Driving 8 hours round trip today to pick up one person, and I’ll never understand why Americans think this is more convenient than my colleague taking a train.
#FuckCars #WarOnCars #TheWarOnCars #Urbanism #CarBrain #PublicTransportation #lightrail @fuck_cars #PublicTransit
While this is often true, I think there’s a habit of comparing apples-to-apples, when they are not the same. Getting to/from the airport is often expensive while train stations are commonly in convenient downtown locations.
Again, I feel like a lot of people over simplify and just go, “My gas is X, the train ticket is Y. X<Y, so driving is cheaper.” It completely ignores maintenance costs and depreciation, which are a lot more than people give them credit for.
I don’t think it is an oversimplification honestly. It might work out as a favorable arrangement if we’re only talking about only moving around within a larger city with robust infrastructure, but the scenario of the post with a 4 hour drive speaks to the fact that this isn’t the case.
For driving a fair distance your expenses will be gas, tolls, and parking generally. A long-range train ticket will likely cost more than all those combined and then on top of that you’ll still likely have to pay for extended parking and/or other transportation on one side of the trip if you don’t have someone you can rely on.
I don’t by any means live in the middle of nowhere and the nearest train station to me is still over a two and a half hour drive. I don’t enjoy it, but the infrastructure just isn’t there to make this a feasible option for many people.
You’re doing exactly what I spoke about, oversimplifying!
Every km you drive brings you a km closer to needing to change your oil, tires, brake pads, etc. You might only think of these expenses when you visit the mechanic, but they can be amortized out when you drive.
Every km you drive decreases the resale value of your car. You might only see this when you sell the vehicle, but that’s part of the price calculation.
EDIT My original comment got cut-off. I’ve completed my thought there.
@n2burns
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe @Caradoc879 @InquisitiveApathy
Those are tiny factors. The vast majority of the costs of a car are fixed no matter how much or little you use it. You have to pay for it up front, license it, and insure it. Those are items you mention are not free, but they are very small costs compared to the fixed costs.
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Sorry, that’s just not true. Some costs are fixed, or have a minimum, but many depend on distance driven. Obviously whether the “majority” of costs are fixed depends on how much you drive/localized costs/etc, but very few people have the “vast majority” of their costs fixed.
If you want sources, feel free to look it up yourself, but here are a few showing the breakdown of ownership
P.S. You actually reminded me, insurance changes with how much you expect to drive! As well, driving more increases the odds that you’ll get into an accident, which can increase your premiums.
@n2burns
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe @Caradoc879 @InquisitiveApathy
I have never seen insurance that checks how much you drive. Maybe they do a neighborhood scale, but not on a personal one. I understand some places have that, but it isn’t universal.
I keep track of my records, and have for years, which is why I say most costs are fixed: they are.
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@yA3xAKQMbq
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe @Caradoc879 @n2burns @InquisitiveApathy
I have had cars that I drove twice the national average, and cars hardly driven at all. In all cases the fixed costs exceed the variable costs. I don’t know where the others are getting there data from, but it doesn’t match mine. Of course different driving habits, but per lifetime of the car (not km!) the fixed costs are more in my experience.
The argument was not whether fixed cost exceed the variable cost or vice versa.
The argument was that a lot of people severely underestimate the actual cost of any given trip because they only account for (a subset of) the variable costs (i.e. gas).
And it’s true. Rarely anyone does full costing when it comes to cars because „the fixed cost are there no matter how much you drive“.
@yA3xAKQMbq
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe @Caradoc879 @n2burns @InquisitiveApathy
the argument in this thread has been about if fixed vs variable costs where more. I fully agree cars are expensive no matter how you do the math, and most people underestimate it (in part by only considering gas). However I stand by my claim that once you have the car you may as well use it as the additional variable costs from all optional trips is tiny (I’m assuming that you have the car for some purpose that cannot be done by something else - towing the proverbial boat for example).
Yep. I live in a suburb outside a major city. To get to the “train station” without a car, I’d need to walk over a mile to the closest bus stop, take that bus up the road to a transfer, take that bus to the light rail station, then take that light rail to the train station. 1 1/2 hours vs 45 minutes driving. And if I’m already driving 45 minutes anyway, I’d rather just stay in my car and go straight to my destination.
Another ignored factor is safety. depending on the city (like mine), public transportation is full of mentally ill and people on drugs. I’ve seen more fights and freaky shit on public transportation than I have the rest of my life combined. I had to physically intervene a dude harassing my client with autism once and shove him out the door. That was the last time I took public transportation because it’s not worth my safety. Thanks drug decriminalization.
Of course, it’s because of the ramping down on the war on drugs, not because of the opioid epidemic, the housing crisis, and rampant poverty!
Time is a resource that once spent can’t be gotten back. I agree that time spent inefficiently is another huge factor, but I don’t think that’s going to be seen as a strong argument in this community so I intentionally omitted it.
I would be careful about making generalizations linking mental illness and public transport. I know you’re commenting based on your own experiences(which are valid), but it’s not going to be the case everywhere and will vary depending on the city support systems, which to your credit you did touch on. Any sufficiently large gathering place, regardless of purpose, is going to have its fair share of weirdos in the end.
“Convenient Downtown Locations” assumes that there is ample public transit to and from those locations. For example, we took a train into Chicago from a small town in Iowa. There was absolutely no public transit going to that station. It was literally a 2 hour drive to the station, and that was the closest train station to us. Additionally, once we got there, we found out that our train was running 6 hours late. This wasn’t communicated to passengers until it was about 30 minutes from the scheduled departure time. This was for a train ride that took 4 hours, and was the same cost as a plane ride that would have been about 45 minutes, and the airport was about a 25 minute drive from our home.
We could have driven the whole thing in 4 hours and it would have been about 1/4 the cost.