TAKING OWNERSHIP
You may or may not have noticed that owning a car is one of the entry points to respectable society. And if you turn on the television or radio or walk down the street or sit on the bus, or just live in the world, you are bombarded with this messaging. Not driving a car, virtually anywhere outside the downtown of a few of our major city centers, is like forfeiting your licence into adulthood and membership in civilization.
(If you doubt this and need evidence just notice that our essential, government issued, personal photo identification card is not a generic citizenship ID, as happens in other countries, but is instead the driver’s licence. This card is your key to the world, while a birth certificate, social insurance card, or provincial health card are important but do very little. Further, according to the National Household Survey in 2011, almost all working Canadians drive. Around 75% of Canadian commuters drive to work and an additional 5% are carpool passengers. Only 12% take public transit, 6% walk, and only 1.5% cycle. Presumably the other 0.5% go by helicopter or po-go stick. Of course across much of Europe and Asia, the better-developed world, these numbers are the reverse: almost everyone walks, cycles, and takes transit – and a driver’s licence or a car are as essential or desirable as owning a private jet...)
On top of being framed as essential, the whole car ownership thing is also portrayed as easily attainable for everyone. (“0% APR financing”, “$0 down at 2% for 60 months”, “Monthly lease from just $150”, etcetera, etcetera.) And, when talking about the cost of transportation, people like to remind me of the exorbitant cost of taking the bus. (Specifically that, if cost is an issue, when you add another person into the mix that quickly makes a shared car a very reasonable alternative.) Incorporate the occasional rental car or intercity bus trip and add to that the time waste waiting for buses, well, you’d have to be a fool to take the bus, they say.
You know what? You’re right. It is a lot of money when you add it up. And, clearly, if you don’t go crazy and keep your mileage low you’re probably not going to spend much more than you would otherwise. Right? Alright, I’m sold. (But let’s crunch the numbers – you know, just to see.)
So a single bus fare costs $2.50. If we pretend I’m busing to and from work five times a week that’s ten trips and $25 per week. Buying a bus pass brings this cost down from $100 per month to just $85 and allows for an unlimited number of trips. So let’s go with the pass.
Then let’s pretend I’m spending a lot on car-share, car rental, and other alternative transportation (which I currently do not do.) Let’s say I’m using the car-share every other day and it’s coming to $100 a month. Let’s say I’m renting a car to leave town once a month, and putting in a few miles, costing me another $100 per month. (Based on the last few years this would be a very generous over-estimation.) Along with this we’ll say I’m taking the bus and train to neighbouring towns around once a week, which comes to around $80 monthly. So I’m spending nearly $300 on bus alternatives each month. (The most I’ve ever spent is $100 in a month and about $300 per year, but let’s just pretend I’ve started a jug band and we’re now touring the regional college scene.)
So all this comes to $385 for the month or (385 x 12) $4,620 for the year. (We’ll ignore that for at least six months of the year I would prefer to walk and ride a bike, regardless of what other options are available, and that doing so drops this number considerably to a still very generous $3,000.)
How does this compare to the cost of a car? Well, I don’t actually own a car and would have to acquire one to start. So let’s say I can find a sturdy little used Honda or Toyota with 150,000 kms on it for around $5,000.
(This may seem like an unreasonable number to whack on to the cost of things, but buying a car isn’t a one-off thing and this is the smallest reasonable price tag, from what I can tell. For any number of reasons, within three to six years I’ll likely need to replace the vehicle. So that’s what, somewhere between $5,000 and $25,000? Even if we just divide the cost of the car over the length of ownership, the annual number you’re talking about is probably something like $1,000 to $3,000 per year. If I were to lease we’re still going to come up with a similar number on top of some amount of money down, so... Great! Got the car.)
Now I have to licence, register, and insure it. That’s $100 annually for the licence and registration. What does insurance cost? Well, depending on who’s driving it seems like it could reasonably cost between $200 and $300 per month, from what I can tell. Let’s just take the low number and say it comes to $2,400 annually. Great!
Unfortunately the vehicle doesn’t run on compost or rainwater so I have to put gas in this sucker. Let’s pretend I picked up a small fuel-efficient Toyota Yaris, or something that will help keep my fuel costs down. At 20,000 km per year and $1 per litre of gas I’m looking at around $1,250 for the year. (Though this seems fair, I think we can agree that there is no telling where these numbers will really be at. It could be sixty cents or a buck eighty...)
If we add up the car costs to this point (5,000 + 100 + 2,400 + 1,250) the basic start-up fee looks to be around $8,500 or $9,000.
But I’ve yet to pay for any of the other essentials. Stuff like a decent emergency kit, winter car kit, and winter tires, at the very least. Let’s say this is another $300 (but you could probably spend more than $500). And then you have the inevitables like fluid and filter changes, brakes, belts, and plug replacements, and other regular maintenance (and there are hundreds of other expenses, from car washings to new wiper blades, etc... you know them well.) This could easily be around $500 for the year. So smack onto that previous total another $800 or so. And with that, lets say about $9,500 gets us safely on the road.
And then there is the likelihood of more significant breakdowns and repairs to think about. A blown transmission or carburetor or alternator, a broken windshield or driveshaft? Of course this could be anything, so for the sake of this comparison we’ll just pretend the car is flawless and the driver lucky, that nothing goes wrong and if it does either insurance covers the bulk of it or there’s a YouTube video out there that makes fixing it a breeze. And we’ll also ignore road and bridge tolls, parking fees, and traffic fines too...
So it seems like at most $4,620 for public and shared transportation and a generous low-ball estimate of about $9,500 for a car.
“But that’s not right, you’ve gotta look at the time lost getting to and from, waiting for, and sitting on the bus”, they tell me. Right. Don’t forget that. But how, then, do we value that time? Well, for simplicity let’s peg it to the same value of an hour of work. (Minimum wage in Ontario is $11.) And let’s say your whole commute, including wait times, is an hour. From my experience this is probably pretty fair for your average route in your average city. (That’s not what it would be for a subway, skytrain, or commuter train though, but we’ll ignore those for simplicity.) So we have two hours per day, ten hours per week, and forty hours per month. (Wow, that’s a lot. That’s a whole other work week added to my month, just sitting on the bus.) At $11hr that adds another $440 per month, or $5,300 per year, to the alternative transport category. This takes the total up from $4,600 to something close to $10,000.
But if we’re going to look at time lost sitting on the bus we have to look at time spent lost in traffic in the car. Let’s say the one hour bus ride takes just fifteen or twenty minutes by car. (I think that’s fair.) So that’s a quarter the time of the bus: so $110 per month, or $1,320 per year. This takes the car cost up to approximately $11,000.
That said, you’ll notice these aren’t similar activities, bus and car downtime, so it isn’t a fair comparison. Time spent on the bus can be, and often is, valuable and productive time. It can be time spent doing work, communicating, learning, or just relaxing. On the other hand, driving time is truly lost time. It is in fact illegal to be doing anything other than focussing on driving. And, further, if you drive you will likely end up trying to find ways to catch up on the activities you could have done had you been travelling by any other mode. This may translate into spending the first thirty minutes of your day checking email or fitting in an hour somewhere to do some reading for pleasure. And we all love to focus on the little time spent waiting for the bus while ignoring the tremendous amount of time killed gassing, maintaining, and repairing automobiles.
So, really, the addition of time wasted on the bus is almost entirely overblown. In my mind, while the estimate of owning a car can remain at around $11,000, the alternative estimate should drop back to $4,620.
If you agree with my math, it looks like busing easily costs far less than driving. And this situation still ignores all of the other costs of driving that aren’t encompassed by the aforementioned ownership and running fees. Just looking at this most trivial half of the car ownership equation, you must spend a couple thousand dollars more per year on a car than you would on alternatives. This actually translates into major impacts on your life. (For instance, if all you are concerned about is money, choosing to drive will result in you needing to work ten or even twenty years longer than otherwise before being able to retire. If instead of buying a car, or several of them, you took even a portion of the difference and invested it, even very conservatively, you would easily buy yourself another five or ten years of retirement.)
However you choose to travel, obviously, imposes benefits and burdens on society. These effects are not abstract: you experience them first-hand every single day. In fact, organizations like Transportation Canada and the European Commission on Mobility and Transport produce regular reports delineating all of these external costs of various forms of transportation. When you drive you cover the immediate vehicle costs and associated fees, and you pay taxes as well. The rest of society pays for the infrastructure (roads, lights and signage, street cleaning and road repairs, etc), your emissions and noise pollution, the cost related to accidents and traffic congestion and, yes, climate change. This “full-cost accounting” shows that your driving is actually heavily subsidised. When economists crunch the numbers they show that for every $1.00 you spend driving the rest of society pays around $9.00 to support you and your choice. The same analysis can be done for busing; and when we run those numbers we find that for every $1.00 spent busing society pays only $1.50. So the difference is significant. But all of this is still just focussing on the most direct financial costs.
There are real personal health differences between driving and busing, and you feel all those directly every day as well. For example the average public transit user will walk ten or twenty minutes to and from their stop. This may not seem like much but is consistently shown to improve both your mental and physical health. And even as little as ten minutes per day actually adds up fast and translates to something like half your recommended weekly exercise (according to the World Health Organization and to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) By contrast, sitting in your car is deleterious to your health and driving in traffic, whether you notice or not, causes stress. This means, at the very least, you would have to set aside an hour or two per week for for going to the gym or riding your bike to achieve the same health benefit inherent to taking transit. Naturally, walking and cycling to work carry personal health benefits far above and beyond that of taking transit. When we crunch the numbers these modes of travel actually produce a range of benefits felt by everyone. You improve your health, your life expectancy, and your work productivity when you walk or cycle. All of society benefits from these factors as well, including your not contributing to traffic congestion and pollution and your being less likely to take sick days or wind up in hospital. In dollar terms, even after accounting for infrastructure, operating costs, travel time, and accidents it is calculated that every kilometre you walk or cycle doesn’t cost society but actually saves it money.
Over your life, and across all of society, these seemingly small and personal costs and benefits translate into something quite significant. Even if all you care about is the extrinsic dollar accounting, the choice between driving a car and travelling by alternative means seems to me so obvious. I mean, it’s just the difference between choosing to be a burden on both yourself and all of society or not. Isn’t it?
What do you think?
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