The True Cost of Driving
While doing some totally unrelated to rail, I ran across this site “The True Cost of Smoking” - quite interesting, but since I don’t smoke, not that relevant. But then I thought, obviously there are similar calculations out there for “The True Cost of Driving” - well sure, here you go.
Let’s give it a try - suppose my job was in downtown San Francisco. That wouldn’t be too unusual. To drive from Mountain View to San Francisco is roughly 38 miles (according to Google Maps), i.e. 76 miles round trip. Suppose I work 5 days a week and use my car for commuting exclusively. In that case, my annual cost of driving (or more precisely, the annual cost of my driving) according to that site would be ~$23,500, i.e. roughly $90 per day!
Well, that sounds like a lot. And I’d like to be able to say that using public transportation would be “cheaper”. Sure, I can tell you that a Caltrain ticket would cost me $6.33 per day (based on a monthly pass cost of $139.25 and an average of 22 days of usage every month). But that is clearly not the “full cost” - there are other costs to be factored in, i.e. contributions to Caltrain’s budget from tax monies, cost of pollution, etc.. Is there a site that shows “The True Cost of Public Transportation”? Adron, that sounds like something you might be interested in? I’m pretty sure that public transportation would still be cheaper than driving overall. Such a calculation would probably also show that there are economies of scale associated with public transportation, i.e. if ridership goes up and trains are fuller, farebox recovery will be better and less taxpayer money will be needed. In other words, the (absolute, not just relative) share of total costs covered by fare purchases will go up. Sure, as more and more people use the train, there will need to be some investments, i.e. add more cars to trains, acquire more rolling stock, even run more trains, but even there, the economies of scale should still prevail.
PS. The more comparable number to that Caltrain ticket cost would be the “Total Direct Drivers Expense per mile”, which in my example above was $0.86 - times 76 miles that results in a total per day of $65.35. Still a lot more expensive than using Caltrain.
PPS. Caltrain also has a calculator.
