Several years ago I asked my mom why she lived so far from where she worked (Vallejo, CA to San Ramon, CA), and she claimed they were saving money on cheaper rent. Five minutes of napkin paper math later I pointed her and her partner were spending roughly $700/month commuting in gas, bridge toll, and basic wear+tear on their vehicles (based on ~$0.45/mile).

It seems like most people don't account for vehicle costs when accounting for cost of living. Why I'm not positive, though it seems to just be the general abstractness of the cost spread out over time, and the assumption in America that you're going to drive everywhere anyway so it doesn't matter.

Even worse we see this with numerous Uber/Lyft/delivery "contractors" who are putting endless miles on their personal vehicles without accounting for the inevitable cost of replacing them.

Why $.45/mile? Is that real? I keep track of all my expenses, so a few years ago I was able to calculate my real lifetime costs at $.15/mile, asymptotically approaching $.10. Of course when I travel for work the IRS says I charge $.50/mile, which is pure profit.

The IRS numbers assume a newish car (more expensive) that gets poor fuel mileage. It is probably correct for the average car, but there is no reason you need to be average - unless you want to.

In my country (EU, so gas is a bit more expensive) the government calculates* transport costs at 0.37eur/km. So $0.45/mi would be in the right ballpark.

You have to account everything, not just fuel, from car depreciation, servicing (oil changes,...), normal wear (brakes, tires,...), occasional replacements (batteries, wipers, ...), etc. If you drive 20.000kms per year, and a yearly service (oil, filters,...) costs 200eur, just that adds aditional 0.01eur/km. Two sets of tires (winter/summer) are ~2300eur + 8 changes (8~40eur) adds an additional (almost) ~1k eur in four years, 1 more cent. Insurance, registration.. 3, 4 cents. etc.

*that's the untaxed amount you get reimbursed for if you use your own car for a business trip.

There are two different calculations here. One is, what's the total cost of vehicle ownership amortized per mile? That's what the government and most popular types of accounting use.

The other is, given I'm going to own a car already, what's the difference between a shorter commute and a longer one? That's going to be a lower number per mile. A big chunk of the vehicle's depreciation is a result of years rather than miles, insurance doesn't generally track how many miles you drive and charge extra if you drive more, the registration and tax isn't any different etc.

The second one is how a lot of people end up all the way out in the suburbs. They can't afford to live in the part of the city that makes it viable to not have a car at all, but once you have a car as a sunk cost, another ten or twenty (or thirty or ...) miles in exchange for saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on housing starts to look like a good deal.

Though the huge factor people commonly forget is their own time. If your time is worth $25/hour then a half hour each way on your commute is $6500/year. And that's assuming you're only further away from work and not also further away from whatever you do on weekends.

> A big chunk of the vehicle's depreciation is a result of years rather than miles

Ehhhh, I'd say that it's not that skewed towards age of the vechile beyond common correlations:

  - usually more years = more miles
  - cars < 5 years are usually in warranty and fetch a premium

> insurance doesn't generally track how many miles you drive and charge extra if you drive more

Mine does: in 5000km increments. (Australia)

> Ehhhh, I'd say that it's not that skewed towards age of the vechile beyond common correlations

But the warranty period is a huge amount of value, and there are others, e.g. newer cars are safer and have whatever other improvements so older cars aren't worth as much regardless of milage. Then many repairs are age related rather than mileage related, e.g. a car exposed to the elements will rust or experience day/night thermal stress even if you don't drive it.

> Mine does: in 5000km increments. (Australia)

Let me rephrase this. The insurance cost does not scale linearly with miles driven.

"Mine does: in 5000km increments. (Australia)"

Insurance has interesting edge cases, like 3rd party can be more expensive than comprehensive, as risky drivers go for the former.

I've had insurance before, where putting in a higher mileage lowers the premium. I assume there's a lower bound where you start getting into Sunday driver territory where risks start increasing?

My insurance company has asked me to confirm my miles per year on occasion, especially the commuting part.

Most of the charges you list are mostly fixed (with time) rather than variable (with distance driven). Yearly service and yearly tire swapping: doesn't change by miles. Batteries and wipers: mostly fixed. Depreciation: probably 80% fixed. Insurance: mostly fixed. Registration: totally fixed.

On a marginal basis ("what does it cost me to drive one extra mile?"), I think my cost is about 7-9 US cents on my electric and about 12-15 US cents on my wife's CR-V. On an overall basis ("what does it cost me in total for the cars divided by how many miles I drove?"), the figures are more like $1/mile for the electric (still have a car payment, full insurance, and only drive 4500 miles/year) and $0.30-$0.40/mile for the Honda (paid off, so just carrying insurance, registration, taxes, and some timed maintenance items)

If we moved farther away, our fixed costs stay about the same, and it's only the variable costs that go up.

I did account for everything above. I keep track of everything.

Note that I do my own maintenance on Saturdays, so I don't put a monetary value on my time. However before you say I should account for my time, do you account for your time taking the car to the shop - I started doing that a few years ago and stopped because I realized that for most things I could get it done faster myself than take it in. (taking it in accounting for all time getting the car to the shop, arranging rides (sometimes a loaner car, sometimes my wife's time), and paperwork. When doing the work myself I can stop at the auto parts store next to the grocery store and so much less time needs to be accounted for there.

Yes, that number is very real. Especially if you start including non obvious costs like insurance, on top of ones like gas, maintainence, license and and registration, etc. I’m near $.90/in my current car. (That number is skewed high because It’s paid off early and I now have a 2 mile commute to work, so there was a lot of money upfront and I don’t pack on the miles anymore) but I would wager $.50 is right near the mean. But buying cheap used and running it 200k miles will bring your costs down for sure, but $.10? At 30mpg and $3.00/gallon you’re looking at $.10 cents a mile already!

How is including the fixed costs at all fair? Even if someone lived clothes enough to use public transport some some activities; work during rush hour. People in the US often still need a car to get to everything else in a timely manner such as doctor appointments. Groceries are a big one as well, how are you going to carry 2 weeks of food for 2-4 people on a bus or rail? A lot of public transport users still need to drive to the station.

My estimation is that a large portion of public transport users only use it for part of their transport needs thus making the fixed costs of car ownership a sunk cost.

Therefore, the variables costs; gas (or electricity) and maintenance make the most sense to use in living cost estimations. Even at the extreme end where you can live in the middle of a city and use public transport for mostly everything, you'd still need a car or a friend with one to go skiing.

Owning a car has costs, some if them are fixed, including them are entirely fair.

We could have a debate about including it in a per mile rate, rather than splitting it out, but ultimately they are costs car owners have to pay, and non car owners don't.

A sunk cost is still a cost. A cost you have to pay is still a cost.

We can’t say that car ownership is a consequence of location if you are going to own the car regardless of location. Plenty of city-dwelling transit commuters drive on the weekends; it’s not fair to say that transit access == zero vehicles.

I think we could say it switches from a necessity to a leisure expense, and that city dwelling households can get most of what they want from a single car vs. several.

I'm not sure that we can't say car ownership is a consequence of location. Plenty doesn't mean all, and transit access == zero vehicles is an argument no ones making.

Clearly if a household moves from several cars to one car, fixed costs will decrease, which seems like an argument to measure fixed costs.

I'd agree with your point about vehicles potentially being leisure expenses, you could perhaps go further and start dividing up those fixed costs between leisure use, and business use. I'd even accept the argument that if you need a car, your leisure transport should be free from the fixed costs, as they have to be borne anyway, but they do have to be accounted for somewhere.

The fixed costs still depreciate. You still have to either pay upfront for the car, finance it and pay interest, or lease it, and the car has a fixed lifetime. Repair/maintenance should go in there as well.

I'd be curious how many miles the grandparent has on the car though. My per-mile costs are also sky-high (because it's 10 years old and only has about 40k miles on it - I think it works out to $0.75/mile or so), but the flip side is that if this drives like a normal Honda it should be good for another 150k miles and, if I don't get into an accident or change my driving habits, I will never need to purchase another car.

Current just over 260,000 miles. This makes a big difference in my per-mileage calculations, as you said, someone who drives less than I did (I had a few contract jobs far from home) would see different numbers.

Nit. Your driving costs shouldn't be affected if you pay off your loan early, the cost of the car should be averaged over the expected life of the car. If it were it should be downwards as you aren't paying interest.

I track every tank so I know exactly how much I've spent on fuel. Of course I'm also getting 46mpg not 30 which makes a big difference.

If you buy a $30k car, and manage to get 120k miles out of it before you scrap it, you are paying $.25 a mile just in capital depreciation expense. That's before fuel, insurance, property taxes, maintenance and repairs.

What about a $10,000 used car you buy with 50,000 miles and run until a good 150,000? That's just 10 cents per mile. Depending on the make, the repairs may not be much, either.

I've bought $500 cars before. Didn't last too long (it was a nice car, but it was an interference engine and broke the timing chain), but averaged 10 cents per mile.

People who spend 45 cents per mile are the type who lease their cars or buy new cars regularly. Lots of us out here make do happily with far less.

Mister Money Mustache estimates "very cheap" driving costs to be around 17 cents per mile:

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-...

Now, I will admit that it is possible to bring your cost per mile down somewhat. That’s one of my own specialties, which is why I still keep a car of my own around for affordable family roadtrips. If you buy the right car for $5,000, you might be able to squeeze 100,000 miles out of it with no major repairs. In this case the car depreciation is 5 cents per mile.

Gas, at $3.50 per 35 miles (assuming 35MPG), is 10 cents/mile Tires, at $300 per 50,000 miles are 0.6 cents Oil, at $25 per 5,000 miles is 0.5 cents Miscellaneous things like wipers and occasional maintenance visits: $200 per 20,000 miles = 1 cent

So the ultimate cheap driving in a paid-off economy car still costs at least 17 cents per mile.

It's possible to do even better... I bought a used electric car (Volt) for about $9600. It had about 65k miles. It does about 85% of its miles electric (meaning oil changes and brakes are super rare), so over the next 100,000 miles, we're talking about 14 cents per mile total, roughly.

Many of the assumptions are different for different cars. For my car it is $3 per 46 miles, or $0.065/mile. Note that 46MPG is actual, EPA would give me 41.

A car at 120k miles is nowhere near being "scrapped". What will actually happen in that case is someone else is going to buy it and put another 100k miles on it.

What can you get for it, $3-5k? That's still $.21 - $.22 per mile only in depreciation and before factoring the time value of money.

Why sell it? The average millionaire drives a 15 year old car they bought new. A well maintained car will last a lot longer than most people give them credit for. You get tired of the old thing, but it will runs.

Welcome to Michigan. Or anywhere else that uses road salt.

Newer vehicles are a lot better, but cars age quite a lot faster with salted roads.

I live in Iowa. No stranger to road salt.

As a family living in a rural area with a large commute (driving) to a major UK city I still see it as a net benefit even if you factor in large cost for vehicle maintenance etc.

I get to live away from the hustle and bustle of the concrete jungle for one.

out of curiosity, did you account for her time in the car as any sort of expense? I assume it's downtime she can't use to do something else. (though some people enjoy driving, listening to music or podcasts, etc, so for them maybe it doesn't matter.)

There's a huge connection between housing and transportation, one affects the other in profound ways.

NIMBY Environmentalist, please take note: For example, in the bay area, high housing prices push people to the outer boundaries of the bay for housing, like Tracy, Stockton and beyond. Imagine the impact on the environment as most people are commuting 100+ miles per day more than if they were simply allowed to live where they work.

> NIMBY Environmentalist

This is a real thing. Exhibit A is the San Francisco Sierra Club.

https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/the-sierra-club-fi...

Usually the opposition to density is just cloaked in environmentalism.

When it comes down to it, these are individuals who don't want outsiders moving their community, or new units driving down the explosive growth in property values they have experienced.

As usual, it is just greedy people wanting more.

As a carpetbagger in Southern California, I totally understand the resistance to people like myself moving in. It's not greedy to wish you could maintain the same standard of living and advocate for policies that protect it.

It may be unrealistic and have huge costs, but it's not malicious. I'd hate it if I moved into my neighborhood 15 years ago in a low density unit or single family home, and now have to deal with nonstop construction, noise, traffic, and general overcrowding as people keep moving in, property taxes/rents go up, and wages stay the same.

Or maybe they just don't want more density. You talk like there's only upsides to high-density cities but the people who are living there right now might not be amused about more people, more cramped spaces, more noise and pollution. You can call it greed but it is, as a matter of fact, a downgrade in quality of life for most of the residents.

> Or maybe they just don't want more density.

Which is a fine thing to want -- so go live somewhere that occurs naturally without regulatory restrictions. There are plenty of areas in the US, or even within California, with low and medium density that require no artificial restrictions to keep them that way.

> The thing is somewhere that occurs naturally could change tomorrow.

So could a million other things. The local government could become corrupt and raise taxes while cutting services to divert money to cronies, leaving you in the middle of a violent slum with a high unemployment rate. Your employer could move its offices thirty miles further from where you live. Climate change could put your whole town underwater.

The solution to things changing in a way you don't like is to vote with your feet. And at least in this case you're effectively being compensated for it, because an area that is being developed will cause your land to be worth more. Some developer will pay you a lot of money to put up more apartments or condos where you are, and then you have all that money to go somewhere else -- where the land will generally be less expensive, yielding you a nice profit to compensate you for your trouble.

You can live in any kind of place you want. You can't expect that place to never change.

And predicting this isn't really that hard. I can predict with reasonable certainty that twenty years from now Des Moines will still not have the population density of New York City, and a person making the same prediction twenty years ago would also have been right. San Francisco is the exception, not the rule.

Also: zoning tends to bottle up changes, so rather than gradually getting some 2-plexes, 4-plexes, and a few 6-plexes, you go straight from single family units to larger apartments, which are more of an abrupt change.

Where I lived in Italy, it was pretty normal to see everything from SFHs to 10-plexes, but big apartments with dozens of units were not very common at all.

> Or you know, just vote in municipal election or go to cityhall hearings, since that's how cities work, and that's exactly how people do it. It's not super weird for people living in a city to try and dictate how the city they live in work.

The problem obviously being that there are people who work in the city and would like to live there but can't afford to and thereby don't get a vote even though they have a stake. So then you get efforts to overrule the cities at the state level and so on, and the outcome of that process is whoever can capture 50%+1 of the votes regardless of your preference as an individual. Whereas if you move to somewhere your preferences are likely to remain satisfied you don't have to worry about any of that.

> Last time I moved cities I ended up having to move 3 times in a row because of unexpected things.

Moving is work. But so is fighting everybody just so you don't have to.

And the people who want to be able to live in the city don't have that option. Moving into the city is what they want, but the housing needed for all of them to do that doesn't exist, so their only option is to cause it to.

> Except a NIMBY thinks about "their backyard" for a reason: Who cares about the city's population density. The problem is the 10 story building popping up across the super tiny quiet street because a special permit was issued to override zoning.

Not a lot of ten story apartment buildings go up in the middle of a hundred square miles of farmland.

> You already said "The problem obviously being that there are people who work in the city and would like to live there". So people who are already there and already have that should give it up so others can have it. Got it.

The people who want to live there want to live in a city, i.e. a place with ten story apartment buildings. The people who are already there can continue to live there all they like, but if you don't want to live in a city with all that entails then why are you? There are suburbs all over the place if that's what you want.

> A stake for sure, but compared to people who not only work there, but sleep there, go to school there, pay taxes there, shaped it, took part in the decisions that made it what it is? A very minuscule stake.

Explicitly because you're imposing rules that prohibit them from having those things, even though both they and the owners of the property that could be used to allow them to do that would like to allow it.

> I don't live in the city I work in. Short of them shutting down the roads and the subway, those who do can do whatever they want. Fortunately they seem to like those roads and subway, so there's no big push (that I've seen) to do so.

There is a clause in the US Constitution that allows the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. It's used as an excuse for them to regulate everything under the sun, but its purpose is to deal with conflicts between regions. If Texas has a bunch of oil companies and wants to enact protectionist rules to impede the rise of electric cars, there is a national interest in preventing them from doing that.

It's no different between cities and towns. Everybody wants protectionist policies that benefit themselves at the expense of everybody else, but those policies are net negative for society and the people you're screwing over have every right to try to stop you.

> There are suburbs all over the place if that's what you want.

Not SF obviously, but most places where these debates pop up ARE suburbs. Thats the whole problem. People spend forever finding a place that suits their need, and then others come in trying to transform them into something that suits theirs instead. Which is fine I guess, but I'd be hard pressed to say one side has the moral high ground.

100 years ago they were farmland or forest. Things change. We can't expect our cities to stop evolving.

No one ever called NIMBYs irrational, it's just that when they always win shortages just get worse and worse and worse

In order to save humanity we ALL need to downgrade the quality of our lives.

That's exactly the point.

What's odd is that tons of Americans spend a whole bundle of money every year to go to Europe, and talk about how great it is.

Having lived there for a number of years, it's just different, really, and certainly not "worse" than the US, if you're an adaptable person.

Our rental here in the US has a massive front lawn that is a complete waste of land and water - to keep the stupid lawn that no one ever, ever uses green.

It has a big back yard too. Our kids like it, but to be honest, I think they preferred the situation in Italy, where we had no yard, but a park close by where they'd often find friends to play with.

Even Europe lives at unsustainable levels. The impoverished world wants better lives too.

There's no way the west can continue to grow consumption. The world will run out of trees.

Eh, they're an organization I'll never give money to because of their anti mountain bike stance, but the national level one is pretty good on most 'urbanism' type issues. They understand that denser living leads to less sprawl, that cars are horrible for the environment, long commutes are bad, and so on.

The SF group seems to just stick their fingers in their ears and shout "I'VE GOT MINE GO LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE LIKE STOCKTON OR MAYBE IOWA".

That's about as fair as saying that the fossil fuel lobby won't be happy until every last living thing on Earth cooks in a Venusian Armageddon.

Actually, it's a bit less fair then that.

The fact that this article does not break down the various transportation costs sets off massive red flags.

The $3k/yr number mentioned for the cost of transportation via car in Houston is on the same order as an MBTA rail pass in the Boston area. Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston.

Yes of course transit is not free but that's true whether regardless of your mode of transit. The premise is solid. The analysis is lacking.

> Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston.

Having lived in both places, and currently living in metro Boston without a car, I'm of the opposite opinion. To each their own.

> To each their own.

... as long as they help pay for the externalities all that driving is responsible for.

I don't think anybody in the world is doing this, right? The environmental impact of all these cars?

A great bit of activity San Francisco saw recently was someone renting out parking spaces as "office spaces" for like 2.50$ an hour. It pointed out that a similar space in a building would probably go for more like 10$/hour or more, highlighting how little we're valuing our street-side real estate.

In Denmark cars are taxed 100% and they still prob aren't paying their fair share. They do have lots of people walking, biking, and taking tansit.

One thing my European friends tend to not understand is just how big the US is. For a huge portion of none-coastline America, driving is the only mode of transport.

"Denmark is approximately 43,094 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km. Meanwhile, the population of Denmark is ~5.6 million people (321.0 million more people live in United States)" From a quick search.

Typical Americans don't commute across state lines. The size of the US is just a stupid argument. The typical US commute is not that much longer than the typical European commute. 80% of the trips are below 10 miles.

I disagree. It's not just about the commute, it's about the fact that there is almost zero public transpo infrastructure in the US. For example, I had a near 40 mile drive just to get to my highschool, and a 75 mile drive to the closest Walmart.

Also, given the numbers I just posted, even if your 80 percent number is right, that's still a portion of the population doing long commutes, and that number of people is more than the entire population of Denmark!

Look, I've traveled in places with great public infrastructure and I really want the US to work very hard towards it, but I get tired of all the Europeans who always in any thread of this subject start ridiculing us without even fully comprehending how large the US is. Do we need to put major money and work into it? Yes. Does that mean it's actually feasible for people to get rid of their vehicles? Not yet for anyone except those in the best public transpo cities.

"Your argument is stupid" ... great one...

The lack of public transport is not due to the distance between New York and San Francisco. It's decades of car-centric city planning that is responsible. Russia is a big country too and public transport in Moscow was pretty good when I visited.

There are people with very long commutes in Europe too. I personally know people who commute 100km+ one way.

If you had to drive 75 miles to get to the next Walmart you probably didn't live in an urban area so any arguments against cars in urban areas don't apply to your lifestyle. You won't find public transport in the countryside in Europe either.

Yes, gas is way more expensive in Europe, in general.

Forget externalities, car owners aren't even actually paying for the roads they use. Gas tax pays for significantly less than half of the road budget in the US, although the exact percentage varies on a state by state basis. The rest comes out of general tax receipts.

Hah, quite correct. I have a link to that in my 'urbanism' bookmarks:

https://taxfoundation.org/state-road-funding-2017/

I did DC in a black truck with no A/C for awhile. Still better than the MBTA.

> Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston.

I'd really like to see how you come to this conclusion.

More control of when you leave/arrive, storage space to transport things, not dealing with other people, ability to go wherever you want, air conditioning.

There are downsides like traffic, car maintenance, and parking, but in general, cars are probably more comfortable than public transit in the US. I'm also ignoring externalities like pollution and unsustainable suburban sprawl growth. I'd rather take the subway Mon to Fri in NYC, but if the roads are empty, the streets are faster and more comfortable.

Unfortunately, public transit is awesome if everyone has to take it, but if enough people opt out, and we give them an option like a personal car and pave roads over where we could have had public space, then cars become optimal for the individual.

I personally like a hybrid approach. I absolutely hate driving in a city, and trying to find (and pay for) parking. So I drive to a park-n-ride that is outside the city, park for a couple bucks, then take light-weight rail into the city. This does require the physical ability to walk quite a bit once you are in the city, however, which a number of people can't do much of due to physical issues (starting to include myself in that category).

This hybrid approach still requires purchase and regular operation of an entire personal vehicle, which will not be entirely attenuated by simply driving half as many miles. So if [driving] and [public transit] both cost x, the hybrid solution will definitely cost more than x, up to 2x, which means most people will only do one or the other.

I dislike the hybrid approach because that's what makes it impossible to optimize a community for either public transit or private cars. You can't do both at the same time, the resources that would make public transit amazing are being used up by infrastructure for private cars.

Park-n-ride has great quality of life but costs a ton because you inevitably wind up paying the cost of driving, parking and public transit.

Like everything else, it depends.

It would cost me approximately $23/day to drive to work accounting for gas + parking, even more if I wanted to pay to use the HOV lane. Instead I drive to a park and ride and take an express bus. The total estimated cost is around $6 including my gas costs.

> Park-n-ride has great quality of life but costs a ton because you inevitably wind up paying the cost of driving, parking and public transit.

Somebody pays for the cost of your parking. If you're parking at work, it's your boss. If you're parking on the street, it's taxpayers at large. If you're parking in a park and ride, it's you.

Park and rides are generally built in areas where the cost of parking is much lower then it is downtown, so the overall cost of a P&R + bus ticket will often be lower then driving and parking the whole way yourself.

Maybe, but my feudal lord offers a discounted bulk public transit pass plus park-n-ride combo.

The worst consequence of a car-heavy culture, to me, isn't the pollution (or any other externalities we don't normally account for because cars!).

It's that a car-heavy culture takes the choice away for everybody for any other transportation.

I'm sure driving around Houston is great, but say I don't want to, for whatever reason (I want to drink a lot to celebrate something)...or say I can't, because of a health condition...

because of the car culture, I now have no choice.

There should be a way to structure cities to return choice to people, instead of giving up 35% of our usable land to streets that force people to move about in personal vehicles; freedom should mean the freedom to choose one's transportation, not just the freedom to own and maintain a vehicle.

I think you're drastically underestimating the health impact of of driving. Public transit incorporates walking and you can relax on the train, read a book or stream something. Driving usually means stressful traffic, road rage, and overall lost exercise.

40 minutes standing or even sitting on a hard plastic seat is not my idea of relaxing. I admit that you'll get more exercise, but no thanks; I'll walk somewhere a bit more pleasurable then downtown.

I find being in close quarters with that many people way more stressful then driving.

Driving excessive amounts or in high traffic situations is worse than public transit.

Sorry, I was unclear. Yes, I totally agree: I believe driving is substantially worse for your physical and mental health than transit.

In personal terms, I sought a new job where I could take the T or bike to avoid driving as the extreme antisocial behavior of other Boston drivers was taking a serious toll on me.

I don’t know about you, but my WMATA rage (raging at the fact that the ride is super jerky because they used all their maintenance funds for hookers and cocaine and thus had to turn off automatic train control; raging at sitting stopped because some switch broke down again, etc.) raises my blood as much as toad rage ever did.

>hookers and cocaine

You misspelled "creating previously non-existent middle manager positions for powerful people to place people in as political favors"

No, the corruption at WMATA is among the rank and file, who get paid too much and don’t do their jobs. The vast majority of WMATA’s employees are in operations.

"Relax on the train" - My experience is that it's very difficult to relax on public transit due mostly to the homeless. Whether it's the smell, begging, or just general unstable behavior, it's not exactly a relaxing environment.

This is a side product if there being lots of homeless and not enough commuters using public transport.

In European cities the most common unpleasantness is drunk people late at night coming back from clubbing, at all other times it is as pleasant as it can be. It was certainly a shock to discover the reason for empty Muni carriages during rush hour so after moving to SF. To give people from outside the bay area an idea, elevators on the stations now have a person in them at all times to avoid them turning into public bathrooms. The area of the city all the underground lines go through have historically been the congregation area for the homeless, and there are a lot of homeless here.

No, you can definitely not relax with one arm extended over your head, the other on your backpack, several strangers’ bodies touching yours, and dramatic change in acceleration every few seconds.

"More control of when you leave/arrive, "

I disbelieve. If you don't want to be caught up in nasty traffic, you have to check the reports, and have knowledge of when rush hour gets bad. So you're still on somone else's schedule.

> More control of when you leave/arrive, storage space to transport things, not dealing with other people, ability to go wherever you want, air conditioning.

But everything you listed there, except people and AC, doesn't apply to commuting, which is the main transportation people in suburbs rely on.

Sure it does. Want to pick up some beer on the way home from work? Kid had a rough night and you want to sleep in 30 minutes later than usual (taking you out of the AM peak train frequency)? Don’t want to have to walk 10 minutes through the rain (or a 150% humidity DC day) to get to your office? Driving is much better for that.

Interesting, the reasons you listed make a stronger argument for public transit than for cars, for me.

30 minutes sleeping in mean I've just added one hour to my car commute time (we joked that the difference between leaving at 6:30 and 7am is getting to work at 7am and 9am), whereas I just catch the next train and get there exactly at the same time as I would have before... plus 30 minutes. If I want to pick up beer, I just grab some from the liquor store on the way to the train or whatever, and carry it, no big deal. Re: rain, traffic accidents go way up in the rain and everything slows way down on the freeways, but the train doesn't feel it at all and still gets there exactly at the same time. It's got AC on it so I'm not uncomfortable on hot days.

Public Transit generally sucks in America so yea, driving is better because the above reasons don't apply when the train comes once every 3 hours, is unreliable, and the AC is broken. But the option does exist to have good public transit, it just needs the funding. Other cities and countries have figured it out, it's possible.

So given that good public transit is an option, is better for the environment, is cheaper in real costs, why not seek that out?

> But the option does exist to have good public transit, it just needs the funding. Other cities and countries have figured it out, it's possible.

Our public transit is actually very well funded. London’s Tube spends half as much money per passenger mile as New York’s subway. (And the New York Subway or DC Metro get half their operational funding from the government, while the London Tube pays for its own operational funding with fares.)

Just because non-Americans have figured out how to do something doesn’t mean Americans can’t. (For example, we spend among the most on public education per student, but get worse results.) Good, well managed, public services is something that appears incompatible with our culture.

>incompatible with our culture.

Culture, or system of governance? Culture is too wishy-washy a term. It seems to easy to give up - ah sorry, Americans are just too stupid/lazy to figure it out. Nah. I want to figure out what specifically about the structure of our infrastructure development is, and fix it.

Our system of governance is an expression of our culture. In France, when the government wants to build a railroad, they do the studies, then they pass a law that preempts every other law, and the railroad gets built. In the US, the government does the studies, decides to build the railroad, and spends years tangled up in litigation. We created those legal structures to reflect what we think is important.

Right now, folks in our county are trying to shut down three light rail stops that have already been built and are operating. (Transit is a “conduit for crime.”) If we do that, we have to pay the federal government back a bunch of money we got to build those stops in the first place. Americans hate infrastructure. And they don’t particularly like each other, so they have built a distributed society that doesn’t require as much centralized coordination.

It’s not stupidity or laziness. Americans are too individualistic to build infrastructure. Nobody can put the needs of society over their own needs. That’s why every infrastructure project is a disaster of inefficient self-serving union workers[1] and endless litigation. (I have an acquaintance who is ethnically Japanese, and moved back to Japan after growing up in the US. She remarked to me: “Americans don’t really go around thinking about how what they’re doing affects other people.”)

Once you really internalize all that, it’s pretty fine. I kinda like the suburbs. I like being able to roll right up to a chain restaurant and park, instead of having to shlep a stroller up and down stairs. In my old age, I’ve realized that if you’re living in New York or SF, you’re doing the whole America thing wrong. That just forces you to constantly confront all the things Americans do poorly (transit, zoning, social services). Kansas City! You can drive everywhere, traffic isn’t too bad, cost of living is super low, etc.

[1] In the NYT piece on why the Second Avenue subway costs so much, there were French transit managers pointing out how ridiculously over staffed the project was. The French were pointing out how inefficient we were.

I think you've illustrated this perfectly - a lot of frustration I've experienced with my peers is what you've said - we want something, and we turn up to the city council meeting asking for it, and we're beset by a lot of older people shouting that a navigation center at the wharf is bad because homeless are criminal and dirty.

Maybe you're right that America as a whole can't. I think the younger liberals though, at least from my experience with them, willing to put forward the needs of society. I think many of them have no choice, because the individualist option just isn't available anymore like it was in the past.

Thank you for your words on this.

In California the state has been slowly passing laws here and there to preempt zoning and lawsuits to stop transit and densification.

One of the things I've noted is often the opposition is basically insane.

From voters in the Santa Cruz mountain blocking construction of a sewer up HWY 9. Needed because everyone's septic systems are polluting the ground water and streams. Blocked after all the planning had been done. The Feds, State, and Country would have paid for most of it. But blocking construct meant all the planning costs had to be paid for by the home owners. Total $1000 each.

To suing to block the construction of the California high speed rail. Because they might run a tunnel 3000 feet under someones toy horse ranch in the San Gabriels.

Yeah, I guess it depends on the person. I live on a pretty strict schedule, so if my kid has a bad night, we all still have to be up and out at exactly the same time. The closest parking garage is a lot farther than the closest train stop. I've taken small groceries home in my backpack pretty often; there's lots of shopping by my office. The thought of parking at a shopping center after work sounds really unappealing. :D

One thing to notice is that the groceries themselves are different in the us and Europe. Packages have a tendency to be bigger and the shops tend to be further away because the customers will be driving to the shop. It's a self reinforcing cycle.

I don't think 'not dealing with other people' really applies to driving. You're still dealing with people, but now they're in large machines that can quickly kill you if the other person is on their phone, drunk, angry or just plain bad at driving.

Public transit is generally safer and less costly when you start taking into account accidents and injuries resulting from them. There's also the immense value of being freed from having to focus on the road, which gives you the ability to multitask and read, write code etc.

I used to do just that back when I rode the bus to and from college.

"dealing with other people" = ticket inspectors, beggers, crying babies, random conversations 50 cm away from your ear, drunk people...

you don't have this in your car.

Beggars exist and will walk up to your car at popular intersections. Drunk people also drive, or else drunk driving wouldn't be an issue and the result of so many other deaths.

Don't get me started on people suffering from road rage.

My subway commute is about 30 minutes and I practice some pretty damn niche hobbies.

The $3k/yr number mentioned is not the cost of transportation via car in Houston, but the premium you pay for Houston's sprawl. In other words, commuting in a low-sprawl city is $3k/yr cheaper than it would be in Houston.

Car ownership is significantly more expensive than $3k/year.

Also, even if it was... it's not the same price!

MBTA is like $100 a month, which is $1.2k, which is less than half of $3k.

This. There are many other costs associated with car ownership. As a transit user I don't need to pay towards a vehicle registration/inspection, repairs, insurance...

Not to mention things like the mental stress and sedentary lifestyle.

My Nissan leaf disagrees with you.

6.5k purchase price. Cost to Charge less than 50$/mo th. Maintenance nill. Insurance cheap ($35/month)

Buying a used electric is clearly an exception, not the norm.

Also https://www.edmunds.com/nissan/leaf/2018/cost-to-own/

It doesn't depreciate?!

Who cares. 6.5k/4 years is 1.6k/year. the car needs to only last 3-4 years

Definitely agree.

One way to show that car transport is much more "valuable" than public transport in terms of convenience and comfort is to observe that very rich people almost universally travel by private car.

> very rich people almost universally travel by private car.

Do they? I thought this would be hard to know, has there been a survey? And is this true even in cities with decent public transportation?

There are no American cities with “decent public transportation.” NYC, DC, and Chicago are the only candidates. The first two used to be good, but have fallen off a cliff due to deferred maintenance. The latter is pretty good but inaccessible from vast swaths of the city.

I live downtown Minneapolis. I own a condo and there are literally at least 4+ different bus stops right outside on the corners of my building going just about anywhere in and outside the cities (Costco, Aldi, Grocery Stores, Movie Theaters, Home Depot, etc...). Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's are within a couple blocks walk.

The light rail is 1 block away and goes directly to University of Minnesota or Mall of America with stops between.

During the winters, rain, or bad weather, the entrance to the Skyway is across the street.

I don't see how it can get any better.

I sold my car and lease out my parking spot for $150/month. I have a Metro Transit GoToCard [0] I fill up with $20 or weekly/monthly day passes.

[0] https://www.metrotransit.org/go-to-card

You forgot to qualify that with "for all residents". If you live in the inner suburbs of Minneapolis and work downtown public transit is pretty good for getting you to work. You will still need/want a car for grocery trips but one car will cover the entire family so you won't need a second. Thus in Minneapolis public transit is subsided transport for the rich - from the perspective of those who do not have a job downtown. (of course the poor also ride public transit, but they don't live in the suburbs)

>You will still need/want a car for grocery trips

Yea, exactly, there is no good public transit, anywhere, in America.

There are cities throughout Europe and Asia where the thought of needing a car to get groceries is comical - the grocery store is right there, or a short hop on a bus/metro away, and it comes every 3 minutes so no big deal.

The USA desperately needs infrastructure help.

There are certainly places you can live (even relatively affordable ones!) that you can have this in the US.

I live in Chicago within a 3 minute walk I have my choice of Jewel/Osco or Trader Joe's (which are both right by an L stop, so they're accessible to other people near the L as well). An extra few minutes and I can go to Target. An extra 10 minutes and I can walk to Whole Foods or Mariano's.

My rent isn't super low (~1650/month + electricity for a ~700 sq ft 1 br; parking would be $200+ extra if I had a car) but a CTA pass is only $100 / month and it's pretax. Of course not every part of Chicago is like this.

Having been to Europe I can report that a fair number of people do not need or have a car. I can also report that a large number of people have a car and consider it essential to get around - they don't live in the big cities.

Or you just get your grocery shopping delivered at home.

This is anecdotal but I can speak for the high net worth individuals I work with in NYC.

Most of them will occasionally take the subway, depending on time of day and where they are traveling. However, all of them travel by car when more convenient (which is often). They also tend to schedule calls during private vehicle commutes (impossible on the subway) and they'll sometimes put up with longer travel times in order to do so.

An MBTA local bus and subway pass is $84.50 per month

$84.50 * 12 months = $1014 per year

As someone living in metro Boston, that is a large difference in cost from my perspective - approximately equivalent to 2 months of rent.

If you live outside of the subway system and need to get places (particularly in/out of the city) within a reasonable time-frame you're likely going to need a commuter rail pass. That jacks up the price substantially.

I did the whole "live in Boston and just use public transit thing" for awhile. Then I moved to one of those cities that MA likes to pretend doesn't exist and my transportation costs stayed about flat. If I had made heavy use of Uber/Lyft they probably would have decreased. My friend commutes in from Worcester and rides the train because of the tolls and the fact that his work subsidizes the rail pass. In a sprawling city with free/cheap parking there would be no economic reason to do anything but drive.

Yes, that is somewhat the point of this discussion. The money one saves on housing by living further from a dense urban core is often offset to a significant degree by transportation costs, whether those additional costs come from regional rail or driving.

When people say "public transit", they don't mean the periphery of a commuter rail system. They mean the core bus network and usually the subway. You're comparing the worst case of meaningful public transit to a city only built for cars. My hypothesis, if you lived in Somerville, Dorchester, or at most, Quincy, the numbers would look different.

Sure, if you specifically craft your living situation to not involve commuter rail (and don't replace it with Uber/Lyft) you can save money. But you'll spend the money on rent.

> But you'll spend the money on rent.

Bingo! That's exactly what the linked article is about. How much extra are you paying in rent? How much are you saving on transportation? What are total costs of [rent + transportation] in both cases? How much time is wasted on transportation when you're paying lower rent? These are questions that need to be asked.

Why would you not want to "craft" your living situation to give you the optimal setup? No, you can't have everything, but a "crafted" lifestyle that avoids need for transportation may be preferred by many, and may in addition in some cases be cheaper _and_ provide higher quality of life. Maybe not, maybe not for everyone; but those are questions that need to be asked, not simply have, "What are housing rental/purchase costs?" be taken as deciding question of what places have higher cost of "housing".

I live in the outermost zone of the commuter rail, and a monthly pass is about $400, or $4,800 per year.

Add to that the fact that you are going to be packed in like cattle, won't have a seat to sit on unless you board at the very first station, and can count on a 30-60 minute delay at least once a week ... the MTBA is probably the single biggest stressor in the Boston area.

If you lived in the urban core, you could save $3786 per year by just getting a local pass. You would avoid a lot of that stress and lost time from your commute. You would not need a car. Of course, your housing costs would be higher, or your housing would be worse, or both. Worth it?

> your housing costs would be higher

My housing costs would be roughly twice as high (from $2,500 to more like $5,000 per month). Living closer just isn't an option.

And most employers will have some sort of transit benefit. $84.50 falls well within a lot of the wage works style benefits people get!

Why would you say using public transportation results in a poor quality of life? Not driving would increase my quality of life a great deal!

As someone who has years' of experience each doing non-trivial commutes by driving and by subway, I'd have to say, the subway wins hands-down. It's not even a close contest. I was doing the most reading of my life when I was taking the subway to work every day, and it was great. I also occasionally played handheld video games or read magazines. My commute time wasn't wasted; I spent it doing things I wanted to do. Contrast with driving, where my commute time was wasted.

And driving is much more stressful and unsafe, as well. You can't be off when you're driving, but you can definitely be off when you're taking the subway. On days when I was especially tired, I would just zone out with my eyes closed.

Now I just have a 10 minute bike commute, and it's my favorite commute I've ever had, but I do miss reading as regularly as I did back then on the subway.

When I've driven I have never had to stand for 40 minutes in rush hour in a jammed Milan subway car with my nose in a strangers armpit while another stranger breaths down my neck. I've never been ask for spare change while in my car. I've never been challenged to a fight for asking someone to take their feet off the opposite seat so my wife could sit down. I've never been pickpocketed. I've never had a bad dixieland band set up, play a few measures of bad out-of-tune jazz and then aggressively solicit donations. I've never had a creepy passenger stare at me for the entire ride as if they are trying to memorize my face. My car seat is never covered with vomit when I get in. I've never had a car commute cancelled because of a a labor action, or a signal malfunction, of work being done on the lines or bureaucratic incompetence. I've never had my car stop running because it was too late in the day or a holiday. All these things and much more have happened to me on public transport.

Yes, it is irritating to be stuck in traffic in a car -- you have to move your right foot back and forth between the accelerator and brake while you sit in your adjustable leather seat, traveling on your own schedule to your custom destination in climate controlled comfort while rocking out to music, an audible book or a podcast.

Some newer cars will even drive for you in these traffic conditions via radar sensors.

I just lived the last 10 months without a car. There needs to be a big asterisk of not driving would increase your quality of life if there is alternative transit in place. It's pretty miserable when the nearest activities are a 45 minute light rail ride away. Biking is great mid day, but doing anything at night when you're adding 30 minutes to an hour on each side makes most plans fall through.

I would love to not have to own a car in my city, but we'd need to increase density and transit significantly.

> Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston.

It's a trade off. One of these tanks the planet and the other doesn't, however.

Public transit doesn't come for free. Bus systems are sometimes worse than people in cars. I would suggest fixing the individual vehicle transportation system (congestion tolls + high gas tax would be a start) than forcing everyone to stand on trains for their commute and stay at home on the weekends.

> Bus systems are sometimes worse than people in cars.

Source?

In the US, bus routes often run with zero passengers on the bus.

Here is a Quora question and answer that states buses consumed 20% more energy than cars per passenger mile in 2009[1]. It references a US Department of transportation document that can now be found here(pdf)[2]. Tables in chapter two. Not sure about more recent figures.

I made this comment as I remembered an AC Transit (Alameda County Transit which includes Oakland) study that said their average mpg per passenger was around 8 mpg some time ago and I found that surprisingly low.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Do-buses-really-result-in-increased-en...

[2] https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Edition30_F...

> Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston.

I'd bet that few people exclusively take public transit in Boston. People still take taxis and car-shares, hitch rides with friends.

The key is that for many important high traffic routes, the highest quality of life option in Boston is transit, far better than sitting in traffic.

Even in parts of the world that have amazing public transit systems, there are use cases where a car (whether owned, rented, or hired), fills in the quality of life gap very nicely.

We live and work in Cambridge, and live close enough to work that walking and cycling are our normal commutes, so our commute costs effectively nothing. I could get a subsidized T pass through work, but I don't need it. When we were looking for a house, we could have gotten something bigger further out, for less money even, but then everything else would cost more and take longer. We'd have to drive more. Hell, taxes would be higher. Our city tax bill is a lot less than most of the people we know in nearby towns pay.

From zillow, the median home price there is 900k. The median rent is 3,000 a month. It is literally unaffordable to most people to do what you do; the yearly amount you pay in rent alone is the yearly salary of many other people. You'd need to make a wage of $24 an hour just to pay that rent. If you looked at the median wage in the USA, its 56k, and this rent would end up being 64% of that income.

What you do is a luxury of the rich. Most people simply can't afford the luxury of carlessness in an urban center.

Gosh, I was unaware of what it cost to live here, or what the flood of tech/biotech money has done to the neighborhood. We got lucky and were in a position to buy during the crash. We couldn't afford it now.

Lived in Houston most of my life, and in places with public transit (good and bad) other parts.

My perspective: sprawl fucking sucks. That's what this is about - not just driving, but what a city built on driving leads to: sprawl. 45 minute commutes to college from Clear Lake while I'm doing nothing but kinda listening to an audiobook or something. So demotivating. Not really being able to hang with my classmates after school cause I can leave at 4 and get home in 45 minutes or 6/7 and get home in 1.5-2 hours.... or just wait until 9, 10, which fucks me cause the next morning I need to be on the road at 6:30 sharp if I want a "reasonable" 45 minute commute. Oh, and when I turn up to school, better leave 20 minutes to an hour to find parking. That's not hyperbole, parking was that bad at University of Houston.

Compared to the train I used to take to Mountain View - my "worst" commute from my time in the bay area. Still a "long" trip, but I'm sitting on a train reading, playing a video game, or sleeping. Traffic is not a consideration. I can go in rush hour or whenever, I'll still get there at the same time. I get off the train and bicycle to the office, leave my bike downstairs and that's it. No idling in the parking lot shitting out CO, waiting for someone to walk into the parking lot so I can offer them an AC ride to their spot in return for the ability to park in it when they leave.

Growing up in that sprawl was painful. Our suburbs were spread out not too bad, but enough to suck hard. One of my best friends was a good 3 miles away in a different suburb (so I had to go the long way round to actually get to an entrance. Sometime's I'd toss my bike over the 10 foot sound barrier thing and try to scale it but stopped after spraining an ankle). Bicycling there would take 20 minutes if there were bike lanes, but there weren't, there were "sidewalks" with giant roots pushing the concrete up that were too big to hop on the bike, or there'd be massive puddles in the dips or dirt and sand ready to slip me up, so I was on/off/on/off the bike, waiting 5 minutes at an intersection for a walk signal and still keeping my head on a swivel because nobody expects someone to actually walk in the burbs. So, it'd take me like 50 minutes to get to my friend's house. If it wasn't so hard, I think I would have hung outside more with my friends, and played less videogames. I distinctly remember chatting in WoW about how we'd consider hanging out, and then say "nah don't wanna bike an hour" and just play more WoW.

Then when you finally do get a car, it's not that much better. First spend 45 minutes driving a pentagram across the suburbs picking everyone up, then drive another 45 to get to the city or wherever. It just sucked!

So, I don't know about cost, I don't have the math for it, but it was terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE and I hated it growing up. The convenience of living in a mildly walkable city like SF with even the mediocre (from int'l standards) public transit they have here is to me leagues better than the bullshit I put up with in Houston. And then you go to a city like Taipei and see what this world is capable of creating... it's a dream.

Housing affordability & transportation costs relationship is the cornerstone that triggered the yellow jacket movement in France. Take most vulnerable families that live away from employment centers (cities) because they can't afford a house there, you have dependability to driving cars (no public transport). The government steps in and tries to tax fuel more for ecology - which pleases richer urban voters but squeezes people who bought a house 20 years ago back when fuel, insurance, parking wasn't as expensive. Their house are the only one that - by the way - are the only ones that didn't gain value.

The ever increasing "metropolisation" as we call it, is scary. More and more, you better be able to afford living in a big city or suffer the negative consequences

People living outside cities bought houses also for tiny prices.

Can't be possible to keep everything always cheap unfortunately, while living in the city is more expensive

> quality air

What do you even mean??

Air Quality Index. Small cities have more pollution due to lower density which makes public transport unfeasible or inefficient.

Am I the only person here to actually like cars and enjoy driving? Being free from public transport timetables and the ability to go anywhere on a whim are so precious. As an introvert, I see my car as my private space.

For most people, there's no such thing as liking or disliking "driving".

There's how you feel about "driving and finding parking in rush hour in midtown Manhattan" and how you feel about "driving down beautiful back country roads with no traffic".

Without discussing the context of where and when, giving opinions on driving is almost meaningless. I mean, here in Manhattan during the day, the subway comes often enough that you don't need a timetable, and you can get most places on a whim a hell of a lot faster than you would in your car.

There are some people for whom driving really is something they like. It's not driving per-se but I personally enjoy motorcycling in pretty much any context whether its commuting in heavy traffic (granted, here in California that does mean I get to lane-split through lots of it) or riding for leisure. Maintaining the machine is also an aspect of it, for some people their car or bike fulfills a niche sort of analogous to a pet or a garden. Not being able to have an automobile (car or motorcycle) if frequently a deciding factor in where people choose to live.

100% this. It's all about context. I live in NJ, and I can tell you that 1- I love driving when I'm able to do 80 MPH down the turnpike on the weekend but loath it when I'm stuck doing 10 MPH on 287 during rush hour and 2- HATE having to pay more money for tolls or parking. The sad fact is, I have to pay for the convenience of not needing to set aside 3 hours for my commute to work every day using public transportation.

I own two cars, and love driving. Which is why I take the train to work. If I were to drive every day, I would start hating it.

I work 100% remotely for the last 5 years, and I don’t plan to change that. Why spend precious time on commuting, when you can sit in the comfort of your room and work the same? All work interactions are handled via email, Slack and hangouts calls when necessary.

In 21st century, I think at least 50% of jobs can be fully remote.

I drive every day (between Daly City and SF) and still love driving.

I don’t own a car, and I might be what some call a mobility advocate. But I’ll admit it, driving is fun. There’s few things as fun as going on a 50 mile trip to explore a new park.

But personal automobiles start creating issues when we are required to drive to pick up groceries or drop kids off at school. When everyone does this we get terrible traffic, suffocating pollution and an environment that winds up being built to focus on machines over people.

This is killing our health, our relationships and our environment. We don’t want to ban cars, we want a culture that gives transportation choice: driving, biking or walking. So many parts of our cities and suburbs right now only give one choice: “driving.”

Last thing, I’m also an introvert, but running errands and commuting on a bike is great. Aside from dangerous or aggressive drivers, most of my interactions with other people is limited and when it does happen is positive. No one really bothers you like they do on transit or while walking.

Of course not. What I object to is how American life is structured to require one.

I went to Taiwan a few years back and didn't rent a car for the two weeks I was there. I was able to explore the city of Taipei thoroughly on their incredible public transit system, including getting mostly out of town to visit the street of stinky tofu, and taking the metro system to a famous cable car tourist destination that led to some tea plantations.

I also trekked all over the rest of the island on rail, high speed rail, and inter-city buses, visiting major metropolitan areas and weird small towns.

Gosh, if we had something like that here, I'd sell my car in a heartbeat. I'd even give it away.

But I do enjoy driving when the roads are uncrowded; just being required to, to get anywhere fun, that's no good.

>Am I the only person here to actually like cars and enjoy driving?

Probably not. You might be the only one willing to take the inevitable scorning you'll get for admitting it though.

Upvoted for your honesty :-)

I like cars and enjoy driving too, but I hate paying ridiculous amounts for parking, dealing with rush hour traffic and driving on crowded city streets. So I take the bus in to work and avoid all the above.

Everyone loves their cars. Climate control, freedom..

But in many places cars being loved so much no one can get around to the detriment of everyone and the places we love. Thus looking to hack a better way of getting everyone moving is natural.

Sometimes when I drive to work, the ride home can take 45 minutes to an hour for 3.5 miles. I can ride my bike faster.

I like cars and driving. I hate car-dependence.

It totally depends on context. If you live in/near a city you'll likely see the burden they can be. What's worse is most cities don't have great public transit alternatives.

I used to drive into SF occasionally and wish I could ditch my car outside the city. Hotels charge $30-50/night when I rarely need it while I'm visiting.

In/near a city you learn to inquire about parking before you leave, because it may not be an option when you pull up. Twice in the last six months I've gotten my car stuck in a garage overnight. The first time I missed the closing time the second I lost my ticket and there was no attendant on duty after hours.

There are a lot of externalities that aren't obvious. Only a fraction of the cost of road maintenance is included in the price of fuel. The rest comes out of general/other taxes. Fuel, even though it has a specific tax, is subsidized. Many ordinances require buildings to have a certain number of parking spots, occupying real estate that could be better used elsewhere. I remember hearing that a parking lot in many of cities is the highest value property.

Then, of course, you have the more obvious burdens like car maintenance and traffic.

I do, too. Just not in rush hour traffic.

>Being free from public transport timetables and the ability to go anywhere on a whim are so precious.

You can't do that with cars though at any time. Because there is traffic and parking spaces to deal with.

Unless you're only going to big super markets like Target or a shopping center and you've never encountered this problem, you really can't go anywhere cool while driving. Please don't mention something like taking your car to a national park or something. That's what car rentals are for.

> there is traffic and parking spaces to deal with

In my observation (living in the SF Bay Area for almost a year now), being stuck in traffic is usually still faster than public transit (unless you're lucky enough for all your destinations to be near a BART stop and lucky enough for your home to also be near a BART stop; as soon as you throw in Muni or SamTrans or CalTrain you're looking at much longer travel times even excluding the time loafing about waiting for the next leg of the trip to arrive).

Parking is indeed a problem, but if you think about it, plenty of people do manage to find parking spaces (obviously, since people are parked in them), so you just gotta be prepared to wait for one to open up (or find one a bit further out; helps when there are plenty of parking garages around).

> you really can't go anywhere cool while driving.

You can't with public transit, either, unless "anywhere cool" happens to be on the transit route and you're going there (and going home afterward) during that route's hours.

> Please don't mention something like taking your car to a national park or something. That's what car rentals are for.

lol. That's also what owning your own vehicle is for, plus being able to use it day-to-day for things.

When I first moved to SF, I did so without a car, forcing myself to get used to BART and Muni (and learned very quickly that Muni's timetables are illusory at best, but that's a story for another day). It's fine until you need to haul something (like me trying to haul a bunch of desktop parts back from Fry's) or need to go somewhere outside of the transit agency's service area or before/after their normal operating hours (like me trying to do a lot of things in the city).

Thankfully, I didn't get rid of my car, and as soon as I moved to a place with better parking I retrieved my car and I've been quite a bit happier ever since (though not happy enough to continue to want to live in/around SF, but that's also a story for another day).

The sfba transit is terrible. When people advocate for transit we are advocating for better transit than what is available here.

>either, unless "anywhere cool" happens to be on the transit route and you're going there

Most urban areas are where actually legit "nifty"/cool/worthwhile restaurants/attractions/parks/etc are (for a reason). The latter is often positioned on the former. Feel free to map highly rated (even highly rated AND expensive restaurants) restaurants in proximity to public transit areas for a quick example. It's not an accident.

>When I first moved to SF,

I don't think comparing the public transportation of a city notorious for its NIMBYism and catering to one particular class of society is a good idea. Certainly no one has ever used SF as an example of a metro that has good public transportation.

> I don't think comparing the public transportation of a city notorious for its NIMBYism and catering to one particular class of society is a good idea

Why not? It's a realistic example, and it seems like a lot of American cities have similar problems. It's fine to speculate on how much better the world would be in an ideal universe with robust mass transit and spherical cows, but right now we're talking about the actual cost of living differences in actual cities.

No, of course not, lots of people enjoy driving and drive as a hobby. Lots of people also hate it. You also can't deny it has massive externalities.

Much the same reasons I enjoy biking. Albeit somewhat range limited in comparison :)

A lot of this is hand waving. As the article admits, it doesn’t adjust for lost time, or household size and composition. Regardless, it assumes a causal relationship between housing costs and transportation costs (I.e. that people with lower housing costs spend more on transportation because their houses are further away).

That’s not a sound assumption. The typical pattern is younger people living in the city and moving to the suburbs as they get older and have kids. In the latter case, transportation costs go up because the amount of transportation that needs to be done goes way up. My wife and I went from not having a car in Chicago to having two cars in the Annapolis suburbs. One car is necessary because we now have to drive to the train station to get to DC. That fits in with the article’s premise that increased transportation costs offset lower housing costs somewhat. The other, however, is necessary because we have two kids who need to go to a ton of different places. Even in Chicago, it’s unlikely that your work, your wife’s work, your kids’ school, and your kids’ extracurricular activities are all going to be near transit.

Also, the article assumes that transportation erases the housing cost difference without accounting for the fact that people might purchase more transportation because housing costs are so much cheaper, not just because they have to to cope with sprawl. We moved from a 1,400 square foot 3BR downtown to a 2,800 square foot 4BR in the burbs. Our mortgage is half of what our rent used to be. Had we continued to pay city rents, we may have continued to drive my 10 year old fully paid off car. Instead we bought two newer cars, not because they were necessary for the commute, but because we had the extra cash.

The article also leaves out the third rail of urbanism: schools. The folks who live in our neighborhood in Annapolis could not afford to buy a house, even a much smaller one, in DC with a public school as good as the one we have here. The folks I know trying to square that circle (living downtown in one of the handful of good school districts in the city) are paying three times as much as we did for housing. (And, as a result, live in gentrified neighborhoods with little economic or even racial diversity.)

>The typical pattern is younger people living in the city and moving to the suburbs as they get older and have kids.

How long has this been the typical pattern? Auto-oriented suburbs are an experiment two generations in the making. Before that development, there was a sharper urban-rural divide. I would not be surprised to see the US largely swing back to that arrangement within the next 60 years.

To expand on this anecdotally, I know of millennials who moved to the suburbs anticipating that suburban shift and have found themselves sorely mistaken about most of their friends patterns. I'd love to see stats on urban->suburban movement by age over the past 20-30 years.

Data suggests that millennials have been putting off moving to the suburbs, consistent with their putting off home buying and having kids, but that trend has already peaked as we get further away from the recession: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-03/millen....

The lack of good schools and affordable houses in cities seems to be the deal killer. In my own experience, I don’t know any middle class people trying to raise kids in the city. Out of my friends’ circle, the folks trying to stick through the city thing are all high income ($200k+ household). My wife and I stuck it out downtown for a while—until our daughter was five. But the costs add up shockingly fast. For example, for the first four years, you can’t send your kids to public school even if you want to. A daycare near my office in DC is $2,400 per month for infants. Near my house in the Annapolis suburbs, it’s $1,500 at the high end. Most of the good public schools are in Northwest, where $900,000 is table stakes for a house (and where you need a car anyway because there is no metro).

Yeah, you need money to raise a kid in a city, that's for sure - no argument there. That said, I'd say millennial are having fewer kids (feel comfortable on that claim without researching stats but of course they are welcome) so that makes cities more attractive to the current 25-40 age range than their predecessors.

The math in the article is a bit off when it claims the "sprawl tax" makes up the difference in higher travel costs when located in sprawling lower cost housing markets. They estimate increased travel cost at $3k/year, $250/month

They take Houston as an example, which is on the opposite end of the housing cost/sprawl spectrum from, say, San Francisco, but the "sprawl tax" math doesn't work here. Given average apartment costs and 30yr mortgages at about 4%:

  Houston Avg House Cost:about $300k or $1400/month
  SF Avg House Cost: about $1.3 million or $6100/month
  Difference: about $54,000/year

Apartments aren't much better:

  Houston Avg Apt: about $1100/month or $13k/year
  SF Avg Apt: about $3500/month or $42,000/year
  Difference: $2400/month or $29,000/year

The sprawl tax doesn't begin to cover these differences. The numbers above are similar for NYC. For Seattle it's less drastic, but still well in excess of $3k/year. Boston is on par with Seattle. On the other hand, Chicago is semi-sprawlish with it's suburbs, and prices are significantly cheaper. About the only place I could find where this "sprawl tax" concept applies successfully after looking at a few randomly picked cities is Hoboken, NJ. A small city twice as densely populated as SF, very popular through proximity NYC and a mini tech hub in its own right. There, buying a house is still not going to even out the sprawl tax, but an apartment will just about do it. (The average cost of apartments vs. houses there is oddly divergent from other cities I looked at.)

Maybe try a city like Taipei or Tokyo?

I think unfortunately there's too much noise from factors like weird regulations and anti-housing hyper activists in cities like San Francisco to get a good comparison.

But isn't that part of the problem? You can't make these sort of blanket "one size fits all" statements because every local is a new mix of problems. The types of solutions and regulatory changes that solve the bay area would be useless in Tokyo and laughable in New Jersey.

I think the point is more that you should be comparing far-out exurbs to closer-in suburbs of major cities.

Of course property in San Francisco or NYC is going to be significantly more expensive than far-off sprawl around Houston. As they say in real estate, it's all about location, location, location. Living in the city is highly desirable for many reasons beyond just having lower transportation costs.

Yes, of course. But that wasn't the point being made by the article. Though even then the math doesn't always hold. I live outside of NYC. A close suburb house costs about 50% more than a mid suburb, which in turn is about 50% more than a further out suburb. That increase in housing costs for close-in is still an order of magnitude more than the decrease and money saved on transporting costs. Just look at the data table the author provides: As housing costs increase, transportation costs decrease, but the total cost of living still increases dramatically

" If you have to drive everywhere, and drive further for every trip, what you save in rent or mortgage payments, can be more than eaten up in car payments, gasoline purchases, and time wasted traveling."

Well, that's assuming you own / lease a vehicle.

Instead, if you're using public transportation then sprawl translates into time. Longer distances translate into more stops, and perhaps even a transfer, or two. That time adds up.

If you're lucky you drive to the train station. But best I can tell, if you're using buses to get around locally, you're paying dearly in time. In fact, a couple days ago I saw a report on the local news that SEPTA (PHL, PA) is seeing bus rides / riders declined. They attributes this it Uber and Lyft. Apparently, the market is figuring out - faster than SEPTA - that time really is money.

It's strange to me that this wouldn't be considered intuitively obvious.

Is it specifically car costs that people find hard to grok?

In London you could live in Zone 1, walking distance from your work, and pay 0 GBP for essential transport, or you could live in Zone 6 and pay ~250GBP a month, or you could live in a small town or village somewhere with a rail station and pay 250-500 depending on distance.

You can't really avoid knowing it unless you just don't care what anything costs.

A few years back I moved from a flat around the corner from work to one quite far out. The cost savings were minimal with transport accounted for; negative if I valued my time. The main thing was being in a more suburban location, less concrete etc.

Yes! This is why I have suggested using my metric DIPHLoW:

Discretionary Income Per Hour Lost to work:

Discretionary income: Income minus taxes and minimal housing costs.

Hour lost to work: Time at work plus time commuting

That more completely captures the tradeoffs that policymakers face.

They can't just sigh and expect people to move further out, be cause, yes, it increases discretionary income, but also increases time lost to work, so isn't necessarily an improvement.

Higher taxes might be a good idea if they can be used to scale up transportation capacity in proportion to the hit to DI.

And policies that reduce pre-tax income might be a good idea if the housing savings cancel it out.

When you ask for public transit, you don't necessarily get it either.

It seems that when demand for public transit is high, politicians often put forward light, elevated, and subsurface rail boondoggle projects instead of just buying some buses and organizing routes, the incremental, somewhat temporary improvements necessary to move toward better transit connectivity.

Why single out transportation? One could imagine a cheap house in a small town with no jobs, high taxes, expensive utilities, pricey shopping centers, in a flood plain, in a country with an exceptionally broken healthcare system. Transportation could be the least of your problems.

Also property taxes and costs of living: food, transportation and other necessities.

One of the easiest ways in which you can live longer, is by simply managing your current time better. For example, try living near everything that you might need, in an area with no pollution. Hard to find for a good price!

You can buy cheaper houses in neighborhods, or rent, or have roommates. Many things can be done to mitigate the cost of housing, just like with transportation.

> You can buy cheaper houses in neighborhods, or rent, or have roommates. Many things can be done to mitigate the cost of housing, just like with transportation.

Housing prices both renting/buying are usually fixed based on similar houses in the area. You arent going to see a $2500 a month house next to a $600 a month house. So the idea that you can just buy drastically cheaper houses in the same neighborhood is not true. Roommates are an option for singles. But not feasible for families

>You arent going to see a $2500 a month house next to a $600 a month house

Maybe not in a modern cookie cutter subdivision, but in older neighborhoods, definitely. My street has a lot of variety of size and occupancy. We have big single family houses, smaller single family houses, duplexes, triplexes, and a house with a mother-in-law apartment.

>Roommates are an option for singles. But not feasible for families

Roommates can work for families with the right architecture, I've seen it work before, personally. Of course, if you're completely closed off to the whole idea just on principal, it won't work.

Price per unit area is the thing that's more or less fixed based on similar homes. You can definitely see a 3000sqft home next to an 800sqft home, if the neighborhood grew organically. The price difference in that case could well be that stark.

In the US, many neighborhoods (esp. newer) were constructed all at once by a single developer. This is how you get the "sameness", and finding a significantly cheaper home is not possible in these places. In other places, it can be.

keep in mind the retail cost of fuel is massively subsidized ... after you factor in global military budget spent subjugating oil rich countries, say nothing about the hit western global big oil would take if those same countries nationalized their own oil ... everytime people step on that pedal they must be reminded of the implications

Not to mention all the tax dollars suburban/rural homes take from city centers to subsidize their "cheap" housing.

4:30 PM PST - hug of death?

Yeah, it makes me very uncomfortable when people say "housing is unaffordable in ${region} for anyone making less than ${salary}.

On the one hand, I appreciate that they're trying to put numbers on a problem we all feel in our gut. You can't hand-wave it away by saying "well, things change".

But, at the same time, things DO change. At a time when many goods and services are at an all-time low in terms of costs, why WOULDN'T housing costs go up? On the one hand, costs will be affected by constrained or increased supply. On the other hand, there's the demand side. If I can afford to cheaply feed and transport and clothe myself, why would I not choose to allocate a greater share of my income towards housing closer to work, or with more space, or in a more desirable neighborhood? The choices we all freely make with how to allocate our income necessarily drives affordability for others.

This seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

And easily tested.

Is it true that the other costs of living have gone down in real terms. If it is, then we also need to know if people are buying those cheaper products and services.

We also need to know which groups of people are affected by which price-changes-over-time, in real terms.

This seems like information the statistics bureaus are likely to collect, definitely recall seeing this sort of data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and I vaguely recall the costs of living have gone up but I’ve never attempted to dissect the data.

I think the most important idea from the parent comment here is whether it’s possible to live on rice, lentils, onions, and potatoes, plus heating and cooking energy, at a lower rate now than the recent past, and if so why are we choosing not to.

Cars are more expensive compared to many people's salaries, as evidenced by car loans getting extended to 7 years. However they are more fuel efficient, last longer, and have lower maintenance costs (oil change at 10,000 instead of 3000 miles, for example).

For food it really depends on what you get. Meat seems to be higher, but I'm always amazed at how cheap bananas and potatoes are (and rice). Paying per minute for phone calls is a thing of the past too.

However a modern lifestyle also comes with more "almost necessary" expenses, such as home internet, cable ($150 - $200 a month), plus cell phone ($160 per month for two lines, to get unlimited calls and data). But electric usage is lower due to higher efficiency appliances and lighting.

> However a modern lifestyle also comes with more "almost necessary" expenses, such as home internet, cable ($150 - $200 a month), plus cell phone ($160 per month for two lines, to get unlimited calls and data). But electric usage is lower due to higher efficiency appliances and lighting.

The "almost necessary" level of those bills is ~$60 for internet and netflix and ~$45/line with a company like straight talk.

Paying $150-$200 for TV and Internet is on the very luxurious side of TV/Internet, and $80/line is both a luxurious amount of data and a premium cellphone carrier.

The 7 year loans could just mean people are choosing to buy more expensive cars, or have less money left over after other costs. I believe average selling prices are tracking inflation, but mandated safety and efficiency drives costs up. (I'm not saying this is a bad thing -- it just IS).

I agree with you on the "almost necessary" expenses. While nobody "needs" a $1000 smartphone, of course, it's hardly reasonable to not expect someone to complain about the cost of living unless they're adjusting their rabbit ears and using a tin cup and string. In particular, for many lower-income people, their (say) $400 smartphone might be their primary computing device

In other words, it's complicated!

>The 7 year loans could just mean people are choosing to buy more expensive cars,

That's exactly what it is. Cars are lasting longer so more of the market is shifting to various types of used (e.g. CPO Avalon is bought by people who would have formerly bought a new Echo) and there's a bunch of secondary mechanisms and financial incentive shenanigans that further this.