But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local public transit.
Both held a license for 20+ years, both in our early 40s with no accidents in that time.
Car maintenance cost varies - haven't had to deal with that yet.
Depending on the study you look at it costs an owner $8 876 per year and society about 1/3 of the lifetime cost in supporting the vehicle (in the form of roads, pollution, infrastructure etc.)
I never had a car in London (where public transport is used by all regardless of income and background). Here in the US we have a long way to go before we level up our public transportation system.
That said, Washington DC's Metro is very good indeed. I hope they extend it further and further out.
Sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/02/04/lifetime...
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/study-car-ownership-c...
> I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive
Whereas you can usually find a reliable and efficient used car for under $5000 and keep it for quite a bit more than 2 years, with a good driving record and the lower cost vehicle it can cost less than $1000/year to insure, and maintenance is dramatically less expensive if you do it yourself. And I mean the difference is $60 for a part on the internet vs. they charge you $250 for the same part and $500 for the labor to put it in.
By contrast, a monthly NYC subway pass will run you a little over $1500/year, which will in most cases be less but not necessarily a whole lot less. Plus whatever you get stuck paying to Uber whenever you have to go somewhere the subway doesn't.
My first car cost about $750 all-in, not counting equity in the car. My commute dropped from 3 hours to less than 1 hour, even in the notorious Toronto traffic. Suddenly I could go to Costco, and my grocery bill dropped by half, from around $800 to around $400.
I got a good deal both buying and selling, and on the subsequent car, so my true cost was less than the monthly payment.
Public transit makes sense in very dense areas. Everywhere else it’s an expensive boondoggle and the working class is better off driving old clunkers than the damn bus.
To throw some numbers out: A "cheap" used car ($5k), financed over 3 years at 8% is $156.68 per month. At my middle age, decent full coverage insurance is around $100 per month (it would cost a lot more if I were still younger). We're at $256.68 monthly just to have a car that we may elect to drive.
But that doesn't include parking for the car (a place to live with good parking tends to cost more than a place with awful parking). It also doesn't include the costs of actually driving the car, like regular maintenance, stuff that inevitably breaks or wears out, fuel, washing the car, and so on. Let's just make up a number and say that these things average ~$150 per month, for a total of ~$406.68 per month to drive a car.
Now, suppose that a commute is 20 minutes each way using that car, or 1 hour if riding the bus. And that a bus pass costs $62 per month.
And let's say that a person "brings home" $25 per hour worked, and that they work 40 hours in a regular week (173.93 hours in a regular month), and that the commute time counts as unpaid work.
The car commute adds 14.49 hours per month, for 188.42 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $406.68.
The bus commute adds 43.48 hours per month, for 217.41 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $62.
The bus seems cheaper and slower at this point, which we all probably implicitly knew to be true.
--
But if my math is right: By the time transportation is paid for, the person commuting by car has an effective hourly wage of $20.92 for their time+commute. And the person riding the bus has an effective hourly wage of $19.73/hour for their time+commute.
So owning and driving the car may be a better option than taking the bus, depending on a person's specific situation and proclivities. And of course, it's more nuanced than that in ways that are harder to math out.
With a car, commute time is just lost time. A person driving a car must drive that car the entire time; they don't get to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever, but they're only doing that for 40 minutes a day.
With a bus pass, commute time might be productive time. A person riding a bus might decide to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever. So if a person chooses to do so, they can use some of that 43.48 hours riding back and forth to work doing something that has meaning to them.
On the other hand: Owning a cheap(ish) car means being able to travel to places where a bus doesn't go, and do so on a whim, and (optionally) take a mountain of stuff along with them if that is useful for whatever reason.
So yeah, cars are expensive. But buses are also expensive. (Life is expensive.)
Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper.
Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes.
My ultimate dream for society, as a whole, is for everyone to "be rich". I don't necessarily mean having a disgusting surplus of money in the bank, but rather to eliminate the innumerable aspects of being "not rich" that boil down to an endless string of otherwise unnecessary daily sacrifices, sufferings and indignities. Then, at least, we'd begin to see the trauma of poverty be reduced and hopefully eliminated.
In this case, that means turning a gimlet eye to the human cost of unavoidable mass transport that isn't rail. Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category. This opens up easier access to work, relationships, housing, and food including breaking down the barriers of food deserts.
Thanks. The commute time was more an aspect of the innate slowness bus transportation combined with the unavoidable route through city side streets. In other words, it would be hard to improve upon. By car, the route is thirty minutes.
Public transport is cheap for an individual, and when many people use it, it reduces traffic and pollution.
Cars have the opposite effect. They are expensive for an individual, and when many people use them, it increases traffic and pollution…
Don’t aim to increase cars on the road, it’s better and cheaper for everyone to improve public transport
Then public transport should be way cheaper than driving, as on transit you have some downtime where you can scroll through your phone, listen to some music, or perhaps even crack open your laptop if you're on a proper train. Driving requires constant attention, so you can't relax or do anything else in the meantime.
At the limit the optimal commute is work from home.
You can lament all you want, but the difference in space between a car and an apartment/office building makes the problem you're discussing completely unsolvable.
So, if you really care about making everyone richer, the only question you can ask is how to improve public transit. Anything else is pure make-believe.
> Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category.
nobody should live in a sprawl or rural area so far they need to commute two hours. make transit and trains fast and cheap and frequent, build opportunities in cities, and design cheap housing in desirable areas.
You don't get to imagine an alternative like "cars for everyone", because it's simply not possible.
I do agree that work-from-home should be a part of the transit solution. But not even the entire software industry can work from home, nevermind all the other industries that sometimes use computers.