Cars vs. Public Transit

Trying to get around? Well what will save you more money, driving a car or using public transportation? To figure out which is cheaper lets use this example. You have to get to and from work 5 days a week. That’s 10 trips a week. Lets say that you live in the suburbs and need to get to your job in the city. Lets do a month to month comparison on how much money you will spend.

Let’s first look at a car. If you include the expense of buying a car, the number of money you spend could really differ. For this example lets say you buy a cheap used starter car at the price of $3,000. Now lets say you keep this car for 3 years, then you’re paying $1,000 a year, or $83 a month. You then need to pay for car insurance, which could really vary, but lets estimate it at $80 a month. You also need to pay for gas, and your driving to the city 5 days a week so lets estimate you say you spend at least $25 a week on gas. Now lets at that all up, 83+80+25= $188 dollars a month to drive that car! And that is not including the money you will need to spend to get it inspected (around $80 a year), get the oil changed (also around $80 a year), and fix spare parts. Lets add those into the equation, for inspection $80/12months= about $6.75, and oil change will cost you the same a month as that, so we’re adding $13.50 for a grand total of $201.50

Now let’s look at public transportation. Lets say that you need to take a bus to get to the train station. That’ll cost your around $1.50 a trip. The train into the city will cost you about $6. You also have to get home so lets double that amount of $7.50 to $15 a day. There are 4 weeks in a month, and 5 days in a week you are going to the city, so you spend $15 on 20 days of the month, totaling $300 a month!

As you can see, transportation isn’t cheep. For this example it seems that having a car is the more affordable option. You also have more flexibility of where you go with a car, but you also have to deal with driving in traffic. Also, you can get a monthly train pass or bus pass which will make the price between the public transportation and a car pretty similar.

Shane Barbera