NYT on the costs of owning a car
It averages $8,758.00 per year, per household. (This takes into account all costs of ownership, not just purchase.)
So if you make twenty dollars an hour that means you pay for your car in about 450 hours of work, or just shy of twelve weeks. A week every month to have a car. Worth it?
Now think of it this way. Let’s say you travel 1000 miles a month, 12,000 miles a year. For every 1000 miles you drove you spent 40 hours sitting at work. Now this next step is the one that is the most interesting to me.
Say you averaged 30 mph in those 1000 miles. (That is an extremely generous speed, by the way.) That means you spent 33 hours sitting in the car. But you also had to spend forty hours sitting at work to pay for the car. Which meant it really took you 73 hours to go those 1000 miles.
People who spend 73 hours to go 1000 miles are averaging 13.7 miles per hour.
Of course, the real suckers in all of this are people like me, who own cars but rarely drive them. Sigh.
–Erik Ryberg
March 20th, 2009 at 9:30 am
The average commuting speed for people who drive is more like 12-15 MPH in a typical city, not 30MPH.
So factoring in the amount of work time needed to pay for and maintain a vehicle, in effect, people who drive are moving not much faster than someone walking. And that’s before you factor in the cost to society.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:25 am
I think it is ironic that this is about how fast you could go on a bike, easily.
March 20th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
my friends in big cities are carless, and they use car sharing programs like Zip Car (www.zipcar.com). In a big city, where parking costs as much as an apartment in Tucson, it’s a great way to go.
March 21st, 2009 at 11:32 am
Can we call in an economist to factor in the long term public and personal health cost of driving a car vs riding a bike?
March 21st, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Locally (Dallas TX) the cost for ownership went past $10K a year about a decade ago, as our crap roads beat a car to death in about 3 years instead of the 5 or so that is the national average. I gave up on car ownership back in 1995.