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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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.

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

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.

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