtrak, car rentals, and my ebike, I never feel confined. Even renting a car occasionally costs much less than if I were to own one in parking alone.

I live in Cambridge. All places I've lived in Cambridge were within a 5 minute walk of a publicly accessible pool. Before I had a car for outdoor climbing, I took the commuter rail to see local towns or got a ZipCar and split the cost with friends.

These days, most of my trips are on my bike. Anything I can round trip within 50 miles round trip is fair game. My roommate made it to Cape Cod a few weekends ago, but he's very athletic.

Sydney has metro rail lines that go out into the mountains as an alternative to driving.

Do you need a personal vehicle to carry a few sandwiches, some water and a first aid kit? If you are going camping can’t you rent a vehicle, how often do you realistically go camping that it justifies the cost of ownership over renting when you _truly_ need it?

If you really do need a car, that’s totally acceptable! But how many people don’t actually need it for anything other than weekend grocery shopping and work commutes? Hint: a very large portion of the population.

>Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022. Between my partner and I, we're saving $20,000 per year not owning a car (and that's assuming a generous expenditure on bicycle TCO). High rents mean nothing when considering how much you save on not needing to own a car.

$10k seems suspiciously high. Maybe that's because everyone is buying overpriced pickups/SUVs? If all you want is a vehicle, you can get this[1] which the site calculates the TCO at $33,858 over 5 years, or $6.8k. I suspect that if you buy used or keep the car for longer (eg. 10-15 years, the average car age is 12.5 years in the US), you can get that number even lower.

[1] https://www.kbb.com/toyota/corolla-hybrid/2023/le/?vehicleid...

My thoughts too. If you buy a car with cash, the only costs are $1k for insurance (or less), $1k for routine maintenance, and fuel. If you have an EV, the fuel costs drop dramatically.

But most Americans have a car payment; the average amount totaling over $400/mo. So in that respect, I guess 10k isn’t too far off.

Yeah, I also find that weird. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love to not have a car and I'm all for public transit/biking/walking, but I bought my car (which I love) - a brand new Focus ST for 28k in 2013. I spend maybe $3k a year on gas and maintenance, insurance etc, (I don't drive much) bringing TCO to ~6k range. If you have to drive a huge amount obviously that's not realistic but for a city like Seattle where you kinda need a car, but only for certain things, it's absolutely possible.

> Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022

Every time I hear this insane number I have a good laugh. I own 3 cars myself and my total cost of ownership is nowhere near that high combined.

I always have the same gut reaction - then I realize I know people who lose at least 10k every 2-3 years on a new vehicle; one that they are financing and driving 2+ hours a day. So factor in gas and insurance etc., you can see it.

Although I think everyone I know who lives in Boston/Cambridge owns a car because they either commute/visit to friends out to the suburbs or do regular weekend activities like hiking or canoeing out in the suburbs/mountains--which can also involve specialized transportation for car-camping etc. You can work around a lot of this but a lot of people don't want to if they can afford it.

I don't live in the city but I'd definitely own a car if I did.

You probably interact with the types of people who are more likely to spend time in the suburbs, by dint of living in a suburb.

"Affording" a car in Boston is stressful as hell even beyond the cost, and I wouldn't recommend it. My friends who both live and work in the city don't own cars. I ditched my car when I moved into city limits, and ride an EUC, bike, or train to work.

The suburbs would have nothing for me if I didn't have family there. But even there, a weekend pass for the commuter rail costs $10 and can take me as far as Rhode Island if I want.

This is overly black and white IMO. For the million or so of us who live in the "first ring suburbs", e.g. Somerville, it's common to own a car for out-of-the-city trips, but use walking/biking/transit for day to day life and going out on the weekends.

Not trying to be black or white about it. I'm not extrapolating my experience, only offering what it is. If I didn't, the prevailing and only observation in this thread would be that it's uncommon to not own a car. And that doesn't match my experience at all, as someone who lives and works here.

Though my anecdote is pretty heavily skewed the other direction towards skaters and the types of people who own PEVs.

I'm actually even further out than the conventional suburbs. But, yes, I mostly know people in the city who routinely do hiking and paddling activities that practically require owning vehicles and who routinely get together with friends well outside of city limits. I think most of the people I know who own a car in the city have a dedicated parking space.

So, yeah, city people I know have made a deliberate (and expensive) decision to live in the city but maintain the flexibility to drive elsewhere without a lot of friction.

People naturally gravitate to lower friction. If activities like getting outside of the city/transit coverage is expensive/a pain you mostly just don't do it.

One of the differences with NYC (and maybe specifically Manhattan--though it doesn't map perfectly) is that there's a cultural expectation that residents, even those with money, may not own cars. It can still be a hassle for weekend trips but it's still something of a difference in mindset even for people in other large cities where carless living, at least within the confines of the city, is fairly doable.

> One of the differences with NYC (and maybe specifically Manhattan--though it doesn't map perfectly) is that there's a cultural expectation that residents, even those with money, may not own cars

NYC is the only city in the country where the majority of residents don't own cars. Manhattan has the lowest car ownership rates of all the boroughs, but car owners are still the minority city-wide. (Within NYC, car ownership also skews notably towards the wealthy).

I travel around the USA a fair amount. In the vast majority of cities, parking just isn't a problem. I drive my car where I want to go and park. Sometimes I have to pay. But the places where no parking is available are very rare.

I am fully in favor of walkable neighborhoods and reducing the need to drive. But lack of parking is just not a stressor that most Americans worry about.

I'd need to see some numbers to believe that this is true for "most Americans." Certainly it's not a problem for most of America if we're talking about geographic area. But population is obviously not distributed uniformly.

> I am fully in favor of walkable neighborhoods and reducing the need to drive. But lack of parking is just not a stressor that most Americans worry about.

Tell that to my local Facebook & Nextdoor groups.

You aren't looking at a representative sample. Spend some time talking to people outside of dense cities. Parking doesn't even make their top 10 list of concerns.

Even in regions like the SF Bay Area outside of San Francisco proper there is abundant parking near most homes, retail, and workplaces. Now I agree that devoting so much valuable real estate to parking is rather wasteful and we ought to eliminate some of those asphalt wastelands, but as a practical matter today it means most people don't get stressed about parking. If you tell them to get rid of their cars so that they don't have to worry about parking they're going to think you're crazy.

> Spend some time talking to people outside of dense cities.

Are you sure this gives you a representative sample of Americans?

I do not currently live in a dense city; I'm in the burbs.

I'm aware that this is a squeaky wheel situation, but I asked a question on a local group about a laundromat that's getting torn down - of the (last check) 38 comments on my post, approximately 5 have to do with my question, and the rest are people worrying about parking spaces if/when a small apartment building replaces it.

Some people always complain about adding more housing in their neighborhoods. My point is that on a daily basis most people don't worry about parking. They just drive where they want to go and then park their cars. Outside of a few limited urban areas, no one sees parking as stressful or as a reason to avoid using their own cars.

I agree there is this strange obsession with fixing super dense city areas, increasing density and public transit, getting rid of cars and parking, etc.. Im not sure why it is such a big cause right now. Its a bit confusing to see it so high on so many people's priority list.

I even bike to work every day since I choose to live very close to my office building, but I don't understand this desire.

> but for $33 a week I can get to most major neighborhoods in 30 minutes

Ahh yes, only the most important, noteworthy neighborhoods that most likely aren’t transit deserts, right?

https://subwaysheds.com/

Some neighborhoods are harder than others, but I have found the subway + bus service + regional rail makes it possible to get ~anywhere~ in an hour from where I live. And those neighborhoods are the exception for me, at least, 99% of my trips really are under 30 minutes.

Driving to those places would be 30+ minutes anyways, some of it really is just distance + gridlock

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