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My mom's (then) boyfriend sold his car back in '96. He was a science man but not on a particularly number-hard field (veterinarian).

He still ran the numbers.

I was too young to fully understand but basically accounting for every cost it was cheaper to call a cab or rent a car for every situation that actually requires a private vehicle, plus it saved loads of time overall (repairs, maintenance, checks, cleaning...) and headaches in general.

The discussion stuck to me, and I'm always amazed at how it became a realization for so many people decades after.

Granted, this was Western Europe where public transit is ages ahead of most of the US.

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I did the same math and decided I wouldn’t buy a car since I could just use Uber when I need one. Turns out I never use Uber anyway since I live near a train station and major bus stop, I can get anywhere from public transport easily.

It's very dependent on local public transit, whether you reasonably have to use a private car of some sort (whether you drive it or someone else does) for commuting to work etc., and your general lifestyle (i.e. if your car needs are to drive somewhere on the odd weekend or so, maybe a Zipcar now and then to visit someone, or the odd roadtrip when you can just get a rental you can probably get by without a car).

I'm sure not all, but I feel so many of these calculations do not include how much is your time worth, which unlike money you can't make more of.

I'm in a sub-sub-urb of a big city in the US so a car is a necessity; I don't like it, but it's what it is. But even if I lived near a train station (and I have used them in the UK, New York, and Western Europe), not having a car is still a cost in time. How much I never put to paper, but it's not zero. (I'm also discounting the cost and hassle of having a car in a "big city" - when I lived in NY, no way I'd own a car there.)

This is true but cuts both ways: car owners spend time dealing with maintenance and repairs, parking, etc. It very much depends on where you live but one thing I’ve noticed is that most drivers are chronically late because they’re thinking of the time spent driving on roads, not actual door-to-door travel time including things like the time they spent looking for a more subsidized parking spot or waiting for other drivers to leave.

The other thing is quality of life. Walking, biking, and even using transit are better for your health – the first two can meet your exercise needs - and they all allow you to do something other than sit immobile looking at a tailpipe, so you have to make a fuzzy comparison in many cases. Where I live, driving can be as fast as riding a bike if you’re lucky on traffic but even if I take transit it’s only like 10 minutes slower so I’d have to weight 30 minutes of reading and 15 minutes of walking against 25 minutes of driving.

I am very happy with my current life right now, which does not require a car at all on a regular basis, but I was lucky enough to inherit an old car that I use for weekend trips out of town and generally getting around to areas that would be difficult or impossible to reach by public transit. I drive about once a week on average, but that average belies just how tremendously valuable the car has been in terms of saving me time. It's been worth every penny and then some. But This is more or less an ideal scenario that I wish everyone had access to, even though I know most people don't. Often you have to choose 2 of the 3: good access to transit, room to park a car, and enough money in the budget for a car.

Yeah, cars certainly have utility but I always remind myself that the total cost is higher than we think and it’s especially harsh for people who aren’t very comfortable financially. I’ve been at the mechanic’s when someone is trying to figure out what they can do to keep their car running enough to avoid losing their job, or praying that a tire patch will hold.

The problem in the United States is that a lot of infrastructure was deliberately built to exclude poor people so there aren’t great options in many suburbs for improving transit or bike access short of building road connections through someone’s bank yard. This has a nasty ratchet as cars have been getting more expensive while those suburbs age and need maintenance far in excess of what the property taxes cover.

I just moved out of a metro area to about 20 miles out of town and have been running these numbers. How you calculate time is something few people talk about but seems incredibly relevant to this calculation.

I'm an independent hourly consultant so my time has a literal dollar rate, but only if I would be working vs whatever activity is in question.

Assuming I 1: have work available I can contribute quality work to in the time allotted and 2: that I actually would be doing that work in this time slot are two things that rarely match up with when I'm doing personal activities that require transit. One obvious exception is going to or from a client site during the workweek, but with a phone hotspot I can start billing on the bus. Something I can't do driving.

If 1 and 2 above are not both true then my hourly rate is not at all my billed rate and is instead some subjective measure of value. I have yet to determine if that measure of value is best expressed in dollars. So far I'm beginning to think it isn't. Instead, reversed feels better. "Is it worth X dollars to not have to carry my groceries home on a bus?"

100% agree, that's more or less how I ended up evaluating my time

Absolutely true, but the beauty is that you can calculate exactly how much a car costs, monthly, how much time is wasted by not having it and how much time is wasted by having it, since you are in control of all of this.

I calculated I'm at least saving $1000/month, I live near a car sharing service spot, a major bus stop and the train, so we get to love car-free.

I'd argue that having a car sharing service really highlights how much you spend for a car when is just "sitting there". You see the expense going up when you don't use it. If there was a similar calculator but for your own car, it would make it way easier to think twice about owning one

As others mention: it’s more complicated than just travel time in car < travel time on public transit. To add something they haven’t yet mentioned: when not a driver, one can focus on other tasks and be productive. Less so when driving a car, where one’s focus is primarily on the road and only hands-free tasks are possible.

For me, the train is much faster. Whenever I go somewhere with a friend in their car. We spend so long stuck in traffic and then finding parking. While the train leaves every 5 minutes and brings me pretty much directly to my destination.

I never got around to learning to drive (always worked in Dublin, and moved into the city centre after college), and was quite shocked to discover just _how_ much people were spending on it (for instance, apparently avg price of a new car here is 35k; I'd have guessed maybe 10-15 if you'd asked me)?

Of course, there are tradeoffs there; my house cost a _lot_ more than a house in the middle of nowhere, certainly. But all in all I'm glad I avoided tethering myself to a car (I do plan to learn at some point, as it feels like the sort of thing I should be able to do before I'm 40, but I can't see myself actually buying one).

To your point, the people who use/think they need cars probably have a lot of misconceptions about not having them.

But at least they’ve both had and have not had cars.

Not to your point, if you’ve never had a car or even experienced the joys of driving itself or simply being able to go far away on a moment’s notice, your “gladness” of its avoidance may ring as hollow as the blind individual who is “glad” they aren’t bound to the tyranny of visual entertainments. I mean, that’s a nice story you’re telling yourself, but do you really have to information to know?

In particular, once you have children, a vehicle becomes a near-necessity anywhere outside a city.

> simply being able to go far away on a moment’s notice

Buy intercity bus ticket on internet, 15 minute bus journey to where the intercity buses congregate, get on bus. Or train, but Irish Rail likes to charge roughly 2x as much for same-day intercity tickets as next day.

Now, if you want to go to the middle of nowhere, that's harder, I suppose, but towns and cities are easy enough (caveat: Ireland's transport system is rather poorly designed and ~everything radiates out of Dublin, so this probably only works well if you live _in_ Dublin).

As I say, I do plan to get around to learning to drive at some point (my last attempt was foiled by covid; I got a provisional license in Feb 2020), but honestly it's hard to prioritise.

Kids would be more of an issue, granted. I mostly walked or got the bus to school, but I do think that’s less common these days. As a late-30s gay man, not something I have to personally worry about too much, tho.

Few issues highlight just how different the US is from most European countries as well as public transit. Intellectually we all know the US is huge but we don't have a conceptual model of just how crazy big it is in comparison to any European country.

> Not to your point, if you’ve never had a car or even experienced the joys of driving itself or simply being able to go far away on a moment’s notice

I own a car after living for years without one, and for every “I can go away on a moment’s notice” (what they sell you) there is 100 times you spend in traffic at rush hour moving at 4mph.

There’s something truly liberating in living in a city where you can just take the bus to a fancy restaurant, get drunk and not put other lives in danger. Or just walk to the park, the playground or the library.

Or I don't drive into the city at rush hour (usually, sometimes circumstances are different but I try to take the train). But I use my car all the time.

I think that's part of the difference though in what you're interested in though.

Where I live, If you were shooting long range rifle on a 900+ meter range, public transit isn't going to have service that area because it's 90 minutes outside of the city on dirt roads. The more modern pistol / carbine shooting facility nowadays are outside of city limits as well. You get similar issues with if you play paintball, airsoft, if you're into mountain biking, hunting, fishing, etc. Most of the ways to access those are out in far flung rural areas that you can't get to by bus.

If things in the city are what interest you then I can see where you're coming from. Me personally it isn't overly interesting though. I detest bars, I don't eat out, I haven't watched a movie in the last decade, I find live music and theater dull, boring, and uninteresting, and most of my shopping is done at Costco, the grocery store, or online. So... more or less that cuts out 99.99999% of the venues inside of a city for me personally.

Where I live, If you were shooting long range rifle on a 900+ meter range

they'd ask why you aren't shooting across your own land at 5,000 meter and who calls 900m long range anyway? ( watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE )

Yes. Though I’ve been paintballing once or twice, years ago; looks like the place I did it is an hour away (two buses, 10 minute walk) or 30 mins by car. Got to admit shooting never even crossed my mind, but there seem to be a few rifle ranges about an hour away. There seems to generally be a lot of this stuff in the outer suburbs.

My visits to the US have been fairly limited, and mostly to San Francisco, so I’m not sure how typical this is, but one thing that surprised me about San Francisco was that, while there’s a reasonably extensive public transport system in the actual city, it more or less stops dead once you leave. Here, it certainly fades out, but areas where suburban becomes rural are often fairly accessible.

Perhaps. Forgive me for doing so, I did google some rifle ranges in Ireland and the only comparable rifle range to the one I'm speaking of is the Midlands National Shooting Center of Ireland near Tullamore, and it has similar problem to what I was talking about for our long range facilities. We have smaller ranges I think similar to the the ones I believe you're talking about much closer to the city limits and a handful of indoor ranges within city limits.

>but one thing that surprised me about San Francisco was that, while there’s a reasonably extensive public transport system in the actual city, it more or less stops dead once you leave.

I suppose it's a jurisdiction issue. The city here is quick to expand bus service whenever the borders expand or to new communities, but they do not service anything outside of the limits whatsoever. There's little in the way of public transit outside of the municipal level.

Yeah, that might be the difference. We used to have a national system and a Dublin system, but the Dublin system had a very expansive definition of ‘Dublin’ and operated well outside the Dublin local authorities. We now have a national system, though in practice Dublin and area is still a bit of a special case.

Well, "average" price of a car is inflated by people who buy way more car than they need. A 35k average includes all sorts of high-end SUVs and sports or luxury cars. A basic car for modest needs is still under 20k euro. (Not that this invalidates your point, cars are indeed expensive, but just clarifying.)

And that is only on the personal level. The hypothetical societal benefits from tightening up streets and houses (no need for a garage) are probably big too. Hard to realise once a city is built though. Just look at the amount of prime land locked up for traffic. It is pretty amazing to think about how much dead space there is in a typical city.

Since the privatization of public transport it has declined considerably, especially in rural areas. This is one of the reasons why I think things like public transport should always be a government affair and never be run at a profit.

In Ireland about a decade ago we privatised about 15% of the existing Dublin bus network. And... no-one noticed; the old state monopoly and the new private company now run buses under the livery of a new state organisation, TFI, which sets fares and dictates routes. Quite why the private company wanted anything to do with this is slightly unclear to me. The incentive for Dublin Bus was... possibly simplification of operations? They seem to have taken the opportunity to more or less entirely get rid of their single decker buses.

But, so far so... good? It's working surprisingly well so far, though I do find the routes operated by the private company a little less reliable than the Dublin Bus ones. It probably helped that this was done as part of an overall expansion, not just a re-allocation; Dublin Bus lost about 15% of its fleet but got replacements; AFAIK it kept all its drivers.

Nice to see a success story. Here in NL it is the other way around. We used to have fantastic public transport, and then, since the 90's ever expanding privatization which means that 100's of local bus lines have been cancelled and the only places that have good public transport are the places that need them the least.

Old people in rural areas are in real trouble, more so because the same has happened to healthcare which in turn led to a whole wave of hospital closures. And that doesn't seem to have ended. Highly annoying because it was those old people in the first place that helped to pay for all of the infra we use daily.

The end result of 4 liberal conservative cabinets in sequence.

Caveat: I just looked it up, and there are a lot of complaints about one of the privatised routes.

I had the opposite experience: using taxis/Uber/Lyft was far more expensive than owning a car so after Uber stopped subsidizing rides I had to buy a vehicle. That was in a city with a metro system, living in one of its main boroughs.

Even today, a cab to anywhere (even 3 miles) would cost me at least $10 each direction, and we have at least 5 such trips weekly. This easily surpasses the cost of the car, including depreciation and fuel.

$10 each way is $100 a week, a car’s going to cost you more than $400 a month?

More than $400/mo wouldn’t be surprising if the true cost is calculated over a year. Insurance, parts, maintenance, gas, putting the winter tires on, etc, etc, etc.

No. A car can cost much less than $400. Hence I own a car instead of taking taxis.

I own a car and I need one where I live. But I question that owning a car can cost much less than $4800 a year given insurance, maintenance, gas, fees, and other costs. As a purely financial decision, I'd trade for a driver if that were my real cost.

Yes, Western Europe is definitely "streets ahead" of the US in public transportation.

One thing to note though is that costs can be drastically lower if you a) buy used, and b) learn how to do most maintenance yourself.

Most things that typically go wrong with a vehicle aren't that difficult to fix, and parts aren't that expensive, but a mechanic's hourly labor costs tend to add up very quickly.

this submission is not about individual cost of a car but overall societal cost of people using cars.

Well, it touches on both; it’s claim is that the per capita common cost is more than the per capita user cost.

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