It's part of the reason I haven't bought a car. I'm in my mid 20s and didn't get my license in high school because insurance would have been too expensive (my parents wanted me to pay for it).
I think driving is a good life skill so I got my license in my early 20s, but I still have zero desire to own a car.
That said, I live in Seattle, where there is good public transportation.
Here are my numbers:
Parking (I work downtown): $250/month * 12 months = $3000
Parking spot at my apartment complex, 5 miles from city center: $130/month * 12 months = $1560
Gas: $100/month * 12 months = $1200
Car registration fees in Seattle: ~$400/year
Insurance for a 25 year old in Seattle: ~$1500 (It might actually be higher?)
Maintenance: we'll say $1000
So the total cost for me would be ~$8660+ per year. And that's excluding the cost of the car!
With a 5 mile commute, public transit 3 days a week plus Uber/Lyft 4 days a week is cheaper, hands down. Uber/Lyft 7 days a week cuts it closer but is still cheaper.
I'm in a similar situation, but from what I gather lifestyle factors heavily into the "do I need/want a car" equation. Kids, for example, usually mandate a car.
Outdoor activities or any hobby that requires you haul around a lot of gear can also make having your own transportation a lot more appealing.
Lifestyle plays a part in where and how you live though. Kids may not require a car in downtown Toronto, but all the nice kid-oriented programs are uptown, where you do need a car to get around.
Similarly, living in SF with two kids, I don't technically _need_ a car since MUNI coverage is decent, but we have a fast-paced lifestyle: it's a heck more convenient to have a car when you are regularly going to costco, ikea, trying out a new local bakery or restaurant, etc, etc... in a single day.
Much like a house becomes a home, the car becomes a "base": it's a place for snacks and naps for the kids, for radio music and breaks, it's where we leave the bags of things to be returned to the mall after brunch, or the three layers of sweaters that are too hot to wear at noon but we'll definitely need on the way home at dusk, it's where we take pictures of the latest ice cream mess and where we have yelling contests when we get lost even though we have 2 GPS-enabled devices running.
We could still do many of those things when we didn't have a car, but it's far more boring, far more exhausting, and far less fun.
This is the biggest divide I see when talking with people about future ownership of self-driving cars: will they consume it as an on-demand service, or will they own it outright?
Some are vehemently in the "I'd never own a car again" camp, and others say "I'll buy one right away". People with kids seem much more likely to say the latter. It's not just transportation, it's a mobile room of the house.
I imagine that depends on the kid's age. When they're small, having a "mobile room" (I love this concept) is great - a place to store the car seat, the stroller, extra clothes, diapers, some backup formula, etc. As they get older, they need less and less accoutrements, until everything they need can fit in their pockets.
If we are casting votes, put me in the “very soon won’t own a car” camp and it’s because I have a kid.
My wife and I each gave up cars we loved because they didn’t make sense for our new kid oriented life. The econobox we have instead we both hate and will likely replace with “nothing” when it becomes cost stupid to own.
I might buy a car after that but it will be pure toy.
Also considering the other sub-thread, it does appear that having kids will incentivize consuming more. There are gaping needs that are most easily solved with big cars, big houses, etc., and I don't think it's necessarily productive to chastise anyone for not going out of your way to avoid these choices.
For people who are considering having kids in the future and care about consuming less, consider that the largest positive ecological impact you can probably make is to have fewer kids. It's important to consider this before deciding on kids, because once they're around, the house is stacked against you in terms of switching to (or retaining) low-consumption habits.
> it's a heck more convenient to have a car when you are regularly going to costco, ikea, trying out a new local bakery or restaurant,
The idea of going to physical stores to browse articles has become mind numbing to me. 'Regularly going to costco, ikea' when I can just order on amazon, get ikea to deliver to my home, get non-perishable/fresh food online from supermarkets that do home deliveries, have 5 bakeries that I can get to in 5 minutes of bicycling and more restaurants than I could care for (European cities are nice like that).
> We could still do many of those things when we didn't have a car, but it's far more boring
Maybe for you.
> far more exhausting
Getting things delivered to your home is far less exhausting than going through the mad labyrinth of Ikea that was built to keep you in the store for the longest time possible. Just the thought of having to find the exit again makes me feel hypertension.
> Getting things delivered to your home is far less exhausting
Fair. But on the other hand, having ice cream and meatballs at Ikea is a thing. You also need to account for cost of delivery and for returning things. And that's just ikea-related things we do.
> 5 bakeries that I can get to in 5 minutes of bicycling and more restaurants than I could care for
That describes downtown of any half decent metropolitan city anywhere, not just europe. I already mentioned the issue with that though: you can't do "5 minutes of bycicling" when you have 2 toddlers. Nor are your family going to have easy access to the multitude of other things I didn't mention: fishing, strawberry picking, corn mazes, safari, skiing, lift lock tour, trips of various lengths are just _some_ of the many many things we did last year. Driving three towns over to ride in a carousel one afternoon "because my wife heard it was a nice one" is the sort of thing we've done just for the heck of it.
Could I do the instagramming-yet-another-fusion-sushi-roll metrosexual lifestyle? Sure. But I think having a car opens a wider breadth of experiences.
> Nor are your family going to have easy access to the multitude of other things I didn't mention: fishing, strawberry picking, corn mazes, safari, skiing, trips of various lengths, lift lock tour are just _some_ of the many many things we did last year.
That really depends on location. Living in a southern French town that has public transportation (bus and tramway) that leads to nice beach towns in 20 to 30 min, fishing is not an activity we lack. Leaving the city to get to the bordering countryside for activities like picking fruits, nuts and wild vegetables also takes about 30 min. When I was a kid I didn't need for my father to be home and drive me around if I wanted to go out and have fun eating wild nuts and berries.
France has a powerful train network and no matter where you live here, you're always close to a ski station, kinda.
> Drive three towns over one afternoon to ride in a carousel "because my wife heard it was a nice one" is the sort of thing we've done for the heck of it.
And the sort of attitude your grand-children will rightly judge you for considering the horrible impact your vacuous consumerism you're calling 'breadth' of experiences is having on this world. I would have abstained from this remark were it not for this latter quip :
> Could I do the instagramming-yet-another-crepe metrosexual lifestyle?
So, if we're not proudly rolling coal we are instagramming metrosexuals, probably wearing fedoras and tipping it at m'lady? have you gone and looked at a mirror yet?
This thread in general was one of the most revealing thing I've ever read about Americans and their view of the world. Particularly the guy who wouldn't even walk one kilometer :
True. Where I grew up, the closest beach was an hour and a half drive away. Closest ski station was in a different country. Wasn't exactly safe to step out of the house to begin with though, being close to slums and all. I consider myself lucky to be able to share different kinds of experiences with my kids now even though the public transport system in north america doesn't help me.
> the sort of attitude your grand-children will rightly judge you for considering the horrible impact your vacuous consumerism you're calling 'breadth' of experiences is having on this world
You're right, I should just throw my car in the sea. If I also throw out my computer, my grandchildren will be proud that I tried to help bankrupt the ecology-destroying companies that mine rare metals for these gadgets you and I use to waste time online. OR I could just be honest with myself and acknowledge that I'm selfish despite knowing that merely existing is a huge burden on the planet.
> So, if we're not proudly rolling coal we are instagramming metrosexuals
I dunno what you do or didn't do with your life, or why you're acting defensive, and frankly I don't care. I literally said I could do that lifestyle, stereotypical as it may be, but that it would eventually feel somewhat monotonous to me now that I've had different experiences.
I say this as someone who was extremely anti-car-ownership and changed minds once I had kids. Maybe you had it easy with safe ubiquitous public transportation and you're just trying to pull the tired europe-is-superior thing on me, but I've no allegiances in that game and I'm just talking about my experience with what I can pragmatically do for my kids with a car vs without. You do you.
> You're right, I should just throw my car in the sea. If I also throw out my computer, my grandchildren will be proud that I tried to help bankrupt the ecology-destroying companies that mine rare metals for these gadgets you and I use to waste time online. OR I could just be honest with myself and acknowledge that I'm selfish despite knowing that merely existing is a huge burden on the planet.
You can have a sense of proportion about the fun:ecological impact ratio of the activities you do, and make choices in the light of that. My instinct is that "driving three towns over to ride in a carousel ... just for the heck of it" is in the same category as "tossed all our rubbish in a nearby field": the cost to other people is all out of whack with the benefit to you. I don't know whether that's actually true or not, but going on a long drive for something frivolous triggers the same skin-crawling reaction in me that tossing litter out of a window would.
(My preferred solution would be carbon cap-and-trade (and land value taxes that would translate into road use fees and parking charges) so that car users bore the full costs of the externalities they were imposing, and then if you want to spend your discretionary income on frivolous car journeys that's up to you. But in the current regime I'd say there's a moral duty to minimize car travel or offset it somehow, because by taking a car journey you're imposing a cost on others, much more than just using a rare metal for a time)
Driving three towns over isn't actually that long of a drive, compared to, say, driving downtown from uptown. The sense of proportion comes from the length of the drive. Sure the carousel was nice, but going to the library or the swimming pool is muuuch more appealing on any given weekend.
In any case, how far does one take the fun-vs-impact dilemma? Is using a couple of dollars worth of gas worse than killing a 7 yr old top-of-food-chain wild predator so we can have a fresh tuna sushi roll? Does it make sense to keep thousands of buses running at 10% capacity 7 days a week when we could all just stay home watching youtube and eating delivered food? One can draw an arbitrary line anywhere but unless they're either an ecological saint or admittedly selfish, there's going to be some amount of hypocrisy in that line.
Wrt taxes, taxing suburb living costs seems totally arbitrary. Even the current income/sales tax system makes more sense imho: spend less == less ecological impact
> In any case, how far does one take the fun-vs-impact dilemma? Is using a couple of dollars worth of gas worse than killing a 7 yr old top-of-food-chain wild predator so we can have a fresh tuna sushi roll? Does it make sense to keep thousands of buses running at 10% capacity 7 days a week when we could all just stay home watching youtube and eating delivered food? One can draw an arbitrary line anywhere but unless they're either an ecological saint or admittedly selfish, there's going to be some amount of hypocrisy in that line.
There are degrees of selfishness; "everyone's somewhat selfish therefore being arbitrarily selfish is fine" is a fallacy. How much ecological impact you consider acceptable is a matter of personal conscience just like how much money you consider it acceptable to spend on personal amusement rather than worthwhile causes, and in the same way there's no clear bright line; rather there's a spectrum from saintdom to niceness to decency to nastiness to evil.
> Wrt taxes, taxing suburb living costs seems totally arbitrary. Even the current income/sales tax system makes more sense imho: spend less == less ecological impact
Pigovian taxes on pollution are mainstream economics orthodoxy. That Georgist land value taxes are optimal and would therefore be better for the economy than income/sales taxes is only slightly less so. It's not about suburbs specifically and it's far from arbitrary.
I don't think anyone's disputing that. I just find it weird that someone would call out another person's lifestyle as "vacuous consumerism" or whatever when they have their own nowhere-near-ideal-but-somehow-arbitrarily-kosher footprint. You might, for example, recycle but I'm not going to be giving anyone crap if they aren't as meticulous about it as the japanese are.
I keep hearing "well here in europe you don't need a car as much" as if that's some sort of sound argument. I mean, that's great for them, but I don't speak french, dutch and certainly not norwegian, so what, I'm supposed to spend $10k+ to move my whole family there so I can lug around a stroller or a bag full of books on the train for the sake of the planet? Sorry, not gonna happen.
It's easy to be single and tell other people "look, I spend so little, I'm such a model earth dweller". I've been there. Now try doing that while enriching your kids lives, while having a public transit system that doesn't span much further than downtown core, and while having considerations about proximity to family, etc. It's a totally different ball game. And that's my whole point: different people have different lifestyles for various reasons. One's single european lifestyle is not necessarily going to work for someone else living somewhere else with a family. If anything, the "you have car, you bad" attitude is self-absorbed and short-sighted.
> I keep hearing "well here in europe you don't need a car as much" as if that's some sort of sound argument. I mean, that's great for them, but I don't speak french, dutch and certainly not norwegian, so what, I'm supposed to spend $10k+ to move my whole family there so I can lug around a stroller or a bag full of books on the train for the sake of the planet? Sorry, not gonna happen.
A lot of Americans talk as though needing a car is a law of nature, which just isn't the case. From a European perspective a lot of this is Americans shooting themselves in the foot and then saying they can't help bleeding everywhere. The American situation is one that's been created by American political decisions - zoning, parking minimums, minimum lot sizes, car-first city designs - and can be reversed by politics as well, but for Americans to make those changes they have to believe that the results are possible. Of course you can choose to keep operating on everyone-owns-a-car politics, but recognise that you do have a choice in the matter; recognise that approaches like the currently-under-discussion California SB 827 could create an America that's less car-dependent.
> And that's my whole point: different people have different lifestyles for various reasons. One's single european lifestyle is not necessarily going to work for someone else living somewhere else with a family.
But non-car does work for a lot of people across many different lifestyles, including Americans, including people with families. You're painting it as if the only people who could possibly disagree with you are this tiny box of single European instagramming metrosexuals, and actually it's you that's the small box. Most of the world's households do not own a car.
> If anything, the "you have car, you bad" attitude is self-absorbed and short-sighted.
Global warming is already going to kill millions of people in the best case, if we do everything we can - but what we do can make the difference between how many millions die. The current American level of car use is simply not sustainable; maybe avoiding it is going to mean worse lives for your kids or less chance to see your family, but ultimately if it comes down to a choice between those things and killing 80% of humanity there can only be one answer.
But really I don't believe it's that hard. For decades incandescent light bulb manufacturers claimed they couldn't possibly make a light bulb that was more efficient - but then when we actually legally mandated certain levels of efficiency, somehow they found a way. A good life without a car is possible, and when cars become a non-option people will surprise themselves with how easy it is to adapt to their absence, and wonder what it was they ever thought they needed them for.
> A lot of Americans talk as though needing a car is a law of nature
I can't speak for other people (especially those who do live in really-car-first parts of the US), but for me it's definitely not a law of nature. I've been single with no car, married with no car, had a kid with no car, had a kid uptown with no car. Can it work? Sure, with some concessions it can totally work. But things like taking the newborn to the doctor using public transportation _suck_, even though I consider the public transit system _good_.
> Most of the world's households do not own a car.
Right, and the sort of logistics that sucked for me with just strolling one kid in downtown Toronto suck for them too, often tenfold. Where I grew up (Brazil), it's common for single moms of 4 to need to take 3-4 buses to get to their first job of the day. There's plate rotation, vehicle ownership tax, tolls, alternative forms of public transit, uber, but also high crime, floods, corruption, inequality, you name it. The cars-vs-public-transit discussion doesn't even begin to scratch the transportation problems in Sao Paulo, let alone the environmental impact. For my specific situation and my level of disposable income, a car happens to make life much easier, but I'm fully aware that cars aren't a one-glove-fit-all solution, just as I'm aware that making sweeping political commentary wrt city design isn't going to cut it as a solution to the many different types of challenges involved in optimizing transportation in a non-idealized world.
> You're painting it as if the only people who could possibly disagree with you are this tiny box of single European instagramming metrosexuals
Not at all! Not having a car does work for a lot of people, and in places like the Netherlands, one can even happily bike everywhere with their kids without getting almost killed by taxis. But cars can be undeniably useful for saving time and for carrying things around. People giving labor use cars to go to the hospital for a reason. People uber for a reason. People drive in much of the rural world for a reason. I'm not sure what's there to disagree with.
> recognise that you do have a choice in the matter; recognise that approaches like the currently-under-discussion California SB 827
Generally speaking, the problem with social activism is that most people don't have the time, energy or interest to pour into the political game, and it's not even clear that a half decent solution would emerge even if they did (see, e.g., housing in SF). For my particular case, as I mentioned before, I'm not american and I'm about as unmotivated to be politically invested in San Francisco as I am in Sao Paulo.
> A good life without a car is possible
Yes, it is, but currently, as I mentioned, it unfortunately involves making a lot of concessions. If a better option came along, I'd totally be open to it. As I said, I've held the anti-car position for a long time, and I'm certainly not shy to change camps again.
Do you eat meat? Because if you do, the meat and dairy industry has a much bigger impact ecologically than a car does, at least in the USA. Raising beef or dairy cows requires orders of magnitude more water, land, corn feed (or even grass feed) for less calories than growing plant based sources of food would. Not to mention the conditions these animals are raised in (USA being the worst affender). So next time you take a bite of your steak, think how much ecologically impact that bite cost the world.
I eat meat on occasion, but not "just for the heck of it", certainly not in the case of beef (you're misleadingly equivocating between "meat" and beef in your post when their ecological impact is very different).
Back-of-the-envelope numbers from a quick search suggest that a day's eating beef is equivalent to driving maybe 15 miles in terms of climatic impact, a day's chicken equivalent to ~1 mile. So "only drive when you're getting at least 1 steak/15 miles worth of fun out of it", and conversely "only eat steak when you're getting at least a 15 mile drive's worth of fun out of it", seem like good principles to live by.
> Could I do the instagramming-yet-another-fusion-sushi-roll metrosexual lifestyle? Sure. But I think having a car opens a wider breadth of experiences.
Looks like your car hasn't given you any breadth in experiences.
Ah, yeah, I've heard wonders about it. Would love to come visit. But yeah, you're right. When I was in Toronto, cycling from my apartment to work was just a 15 min ride, but it's definitely not something I would've felt safe doing w/ kids on the bike.
We do have a car and a toddler. The car sits idle most days, maybe once a week we get on it to go somewhere where it's inconvenient by bike or transit. For his first year we didn't have a car. This is in SF and Berkeley. A lot of people, even those with kids, could perfectly ditch their cars, rent occasionally and come out ahead in terms of costs (and lifestyle).
One thing I've wondered is how people deal with car seats with Uber/Lyft/Taxi's. Do they carry their own with them and take the time to install it and uninstall it? Do you just take the bus and not worry about a car seat?
> Do they carry their own with them and take the time to install it and uninstall it?
Yeah, it is possible to do this without much effort, if the car-seat has a seatbelt strap in the base and the stroller can carry the car-seat around instead of being held in the hand.
I had no car for the first eight months, with my child in SF.
The Lyft plus generally has enough space to stow the stroller and the kid wasn't heavy enough to hurt myself by picking up the carseat with the baby in it.
However, once day-care starts, it gets pretty inconvenient to use a taxi every day.
We moved cross-country and didn't have our car for a few weeks. For the few uber trips we took during that time, we just YOLO'd: had the kids (5 and 3) wear normal seatbelts, but with the chest strap going under their arms rather than over their neck. They also travelled to/from airport without car seats.
In my experience, drivers are generally a _lot_ more careful when there are kids in the car, compared to, say, a pool driver at rush hour.
Car seats aren’t magic. They don’t eliminate risk, they reduce it. Much safer is to never drive the kids in a car at all. And if you do, never on the highway and only in the largest vehicle money can buy.
But that’s not how life works. We all risk our lives and those of our kids every day, for convenience, life experience, laziness, etc. You should be aware of the risks and then pick the place on the risk / reward curve that you can live with.
From local laws. From physical laws they are not. As a kid long time ago, I was sitting in a Fiat 124 when a bus driver wasn't paying attention to the road ahead and hit the stationary car on intersection in full city speed, thankfully it was direct hit from behind and there was nothing in front of the car, so there were no serious and only some very light injuries, but it was ugly.
But I cannot image having a kid sitting freely in a lap nowadays just because the car in question is exempt from regulations. There doesn't even have to be a collision, emergency braking (either human or autonomous) is enough to throw the kid off against the car interior and sustain injuries (yep, had that too in the old no-rear-seat-belt-times when an ambulance without siren appeared oncoming wrong way, almost bit my tongue off).
Don't use restraint systems just when they are required by regulations. And especially in nowadays tenfold traffic.
Outdoor activities or any hobby that requires you haul around a lot of gear
Indeed, this is something that gets totally missed by advocates of on-demand self-driving yadda yadda, because they live in densely populated cities and socialise and get entertainment almost exclusively online. That demographic is overrepresented on HN. Most people who own cars who might use them to commute during the week use them for fun stuff at the weekends too, for which glorified taxis are just not suitable.
A zipcar’s not really for the use case of a weekend away tho’. It would be a traditional rental like Hertz or Avis, then you have to pick it up the night before, load it, then when you get back late unload it, drop it off, then get back home by some other means...
well, because it has a max 180 mile per day limit with per-mile costs above that. So if you're staying overnight, that's one thing, but doing a 2 hour, go kayaking, 2 hours back type drive doesn't work.
Pointing out that it makes sense to calculate the actual dollar amount of the per-mile cost. I haven't done 2-hour round trips, but I've done 1.5-hour and was surprised how inconsequential the markup turned out to be.
This was several years ago and in Canada, so conclusions may differ.
Eh, 2 hours, hike for 10 hours, 2 hours - you can do that all while it's still light quite easily in the summer time, and 10 hours of hiking is a damn good day :)
Depends on where you live. Even with kids, you don't need a car in London. You can rent cars over the weekends. Hauling groceries is a PITA but with a good backpack, this is also solved. If you live in some place like Barbican, everything is around your doorstep, so no need to haul groceries. The downside - you pay higher rents.
Outdoor activities - you can rent over the weekends unless you are kayaking, skiing or climbing and don't want to haul gear in and out of your car every time you reach home.
I don't find Zipcar all that affordable except for the very shortest of trips (read: < 3 hours). Anything over that and you're better off renting a vehicle for the day through traditional routes.
If zipcar's like our Enterprise Car Club here in Nottingham, the massive advantages are:
1. No need to travel to rental (out-of-town) centres, it's round the corner
2. Don't have to pick-up or drop-off during office hours
3. Don't have to wait half-hour for all the paper-work and stuff
4. Don't have to answer a bunch of obnoxious questions
5. Don't have to dig out a load of documentation
6. Can decide to take one on a whim, with no notice
7. Can hire it for 2 or 3 hours instead of days
You pick up the car and go.
I don't use it much as generally taxis are cheaper, but if I want to go on a country walk or do a large shop, it's very handy.
I think it works out slightly more expensive if you hire it for whole days, but again all those conveniences apply.
I can get a car from AVIS for $30 to $40 CAD per day (not including gas: typically that is another $10-12 or so).
I have a membership in a car share, but I rarely bother with it for the above reason.
For an hour or two or something, it's good.
Most recently used it for trips to emergency. I mean, the co-op car is out there on the street, walking distance, whereas you need a reservation for the rental car, can only get it during the opening hours, from an outfit that is several miles away.
Yet, there is no guarantee that the share cars will be there for emergencies; it's just luck. If it's 3 a.m. the odds are excellent. 3 p.m. on a Saturday; not so good.
Same experience. I can rent for $100 for the full day. Problem is usually I have to pick up the car from the airport since local garages office hours are limited. There is very few available on the weekend.
That's crazy expensive. I rent for around $30-$40 (Canadian dollars). Booking several weeks in advance, mind you. I often rent over Saturday night to Sunday morning. The near by place doesn't open until 9:00 on Sunday for returns, so I rent at 9:00 on Saturday even though they are open at 8:00 already, so I can return it within the 24 hours. During certain peak season times, they about double the rate. At those times, I favor the co-op in which I have a membership.
Depends. I did take one from Avis roughly $70 for a whole day with some fee. But not all the time and again depends. I have AAA though. Just to be clear, for zipcar, one full day can be super expensive. Deals like $85 a day is seasonal (like Labor Day).
Zipcar usually has both and hourly and day rate. The day rate is typically something like $85 and the process of picking up the car is typically much easier than a traditional rental.
Don’t forget you have to add up taxes and other shitty fees. They come out like $100+ for Zipcar. Those $7.5 an hour deal is hard to get because they run out quick and then the ones left are far to pick up - at that point just call Uber or give up...
I work at a ski resort, I ski anywhere between 3-7 days a week. I lug some level of gear between home and the mountain every single day because sometimes I'm keeping the option of skiing elsewhere open. Renting a car would not be effective for me.
I did this for a while after I moved to the bay area. Turns out, it adds up quickly. A weekend of climbing or backpacking or skiing comes in around $300. On top of that, it's less practical. You have to go get the car, higher mileage trips cost more, you can't rent for longer than a few days, etc. If you're going out of town every weekend, and possibly driving during the week too, car sharing services aren't quite as great as they seem.
we take our kids on the bus its fine, but not practical for daily commute, we drop all 4 of us off at a different spot on the way into the city. Just no good way to do that on the bus.
once they are both in school, (and the school that is being remodeled so one of them is going across town, we should be able to take transit daily and the kids can walk too from school. There's more to it than if they can walk on and off the bus.
It still depends where you live. A city with good public transit and cycling infra structure and stuff you can walk to, still means you can have a kid and not need a car.
Cause we're all giving numbers here. Let me give you my numbers for my bike. I rent my bike and got a train subscription. I pay about 50 EUR a year for my bike and 100 EUR a year for my train subscription.
I have a car, but I'm not the one paying insurance on it anymore (passed on to other family member). The car was 5000 EUR used (Volkswagen Polo) which was bought 7-8 years ago and it was a 5 year old car back then. Right now it's really getting old, but only needed a fix last year or so and new tires this year (not my concern anymore though). But it's safe to say those cost about 800 EUR in total. The car insurance is what I'd guess 400 EUR.
I'm glad that I live in a city where biking is the #1 priority, I wouldn't feel safe biking in the US. It's also a lot cheaper!
You don't just live in a city where biking is a priority, you live in a country where you can actually get to places by train - which the US, for all intents and purposes, is not.
100 EUR per year for a train pass? Wow. I pay $100 USD per month for a CTA pass in Chicago...and that's about the best transit situation you'll find in the US.
Also mind that in many places in Europe, public transit is more heavily subsidized by taxes. If you consider how low taxes are in most states of the US, you probably have some extra money at hand to use for trains (or whatever else), partially making up for the higher cost.
Just for context this is the all you can eat monthly plan for the CTA and the suburban bus system. It represents something like 50 per ride, no transfer train trips per month.
The trick to reducing insurance on a beater car is to not insure the car for damage. Just get insurance for passengers, yourself, damage you do to other people, cars and property.
Never insure for a risk you can cover yourself. If you have a car that is worth < $10k, you probably should pay for damage to it out of pocket.
In the UK this is known as 'third party' cover, and, when you hit the price comparison websites, it's not always the case that the cheapest third party option is cheaper than the cheapest comprehensive option.
Depends on your car, they said it's a beater. Of course an insurance company will give you significant price reduction if you have, say, a late 90s Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic with a 80 hp engine, as compared to something more modern and fun with twice the power.
I know that the sportiness and novelty of a car drives up the insurance price but it doesn't seem to as much as I thought, my friend recently got a new WRX and pays very very little in insurance for it considering he's a 22 year old male.
But yeah it being a beater makes sense, I just got quotes for a 1981 Honda Civic in Seattle and some are even less than $700/year.
Seems like location is very important. I went down from ~$350 to ~$115 a month moving from NY to NJ. For reference: 22, male, just started driving in late 2017.
GP might be paying only third-party insurance. I'm not sure about America, but at least in Australia, AU$500 (US$400) per year will get you third-party insurance if you're under 25, and if you're driving a beater car you don't need any other insurance.
I looked at getting comprehensive insurance on my old car, but in the end the excess was greater than the value of the car. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for GP.
I think it really depends on your lifestyle. I love to hike, snowshoe and ski. Public transit to Snoqualmie doesn't exist and lyfts would be incredibly expensive, if they would even take you there. Not even factoring in lugging heavy equipment around.
If you stay in the city almost all the time it's probably great. The minute you want to do something outside of the city it's impossible without a car.
> The minute you want to do something outside of the city it's impossible without a car.
Depends on where you live and what you do outside. Over the years, I have ridden my bike to half a dozen different countries, starting from my doorstep. That might be rare, but it's definitely not "impossible without a car".
I also happen to have access to a very active market for skiing/snowboarding weekend trips where a bus takes you to an hotel in the mountains on Friday night, you spend two days on the slopes and get back on Sunday evening. There are all kinds of people on those buses and most of them arrive at the meeting point by car, so it's definitely not a choice made out of necessity.
Rent a car for the weekend? It's like $50/day, so only $3k/yr to do it once a day per week. (Not factoring in the added cost of gas, or the discounts you can get by regularly renting a car and getting your own non-owner insurance)
It's a hassle. You can't customize it. I have a roofrack that accommodates a canoe. Maybe you need chains for the winter; maybe you can get those with a rental, don't know. Etc. Obviously it's an option for people who live in cities and can't easily own a car but if you're going to use it regularly, there are a lot of advantages to having your own vehicle.
I would never want to bring a rental car into a snow covered pass or an icy parking lot. Too much liability. Good suggestion, probably good for a day hike or otherwise.
there are road conditions you cannot drive in without snow chains, and rental companies don't allow you to attach chains. these road conditions are not uncommon if you're going skiing.
effectively there are moderately common road/condition combinations that you cannot drive in a rental car.
> there are road conditions you cannot drive in without snow chains
Where is this? I live in northern part of Scandinavia, and we manage just fine with normal winter tires. Snow chains are pretty much only for semi trucks. Most people even use studless winter tires these days.
And of course rental cars have winter tires in the winter season, anything else would be illegal.
The US does not mandate snow tires at a national level, and in many places (even northern states where snow and ice are common) tire chains are illegal because they can damage the roads.
If you're going up steep hills covered in ice, winter tires or even studded tires are not going to work. You need chains. Then again, the best rally drivers are Scandinavian, so maybe you guys are just better drivers than we are :)
Western US. I can't comment on whether they should be required or not but they commonly are required in Utah, passes in the Sierras such as going up to Tahoe, and in the Cascades.
Seconded, grew up in far northern Minnesota and no-one uses snowchains there, though there is a preference for cars with high clearance (and some sand/skidboards in the trunk, usually). I guess I can see this if you're doing deep backwoods skiing, but that's an awfully niche pastime no? I've never heard of a ski resort that's inaccessible without snowchains.
>I've never heard of a ski resort that's inaccessible without snowchains.
Lots of them in the West. Little Cottonwood Canyon (at a minimum) in Utah. Tahoe from the Bay area (Donner Pass) under certain conditions http://www.dot.ca.gov/trafficops/trucks/chains.html. In a number of cases you can get exceptions for approved winter tires but it varies.
The entire idea is to be low cost, so when you start tacking on all these fees kinda defeats that purpose. At some point you will get to the point where it's the same cost to rent vs own.
A Lyft to Snoqualmie would be expensive, but a Zipcar, ReachNow, or Car2Go wouldn't be. Especially since you don't need car insurance or have to pay for gas.
Zipcars with ski racks might be a little hard to find in Seattle during the winter, but they do exist.
"That said, I live in Seattle, where there is good public transportation." boy are you in for a treat when you move to a city with good public transportation!
I don't understand why every country/state/city doesn't have superb public transportation. I live in a city in India which has a pathetic public transportation system. The buses are irregular and you can't rely on it at all.
I've been to India, and I'm quite sure nobody I met except maybe the hotels serving tourists, was paying taxes. Shops, restaurants, businesses all only accepted cash. And they also never give a receipt. So yeah, 3% sounds about right.
I live in South Africa. It's a similar situation here. The problem is that most people are so poor, they legally don't have to pay income tax. (because they are unemployed or have a really shitty income)
Really shows how much subsidized parking can affect the equation. I've never had to pay for parking at my residence, and the only time I had to pay for parking was a 20-month stint working in downtown Boston. Cut those out and costs go down by $4500/year, over half. I spent about $25/month on gas (for most of my career, I've worked either 2 miles away from home or 20 feet away). Insurance has consistently been about $1000/year. Maintenance was at basically zero for many years, but now that my car is 9 years old $1000/year is about right. Including the amortized cost of the car (which was $16,700 OTD new), I've spent maybe $3000/year on it. That's a generous estimate - the car still has some resale value (though I intend to run it into the ground), so it may be even less.
Same here. Park on the street free outside my house and work pays for parking (East SF bay area), although I bike pretty much every day anyways. Basically $100/yr for insurance, car is old and crap so maybe $100 for depreciation now, amortizing the cost over the age (10 years) would be a bit more but that doesn't matter anymore, maybe $1000 for maintenance. Gas for trips. Cost is pretty similiar to yours.
Probably about $2.5K/year all-in, once depreciation and maintenance are included. Maybe $25K total. I don't consider that to be all that bad. My car has about 30K miles on it, which is ridiculously low for a 9-year-old car, but that's the virtue of living 2 miles away from work, biking in the summer, and walking to the grocery store.
Lyft prices in the SF/BayArea are $1.21/mile, so just on mileage, I would've paid $36K. Add in the $2/trip base fair, $5 minimum, and any surge pricing or time waiting, and it could add up to $50K very easily, double what I've spent on my car.
People look at $16K for a car or $3k/year and think "those are big numbers", but it turns out that spending $10/day on individual transportation rides adds up very quickly, such that you end up paying way over what the large capital expense would've cost. When I was working in downtown Boston, I did a hybrid car/train commute, and it easily added up to that ($5 parking at Alewife + $2.50 for the train each way) - it was still cheaper than driving, but only because parking in downtown Boston is ridiculous.
25$/month, assuming 35mpg and $2.75/gallon, is 320mi/month, that's a lot of trips to the grocery store or a trip to go skiing/vacation for a weekend. Might not be cheaper than rentals but depending on your situation it can be much more convenient and not much more expensive.
To add on: I just moved to Seattle from Chicago where I lived for several years. In Chicago, I used strictly public transportation or walked, it worked great because I never needed or wanted to leave the "city" in general. If I did, it was infrequent enough to warrant renting a car. All my errands could be done on the walk home from the office as well.
Now that I'm in Seattle (well, Bellevue), the beauty of the PNW has me going on several hours of driving and exploration every weekend. Good luck doing that without a personal vehicle. Also, my commute is agonizing, but even in a personal car it's still orders of magnitude more time efficient than the public transportation options, and I can get all my random errands for the family done during.
I'm probably preaching to the choir by replying to you, but my car is now an indispensable part of my life. I could only imagine not having it being in the densest and most "isolated" American cities at this point (Chicago, Manhattan possibly).
i think those numbers are describing a lifestyle
and not what it means to own a car. many people who own a car will not pay that much for parking. especially if you live 5 miles away from work.
assuming you don’t drive to work and park on the street at home your numbers are down to $4100/yr. but your insurance number looks 2x too big, and maintenance i would drop by half, i think more realistic is a about $3,000/yr
Agreed my company is currently moving close to the center of Atlanta. It’s going to cost $15 a week to commute by train for the minimum 3 days to the office. Employee will match half so it only costs $7.50 a week out of pocket.
I own a car bet it much more feasible to ride the train and walk briefly. Parking is free and only a mile to the closest train stop.
My employers building has a free parking deck. Does Seattle not have free parking decks is some larger buildings?
I've never had the experience of being the only white person on the trains (though I still often am the only white person on a lot of the bus routes I take), and they're generally pretty crowded with all walks at this point. The CEO who took over in 2012 has had it revenue-positive every year and in 2016 ATL voters passed a tax increase to build out more, so it's got the public support now as well.
My apartment complex has a free parking lot. You can park there or on the road. I live 2 miles from work (picked the apartment because it was so close).
Miles driven x .545 would be a simpler way to calculate the costs of driving. It is the reimbursement rate the IRS uses, and is supposed to be all-inclusive to the car itself. This number is continuously updated, and there is a high incentive to keep it as accurate as possible for most people.[1]
That's an average, though. It varies considerably depending on many factors. Generally speaking, the less that you drive, the higher the per mile cost will be because there are fewer miles to amortize the fixed costs over.
Never owned a car, as my income increased considered getting one this summer as a luxury, mostly trips and stuff, but didn't have a license and it takes a couple of months to get one here. After thinking about it more I got myself a motorcycle - wanted to get one when I was younger but couldn't afford it - can still do trips, parking/mobility is better and I live in a place where I can ride 10 out of 12 months a year. Has been insanely fun so far although scary as well - an idea to consider if you're in this situation.
> With a 5 mile commute, public transit 3 days a week plus Uber/Lyft 4 days a week is cheaper, hands down. Uber/Lyft 7 days a week cuts it closer but is still cheaper.
But you also have to go to grocery store, go out with friends, do errands which most of the time are scattered across the city, it can take multiple rides per day as well. Also if you have kids you should add dropping them to school and other stuff. So you end up spending lots of time waiting for uber and paying for this little trips.
I walked 5 miles or more when I lived in the city (Boston). If Seattle has any of the amenities of Boston there's a grocery store within walking distance. I always took the T (subway) everywhere. I can't imagine paying for someone to drive me places in the city, it was just never needed even for things like you're talking about.
In the winter too? I thought we were not talking about what's possible and what's not, I thought op was talking about equal convenience for him of owning a car vs using uber/lyft.
(I'm not OP) Why not? I ride even during storms, much less shying away from what, some cold winds in winter? By the time you reach your destination if you're wearing the right clothing you not only won't feel cold, you might even feel too hot. If I ride for longer than 10 minutes I need to open my jacket or put it in my backpack to let some air in to prevent my body from sweating.
Of all the seasons I'd name summer as being worse to ride than winter because there is no getting away from the fact that you'll be drenched in sweat during summer. Thankfully I don't need to go to work on a bicycle because we have great public transportation here in France, so I mostly use it for other things and just for the sake of it (I like cycling). Cycling to work would not be convenient during warm seasons, to say the least. Winter is the best, just get a jacket that protects you from the wind, some gloves and decent shoes.
Don’t you think cycling on a slippery road is quite dangerous since in US you have to ride your bike on a road with cars and can’t go on a sidewalk, so as soon as you fall down - you are very likely going to skid to a path of an incoming car. I don’t think saving a penny is worth this risk
Think about how much money you could be making on the cost of living arbitrage if you commute 3 hours one way from nowhere to your high paid SF software job. But of course adding time to your daily commute, spent in a car particularly, is a great way to trade off a little bit of money gained from expenses pushed into externalities against general happiness.
I agree it varies by place. I live in Charlottesville, and it is not very plausible if none of your friends have a car. The public transit is only convenient in downtown and in UVA, but none of the supermarkets are inside the city.
Supermarkets, many restaurants, and malls are all along the state high way. It is ridiculous for a walker, because sometimes you cannot walk across the street to get to the McDonald's right in your eye sight. No crosswalk for a few miles.
Walmart is 15 minutes drive away from the city. But to take busses, you will need about 45 minutes to an hour to get there,depending on your timing.
There are closer grocery stores, but the busses still take much much longer than a car.
I will be willing to ditch my car anytime, if either there is a grocery store in city, or a faster public transportation method is available.
I reached exactly the same conclusion (I have no kids etc.). I commute to work via Uber/Lyft Pool for ~$450/month. Owning a car in Boston would mean:
- Parking $315/month
- Gas $75/month
- Insurance $1,500/year
- Car Lease $200/month
- Maintenance $1,000/year
- Miscellaneous Boston registraction fees etc. $500/year
- TOTAL $840/month
For me, owning a car makes no sense.
Tried becoming a car person once, ignoring all that math, just as a luxury. The cheapest old banger is more of a "luxury car" then a Lexus if you don't have much use for a car. Turns out it's impossible for me, cars just don't stay operational through sufficiently longs stretches of disuse.
I've never had a car and my roommate ditched his car shortly after moving in with me. It's a complete no brainer unless you live in a poorly-designed area[1]. He actually likes driving, but with a small fraction of the money he's saving relative to owning a car, he rents a sportscar once a month and we drive somewhere beautiful (one of our favorite choices is the oceanside cliffs near us).
[1] To be fair, the US wreaked havoc across its cities in the 60s and 70s, so it's a lot more common here than it should be.
Much depends on what you do with the battery. Physically disconnecting goes a long way, trickle charge even further. But street parking and serious mothballing don't go well together, particularly when you never know ahead of time wether your next drive will be tomorrow or next year. There are cheap solar trickle chargers that supposedly solve the problem for street parking, but modern car electronics often require some rewiring to hook them up. In the end it's not an unsolvable problem, but a strong motivator to give in to reason and just take a rental when needed.
The battery was fine in mine too, and not disconnected. I had to jump it but it still had enough charge for the radio etc. and I've been using the same battery since.
UberX/Lyft or Line/Pool? I do Lyft Line from train station to home when my wife can't pick me up, and I dislike it. I wonder if you are factoring that in, or maybe you're used to it.
I think the biggest impact is going to be felt with current generations of 18 year olds. My kid (about to be 18) has no interest in getting a driver's license and neither are any of his friends. He's happy to be taking Uber and Lyft anywhere he goes. And between the cost of the vehicle and insurance, it's cheaper for me as well.
I didn't drive a lot (or own a car) until I graduated from school. But I do have trouble wrapping my head around not getting a driver's license past a certain point--whether they get one while in school or not. Even had Uber/Lyft existed at the time, I literally couldn't have done my first job (I regularly had to drive hours to a job site) and I would have been at least reliant on other people at other jobs.
Vacations and weekends would be even more limited.
I certainly get not owning a car, especially in a city. That's basically a decision about economics and hassle. But even the couple I know who live in SF without a car use rentals and Zipcar all the time (in addition to Uber/Lyft).
I'm 42 and don't have a drivers license. My dad tried to nudge me into learning to drive, but I had no interest - it seemed to me to be a waste of time. Of course, I lived in Norway, and public transport was good. I now live in London, and transport is still good.
I've never really felt limited, though certainly there are places that would be expensive for me to get to thanks to the need of long taxi rides etc., but there are also far more places to go than I can get to see in a lifetime that are still easily accessible with public transport.
I something think maybe I should get a license so I could at least rent a car for certain places, but I've just never felt it's been important enough to get around to it.
Had I lived in the US, the situation certainly would be different - I have spent quite a lot of time in the Bay Area without a car pre-Uber/Lyft, and it certainly is possible but awkward even when you're there as a single person, and many other places I've visited in the US has been much worse.
But the thing is, I can totally see a lot of people there too adapting their life after what works with these services. A car is practical in some respects, but you have to deal with service and insurance and parking, and without it you can often spend a portion of that money living in a location where there's less need for a car to begin with, and a portion of it on taxis/Uber/Lyft. And then I can sit back and read or nap.
Of course it depends on the type of jobs you want etc.
>But the thing is, I can totally see a lot of people there too adapting their life after what works with these services.
I'm sure you're right. That's exactly what people do. There are certainly things I can't do that restrict where I can go. I'm not comfortable doing any sort of serious 4WD so there are just areas of parks and forests out west I just don't go to.
Without having had a car it would be hard for you to compare.
In the periods I haven't had a car, I visited some friends much less (friends that other forms of transport were much less convenient than a car). Without a car certain activities were not available either.
Likewise, after many overseas trips, I then hired a car, which made a massive difference to the holiday.
Certainly in a lot of Western Europe, there's a lot that's easily accessible by public transportation + a bit of taxi. But there are absolutely areas and sites that pretty much require you to be either driving or in a tour (which I generally dislike).
It's not that hard to compare, as I certainly are aware there were things we did when I was a child that would be hard for me to do without a car. But the point is that you simply make other choices. Not better or worse choices. Just different ones.
25, and live in SF. No drivers license. Well I had one, but it had expired and I never bothered renewing. I've only personally had to drive a car once in the last 4 years. I recently took a job in the Peninsula, where my commute is now Lyft -> Caltrain -> Lyft, which given the cost of parking in my building turns out to still be cheaper than owning a car - this might be an equation unique to SF.
The only downside of not having a license is getting into bars. Bartenders don't like expired ids and I've been looking into getting a new one.
The thing for me is that, if I were living in that area, I'd be driving into the Santa Cruz mountains, Big Sur, the Sierras, etc. all the time. Which you really can't do unless you drive or someone else drives you.
Heh. My wife & in-laws went with me to watch the Perseids in the Santa Cruz mountains. While we were there, we met a couple young women who had Ubered in from San Francisco. They got there fine, but there was no cell reception where we were, so their apps didn't work, so they were trying to find someone to hitchhike home with. We had a full car (and were going the other way) so we couldn't take them, but I hope they managed to get home safely.
Sure. Subject to the other reasons you may want your own vehicle. But the discussion was about not having a driver's license. I fully agree that, for a lot of people, using some combination of rentals, Zipcar, and ride hail services makes a lot of sense.
I'm surprised - most bars I know either don't card because they're upscale enough to not worry about minors, or they don't accept any expired ID (or sometimes even other states). In Texas, a state ID can be issued that is identical to a DL but with a different title. Costs something like $10-20.
Or get your passport, but that's $160 with the book + card.
I've been using my Passport (card) and that was convenient, however I lost my wallet recently - I've been using my Passport, but if I were to lose that, then I'd be a bit more worried.
As far as carding goes, it depends on the establishment. Most bars I go to, don't card, but when they do it's a situation that can mess up your night.
Some people are very bad drivers for various reasons (e.g. lack of depth perception, poor spatial awareness, whatever). While very little skill is required to get a license in most parts of the country, I fully support people not getting a license if they're bad at it.
I absolutely understand that some people shouldn't/can't get a license. That will probably restrict what sort of activities they can do, etc. I don't really understand doing that by choice though.
(And I'd hope employers would be understanding and supportive of an employee in that position. They're less likely to be as supportive of an employee who just doesn't want to do something even if it affects their ability to do their job.)
I don't get why the employer would have to be "understanding and supportive". Either the job requires a driving license, in which case they should have asked at hiring time, or it doesn't. If they bait-and-switch the employee into driving despite not having asked for it, it's their own fault.
US employers assume adults can drive. Presumably, if they're hiring you as a delivery driver, they will confirm the appropriate licensing. But, if you're a random engineer that they discover can't go to various customer sites without all sorts of special arrangements, a lot of companies are probably going to take that into consideration come review time.
Seems pretty straightforward. If it becomes an actual problem, they start calling it out and make it a requirement, even if it's negotiable.
ADDED: The reality is that there are lots of implicit assumptions in a professional job. Unless it's a job that involves significant/regular travel, they probably won't ask you if you're willing to step on a plane. They probably won't ask you if you're OK with attending meetings before 10am. Etc. If you have out-of-mainstream requirements it's probably mostly on you to raise them.
In the US it's sort of implicit for most professional or technical positions that you'll have to take occasional business trips, and some places you go may not have much public transit or taxis / ride hailing services. A lot of hiring managers just assume everyone has a driver's license and can rent a car if necessary.
Don't forget that getting a driver's license is very expensive in some parts of the world, like Europe. Here it easily requires 1000,00 € and more, as well as a significant time investment for mandatory training, lessons and tests.
While I don't recommend skipping the driver's license despite these circumstances, I can understand that it's a legitimate option for a teenager that doesn't plan to drive.
Exactly the same for my 20 year old daughter. This is really going to restrict where she can live in the US. I wonder if this may have the effect of making cities compete with each other for improving public transit.
I'm in my 20s and have no desire to have a car, I need one where I live right now, but I'm about to make a move to one of the biggest cities in NA, and going carless. I wouldn't even want to live in a city where a car is a requirement.
Can parents track the movements of their child through Lyft and Uber billing? If I were a caricature of Uber, I might be tempted to create an add-on subscription product that would let parents of minors track the movements of their children.
The societal effect of something like this? Possibly awful. Many of today's social problems might stem from children being deprived of time being independent/autonomous. Society doesn't need free range chickens nearly as badly as it needs free range children.
Tracking your child's movements gives the far more autonomy than locking them in the house, for parents concerned about their children's whereabouts. Outside of cases of abuse (not to be discounted), parental location tracking isn't infringing on "free-range children"
This is one of the few cases where I was ahead of my time.
I turned 16 about 20 years ago and had 0 interest in a driver's license. I lived in an extremely rural area. My parents (rightly) said that I'd need to get a job to pay for a car. I figured why bother since I'd be paying for a car to drive to the job where I'd make money to pay for the car.
Seemed like a complete waste of time and effort.
20 years later, I still have no plans to get a license but have changed my tune on work a bit.
So you're relying on friends/family to do the driving if you're outside of lyft/public-transit areas e.g. on vacation in a rental car? Not having a car is a great idea if you can get away with it - not having a license basically means you can't help out when necessary.
It's funny the difficulty that car owner show at understanding non-car-owners. Why would you assume that someone without a driver's license would go on vacation in a rental car in the first place?
By the way, this might not be true in the US, but in other places there's usually some sort of shared transit. Even if it's not a city bus or a ride-sharing network, there's usually some person with an unofficial "taxi" that drives others if you give them a call, or someone with a passenger van that makes a weekly trip to a city for a few regulars.
Old and poor people everywhere can't drive cars, so these solutions are widespread, you just need to ask around (calling the local shops usually does the trick).
I'm not sure what made you think I meant otherwise. All I'm saying is that their situation happens to create a viable market for people willing to drive others around. I wasn't saying they were "lucky" for not being able to own a car, or anything like that.
>So you're relying on friends/family to do the driving if you're outside of lyft/public-transit areas e.g. on vacation in a rental car
I actually have moral objections to both Lyft and Uber. Other than that I only take vacations in places where public transit is an option. For more rural vacations, I usually just ride my bike there. Plenty of fun places to bike to from where I live (Portland, OR).
Otherwise, yes, someone else does the driving. My partner and I go out of town by car once or twice a year and she drives.
It doesn't become necessary unless you make it necessary. It makes some places harder or more expensive to get to, but there are plenty of other places to go to.
It's a tradeoff, and obviously if you want to go places where there's no public transport options at all on a regular basis, it's probably a good idea to at least have a license, but for my part that's simply been enough of a reason to bother getting a license.
I similarly have no real intention to drive for my own sake or own a car, but since I do have a license I can be called on to do things for friends and family - moving/dropping or picking someone up at the airport/getting grocerties/etc. I think the added utility is a net good(well certainly for my loved ones if not myself).
They're certainly not driving cars; A car has high upfront costs in purchasing and insurance. High usage costs in gas, and maintenance. High volatility in maintenance and accidents. And high downtime in times to have a shop fix it correctly.
For my first car (2011), I was paid $1500 out of pocket, about $100/month in loan for 2 years, $40/month in insurance and about $80/month in gas, including out-of-town road trips and driving to airports 200 miles away.
That was pre-Uber, but last time I took an Uber in that town, it was about $10 one way for "short" distances (e.g. 4 miles to go to a grocery store - things are spread out in TX).
The car never had a high maintenance downtime (and only one fender-bender in the 7 years of ownership), and I can't account for maintenance; think it'd be under $80/month.
So we have about $300/month for car ownership, or about 10-15 Uber roundtrips/month. I'd say, there's no clear-cut conclusion here.
Plus it extends the usefulness of transit and working around schedules/connecting endpoints with stops, is great for health and fitness, and in many areas there's decent diverse social scenebuilt around different types of cycling. No better way to know your city.
Not sure why so many people here are almost virtue signaling the act of not owning a drivers license.
I agree—It's perfectly okay to not own a car if it doesn't make sense to your life situation.
That being said, the ability to drive is nevertheless a useful skill and asset and at least in the United States, does not have a very high barrier to entry (for better or worse).
There is so much in the United States that a car gives you access to (most National Parks or wilderness in general are not accessible by public transport). And I don't see human-driven cars disappearing from our world for the next 20–30 years at least.
It sort of blows my mind. I get that people have different interests and hobbies but the idea that people would live in San Francisco or Seattle and be "I'm fine with mostly just hanging around the city and looking at the mountains from here" is a bit hard for me to digest.
And, as I said in another comment, renting a car has frequently been the obvious approach to get to places I need to get to on business trips.
> I'm fine with mostly just hanging around the city and looking at the mountains from here
That statement is very strange to me. If you really enjoy nature, I think the last possible thing you'd do is buy a car solely to go see said nature. Seems entirely wrong to me.
Best thing you can do for those mountains if you love them is not purchase a vehicle.
Best thing you can do to reduce your environmental impact is probably to kill yourself, or if you are not morally against it, probably kill as many people as you can. Baring this, you could just sit around and do nothing all the time. This isn't very fulfilling. Some people, myself included, want to enjoy the mountains and driving to them, while maybe not ideal, is the only way at the moment and for some can be worth the environmental cost.
I'd wager the best thing you can do for the mountains is to rally for their future protection and educate the public on the importance of saving our public lands.
For you the cost in time and money is worth it. For other people like myself it's just not. I know "virtue signaling" is the hot new way to disagree with people on the internet but you should use it in a more discriminating manner.
Getting a permit is not free in terms of time or money. Getting a license takes even MORE time (pointless outdated mandatory education classes) and MORE money (lessons). That's not even considering taking the written and driving tests themselves. Or going to the DMV.
Yeah I know, all of this is super easy, look at the kind of people who drive, how hard could it be? But you know what I could be doing with my TIME and with my MONEY instead? All the things I want to do that I value more than driving.
Obviously this thinking is just amplified when you take into consideration gas/insurance/maintenance. And this doesn't even get into the psychological impact of driving a car. You know what one of my favorite things in the world is? Reading a book on my 2 hour commute home on the train. My sister just recently got her license and I can honestly say (no virtue signaling I promise) that it has taken a psychological toll on her. She would admit herself that being a driver has made her a more angry and on edge person than she was before.
Also it's pretty rosy speculation to suggest access to national parks has anything to do with motivation for car ownership. I think it's safe to say that can be covered almost entirely by "I need it for my job."
Driving isn't easy. You can kill someone with a car if you don't know what you're doing. If anything, it should take more time and more classes/lessons to get a driver's license.
>All the things I want to do that I value more than driving.
This paints you as a very limited person if you are living in the US, because the "things that you want to do" exclude:
-pretty much all the great outdoor activities and nature that the US has to offer (National/State Parks);
-getting to know your own country and traveling within it
-going to any place or event outside the city (for most people, shelling out $100+ on Uber each way is a barrier)
I know where you're coming from, I used to live in NYC and didn't drive. I got my license when I moved to TX for grad school at the age of 24 - and I didn't even need it to get to work (I've been biking to campus for 7 years). But I did use the car for all the "rosy" things, and with that came the realization of how much I was missing out on.
The thing is, you don't even know what you are missing out on. You are a person who doesn't travel, and says they don't want to. You are practically tied to your community. How often do you get beyond the 50-mile radius of your home? 100-mile radius?
Now, if you were living in Europe, that wouldn't be the case. You would be able to travel without owning a car. Owning a car there has smaller marginal benefits.
But you don't live in Europe. Public transportation in the US is horrible, even when you add a hefty dose of Uber/Lyft to it. It's a sad state of affairs, and I wish it weren't that way. I support public transport initiatives when I can.
Choosing not to have a license is voluntarily confining oneself to a very small subset of the country. Uber won't get you to the Rockies. A rental will (so you don't need to own a car), but you still need to drive it.
Yes, it's a hassle (at first; after some time, people start to enjoy it). Yes, it takes effort, time and money. But to say that you don't WANT to have the benefits it gives you in this country, one must at least somewhat be aware of what they are.
Of course, to each - their own. But I got to see the total solar eclipse. And you might read how amazing it was in a book on a train one day.
PS: I apologize for the somewhat-deliberately provoking tone. On a softer note, have you read "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac? If so, do you honestly say that you want none of that? If not, you're in luck, because reading it is a marvelous experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road
This book is culturally significant; but as a side effect, it might change how you see driving.
- nyc has a huge park right in the middle of it and many large ones like prospect and forest park in brooklyn. Upstate new york has some of the greatest hiking in the country. Any number of stops 2 hours or less north of the city will take you to breathtaking natural sights
- I have been to nearly every state in the US. Amtrak and public transit.
- living in a major city means most of the events are here, not in surrounding isolated areas
>"You are a person who doesn't travel, and says they don't want to."
Like I said I've been all over the US and I definitely never said I don't want to travel. It takes a serious lack of imagination to believe you need a license to go places.
>"You are practically tied to your community."
Yup all 9 million of them in their diverse splendor.
BTW for the non driving curious it's very easy to do all of this touristy "I drive because I can go to national parks!!!!" stuff. While travelling around the US for 4 months (without a car) I found that almost every hostel I stayed at offered numerous daily vans for groups who wanted incursions to almost anywhere interesting in the area. Like I said many drivers don't even know these things exist because they're so tied to car culture.
In my experience with travel a car is for people with specific destinations. If you're more of a "the trip is the experience" type of person, you lose a lot of local color by just shutting yourself in your own world from point A to point B.
edit: in response to your edit, I think my original comment addressed your "on the road" suggestion well enough. Let me suggest one thing about your tone. If you find driving a car romantic in the vein of "On the Road" more power to you, I'm not gonna tell you what you know you understand and enjoy. But on the other hand I think you should step back for a minute and think about how much you REALLY know about public transit in the United States considering you willingly admit navigating public transit isn't really your cup of tea. Maybe rather than buying all of the "can you believe America doesn't have bullet trains!!!" hacker news echo chamber you should consider that living a perfectly fulfilling licenseless life is not just possible but actually preferable, yes, here in the "dire broken infrastructure" of the united states.
Right, I keep forgetting that New Yorkers think that Central Park is nature. I still say it is to make my wife rage, though.
>Any number of stops 2 hours or less north of the city will take you to breathtaking natural sights
Two hours north will take you to a dismal lack of public transportation. Again, how often do you explore these natural sights?
>I think you should step back for a minute and think about how much you REALLY know about public transit
I've lived in NYC for 2 years, then in Suffolk County for 5 years, and then in a Texas college town for a year without a car, relying on cycling and public transportation. I've also spent a summer in Seattle riding its buses, and can say that that system really works.
But when I say that there's not practical public transportation in this country, I do mean it, and not for a lack of trying. NYC has it, Seattle has it, most cities do not. And even in NYC, not having a car meant that I would rarely visit anyone in Queens when I was living in Brooklyn.
Here in South Bay Area, it takes 2+ hours to get to SFO or OAK by public transit vs. 45 minutes by car; this ratio is not uncommon in places where public transit exists. This is what I call by "no practical public transportation".
It is certainly possible to reach places using Amtrak/Greyhound/local bus shuttles, but often it is outright unpleasant to do so, and takes way too much time.
I apologize for underestimating the efforts you took to explore the country. Nevertheless, there really is a huge chunk of it that one misses unless they drive. You can say that what you can't reach is not "interesting". I say - that's where the "color" is. A lot of my most vivid memories of traveling (including talking to random people) come from places not accessible by public transport.
>If you're more of a "the trip is the experience" type of person, you lose a lot of local color
I heavily disagree. I'd drive to places and then walk/bike/explore - and one would miss out on this "color" because buses don't go there.
Anyhow, when I was living in NYC, I was saying a lot of the same things, and it was very stressful to try to learn how to drive in NYC (I haven't). Nevertheless, given your interest in exploring, I believe that getting a driver's license will be a worthwhile investment of your time and money.
Finally, regarding:
>It takes a serious lack of imagination to believe you need a license to go places.
So, how would I go from College Station, TX to Bastrop State Park? How about Sam Houston National Forest? Enlighten the unimaginative one, and I'll acknowledge my utter ignorance.
Yes, you don't need a license to "go places", but you certainly do to go to specific places, and in general, it makes going places much more pleasant, and with far less advance planning.
To make an analogy, wheelchair users are still able to "go places", but the places they can go to, and the places they will go to (and how often) are going to be affected by this mode of transportation.
I have noticed this very strongly just in the last few weeks alone. Anytime a conversation begins that has to do with cars, a whole bunch of people immediately jump in to point how owning a car is immoral, how it destroys the environment, how it kills innocent children, how you should feel ashamed for owning one, etc. Maybe I've missed it before but with the recent spate of self-driving car stories it has become really stark how many people on HN have extremely narrow viewpoints.
The entire US is effectively "car culture" - and in my (and others) opinions, that car culture has effectively killed our society. Maybe permanently.
You cannot have a functional society when the majority of productive people sequester themselves off from "the others" into little boxes set apart from each other, never interacting with anyone unless it's a planned social engagement. Typically that means extreme segregation - which we're seeing.
The car - and the resulting car-based society (basically every single community/transportation project in the past 50+ years has been car-centric) - gives you the beginnings of the total social breakdown we are experiencing.
That wouldn't be an entirely bad thing necessarily - it would mean people chose that. Unfortunately they didn't. Car culture (and the suburban culture it enabled) was subsidized by the rest of society practically from day one.
It is arguable that the United States would not be in the position it is today -- good or bad -- without the car. Absolutely true. But you have only made an argument, not backed up with anything like data, that it has been bad.
Also, if you take a step back and do some research you find that the 'nuclear family' construction dates back well before we became any sort of car culture, and it did not originate in the U.S. So killing cars is unlikely to save our society.
> However your comment seems slightly hyperbolic to me.
Perhaps, and I will say I have no hard data either so it's simply anecdote. However the older I get and the more I travel and witness other cultures - I continue to come back to this conclusion. After being a hardcore car+suburban lifestyle sort of guy in my youth.
It takes a village to raise a child and also have a functional community, and the US has very few villages left. The village empties out during the day and is basically a wasteland of people who barely know each other.
I don't think it's so much cars necessarily, it's the ability for people to self-segregate and pretend they are not part of a larger whole or part of an actual functional community. The ability to remove yourself from social situations you helped create (by simply existing), but want to ignore and shove off on other people. There are a few suburbs that are socially functional, but they are in the extreme minority in my experience.
This laughable trope that a nuclear family is a self-sufficient unit has to die.
I actually agree with you that the construct of a nuclear family seems counterproductive. But I don't agree that the car has anything to do with it. Industrialization and the corresponding reduction in scarcity seem like bigger drivers.
Fair enough. I don't think the car was the only driver, but I (obviously) believe it was one of the primary enablers if nothing else.
I also agree with your earlier comment that perhaps the US would not be in the dominant economic position it is today without the car. It enabled extremely rapid economic growth, and that should not be discounted.
I simply feel what it enabled in terms of society and lifestyle will be our undoing. I also agree it's only one factor of many however, and I'm not entirely sure what importance to put on it.
Talk to me in 10 years after I get through a lot more reading and thought on the subject :)
How are those narrow viewpoints? It seems the narrow viewpoint is the one where we all have to own cars, and people can't understand how anyone could live without a car.
> That being said, the ability to drive is nevertheless a useful skill and asset and at least in the United States, does not have a very high barrier to entry (for better or worse).
Definitely a useful skill but I disagree there's a low barrier to entry if you are in a dense city. Driving school is expensive (I got my license about a decade ago in Boston, and it was probably over $1,000 in classes) and time consuming. Most people you know don't have cars, and even your friends who do are justifiably wary of letting you practice your new skill in their most valuable profession, something they own because they need it to get to work.
I have seen many of my friends get their permits in cities like SF, NY and Boston and never get their licenses, or get their licenses and never feel comfortable driving solo, and these are not people who shy away from learning new skills in general.
It's not a virtue signal so much as a status signal. Having enough money to afford to live in densely populated urban areas where you don't need a car to live is a status symbol.
Except that the people who are making the argument for living in the city without a car constantly cite costs as justification.
And besides, isn't it the other way around? Unless you're living in one of a few extremely narrow areas of very specific cities, the really wealthy people live outside the urban core.
That's definitely not true. I live in a city where a third of households are carless, believe me, with the neglected state of transit and pedestrian infrastructure, it's not a choice for most. I wouldn't hesitate to say that's the case in almost every American city outside NYC.
But we should be talking about designing our society around more bikes, transit and walking.
Transportation should be accessible to everyone - those too young for a license, too handicapped to walk or drive, those unable to afford a car.
I think our health, environment, liviability and community would all be done a great service by demphasizing the single passenger car and it's accessories (sprawl, acres of parking, endless noise, pollution and isolated commutes)
> There is so much in the United States that a car gives you access to (most National Parks or wilderness in general are not accessible by public transport).
They are accessible by tours, and friends, and cycling, and many other ways. You car people really seem to have a limited understanding of the real world, everything revolves around cars. You can't imagine doing something without a car.
Incredible as it may seem, there are people in the world who have life experiences and perspectives that differ from yours. Unsurprisingly, that results in them also having different opinions and making different choices.
Clearly you feel that you've reached some kind of moral high ground, but there's no need to sneer at the rest of us from it.
Automobile ownership is dumb, but ridesharing isn't the answer either. Cities need to invest in public infrastructure, especially fast efficient public transit. People should also rediscover the joy of human power (walk, bike, run).
That's the bubble mentality of someone who lives in the city and/or doesn't have a family. How about you try hauling a baby in a stroller, diaper bag, and two other kids to a metro train (if you're so lucky to have one close) and then onto a bus. Ride sharing doesn't solve those problems, either, especially since you'd be in need of carseats. So no, automobile ownership is not dumb. There's plenty of use cases where it's the obvious solution.
That is a fairly normal and commonly solved problem all over the United States. Lots and lots of people who can't afford to own cars deal with this and worst as a matter of course.
Making life easier for people who choose to not own cars, has positive impact for those who can't own cars (and not to even begin on reducing the negative externalities).
For the record, I own a car but also frequently hauled a baby stroller and a diaper bag to the metro train (though only for one kid). The secret was to have a stroller that was geared for walking not the SUV sized strollers so popular with the SUV set.
>Making life easier for people who choose to not own cars, has positive impact for those who can't own cars (and not to even begin on reducing the negative externalities).
And people who drive cars. Because less congestion if there are half as many cars on the road.
Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out that way, because congestion tends to be the limiting factor for demand for car trips thanks to a very low perceived marginal cost. So as soon as congestion reduces somewhat, that extra capacity suddenly makes it more attractive for the marginal driver to take a marginal trip, and traffic increases (but not quite all the way back up to its original level).
Not if more people forego the car entirely. The marginal trip costs are high if you don't have a car. Even if you could rent one cheaply over the weekend, it's more marginal cost than if you have it in your garage.
A lot of European cities with good public transport and narrow medieval roads still have less traffic than American cities with 4 lane roads.
I did specify being close to the city being a factor in how doable it is to go without a car. And even then, there are limiting factors that make car ownership worthwhile. Things like:
1. Monthly Costo/BJs run (with family in tow)
2. Visiting family that's over an hour away and not along any rail/bus line.
3. You live in a pretty remote area.
Essentially, I'm saying that there are life choices and/or criteria met that makes lack of car ownership feasible. But since so many Americans live in the suburbs without easy access to public transportation, car ownership just makes the best sense for some people.
> But since so many Americans live in the suburbs without easy access to public transportation, car ownership just makes the best sense for some people.
And I doubt many folks would have a problem with that, except for the fact that car transportation is by far the most heavily subsidized lifestyles around without even factoring environment or societal external costs. Add suburbs to that and the people living the worst possible lifestyle for the environment are being bailed out by the rest of the country who does not live like that.
That's my major problem with car culture in the US. It's basically welfare for the wealthiest of Americans.
Yeah i wasn’t disagreeing with the not stupid part.
Was disagreeing with the difficulty part. It’s not hard to prioritize living a car limited life. In particular I find the “schlepping kids” argument uncompelling because the stuff you schlepp grows to the ease of schlepping. Lots of people with no choice handle this as the easiest part of their day.
If anything my argument is that we should make it more stupid to own a car.
What? Talk about "bubble mentality," this is the very definition of "white people problems."
Kids take the bus all the time with their parents. My brother, sister,and I took the bus all the time with my mom or grandma or occasionally both when we were very young. Sometimes when we'd add in a few cousins too, then we'd be rolling 8+ deep.
My parents car was always breaking down and my grandma never learned to drive so it was just totally normal to hear "we're taking the bus today."
When we were a little older (ages 3 4 and 6ish) we would take the bus with the teenage babysitter and her friend to go do something (usually it was ice skating).
It's just such a non-issue.
I really can't understand what sort of "problem" you'd have that you wouldn't have, say, walking on the sidewalk, or going to a store, or just leaving the house at all.
What does it have to do with white people? And I don't think they were saying that it is impossible to ride the bus with a family, but it is certainly not as nice, especially in places with poor public transit. Try taking public transit when you live a 10 minute drive out of the city, its just not going to work. Ride sharing isn't great because if you have a large family you have to split up, and it's not available everywhere.
>As defined by the great Louis CK in his concert film "Hilarious", these problems affect Americans in the middle to upper class. This is when your life is so amazing, that you make shit up to be upset about.
Riding on a bus with children is not different from walking on the sidewalk with children, going to the store with children, going to the park with children, going to any public event with children, or simply leaving the house with children.
If you read the thread, the context was about "Cities need to invest in public infrastructure, especially fast efficient public transit" the reply was "you can't ride the bus with children because, idk, they exist?" My post was directed at that reply.
When my son was 3 months, we took him, his stroller, two large suitcases and assorted smaller stuff on a vacation that involved a train, then a ferry, then a taxi to get to the hotel, followed by multiple buses over the following days, then a taxi, a train, a ferry, another train and a taxi to get to the next hotel, then multiple buses again, before another taxi, a train, a second train, and a taxi to get home.
I do this, though we could afford a car - and it's totally fine. Of course you make different choices, for example using scooters for the kids and ditching the stroller early, using bikes, planning out journeys, and allowing a little more time. I wish more people lived without a car in my current city, it'd make life more pleasant for everyone.
Outside a city of course, the equation is different and public transport just can't work for everyone, but in large cities life would be better if no-one had cars.
And yet people have to do this everyday out of necessity. The alternative to not driving is not no car, public transport, ride sharing, and car hire all fill a need.
BTW, met a few people with marginal income. They totally wrecked their credit by buying a car. They did not foresee the TCO on a car. After loan payments, insurance, gas, and maintenance they were barely keeping afloat. Payday loans finally sank them and the cars ended up being repossessed anyway. They are still stuck paying the loan since the bank fees and depreciation weren't removed.
I feel that many of the uber/lyft drivers are in this position. They squeeze some money out of the asset that they have, but in the long run I don't see how they come out ahead.
That being said, it would make sense to drive for Uber in some small subset of the population: if you enjoy driving and would otherwise just be out joyriding, might as well get paid. Or if you are a student with varying classwork loads or bored people who would rather be doing something than watching TV.
I'll accept that there are reasons for having a car related to child rearing, especially for the first, say, 5-10 years of a child's life. After that, ditch the car and get back to using public transportation or human-powered locomotion.
When I was growing up my family had a car, but around middle school it was possible to bike to any school/sports/extracurricular activity within 20 minutes. My parents kept the car for a number of reasons, but getting to work was numero uno. If getting to work was simpler with public transportation then we would have been able to get rid of the car much more easily.
Now living in a big city - Amsterdam - makes living without a car magnitudes easier.
The other thing is germs. Even mild germaphobes will never ditch their cars. If you have a kid that is too young to have had all their vaccinations yet, it's a major concern.
I was listening to a radio programme yesterday where they discussed the dominance of young white males in shaping tech and how that can exclude other demographics without them even being aware of it. That bubble mentality is exactly the issue. They often don't have the perspective and experience to realise that what seems completely tacit to them just does not apply universally. And they don't know that they don't know.
I'm sure people in the US would love to walk to work, but the layout of US cities doesn't lend itself to that. People tend to live pretty dang far from where they work in the US.
And even when you live close it's not always safe to walk. There is no sidewalk near my house for a few miles. I live in a fairly nice area and so I do still see some people attempting to bike but I also constantly see them almost get ran over. It's a curvy road with ditches on each side so it's hard to get out of the way.
And then when I -did- live close to work (about 2 blocks) I had to cross the town's main street, where I was catcalled about every day and on multiple occasions had a man follow me home even after telling them politely each time that I was not interested. Horray. People here don't walk. So you stand out. When I was in the city I could wear a big heavy coat and most people will ignore you because you look poor/ugly, here even in my most ratty coat people still followed me...ugh.
I don't mean to be rude, but you need to get out of your bubble and see how the rest of the world lives. I hope you're living your dream, but everyone has different dreams, constraints, etc and they're not all inferior because they are different from yours.
What are some cities with decent enough public transportation and urban planning for pedestrians that also don’t suffer from lack of housing/exhorbitant housing prices? The top cities I can think of that satisfy the former unfortunately also have the latter.
That's a non-starter for a lot of folks. Intellectual pursuit, family obligations, money, or a combination of those things can conspire to keep people somewhere whether they like their situation or not. I left academia so I could move where I please, but there was a steep price attached to that, and I wouldn't expect everyone to make the same decision.
I'm sort of baffled at people exclaiming about the high costs of automobile ownership. Yeah, if you have a brand new car, it's expensive. But I've known a lot of people over the years that bomb around in $1000 third-hand Subarus and junky cars very inexpensively. Mostly because they have to - out in the boonies, there's no bus, there's no taxi, you either drive or get somebody else to.
There are lots of cities where you can choose to live in particular places to minimize car usage. You don't need to redesign whole cities (and thats the ask to add fast efficient public transit) to support that.
You can do localized changes such as tax incentives/penalties, subsidize parking less, zoning law changes that make it easier to mix businesses and residential etc.
That plus smart investment in public transit and a mix of ride sharing are all part of the mix to decrease car usage.
The problem is that the number of such places is small and generally not growing particularly fast because transit isn't being expanded all that much (and often expansion comes in the form of rail lines to suburban park and rides), while zoning often prevents infill growth in existing neighborhoods. As a result, there is a scarcity of such places in many metro areas and they are becoming increasingly expensive as a result. California's proposed SB827 is an attempt to change this, and hopefully some progress will be made in this direction soon.
Have a license, but never owned a car (close to 40 yrs old). And although I use Lyft extensively now I'm visiting the US for a few weeks, I'll never be able to rely only on ride sharing in the Netherlands from a cost perspective (and I love riding a train compared to a car). Good public transport is essential indeed.
You could have not come off so rude had you changed "dumb" to "not ideal". Are you saying it's dumb that as a country we require vehicle ownership in so many places? Or that people who own vehicles are dumb because they should all take almost non-existent public transit, or because they should lease?
It's lazy to exclaim something so obviously incendiary without following it up with an explanation or a reasonable proposal - "everyone in the country move to a city" not being one.
And for the record, I am from the South, I love vehicles and driving, and I also wish like Hell that we could have trains between the Texas metro areas, and public transit on the freeway corridors to the main business and residential districts. I also know it's a multi-generational effort, if it will ever happen.
Couldn't agree more. Ridesharing is a terrible solution to the transportation problem. And the artificial markets that Uber/Lyft have created here are not sustainable.
In SF I can believe it. In a large area like DFW the wait times for a ride are too long to be practical. Also the question of cost is relevant, I drive a car I have paid for in a city with reasonable insurance rates and no issues with parking. Lyft or Uber would be impracticable here.
I have a family member in DFW who has really embraced Uber, and wait times for the area are minimal, and they are around 20 miles from the Downtown area of Dallas (very mid-cities). I never thought that Uber would catch in DFW, and I'm really surprised to see how it's changed life for a few people I know there.
Maybe it's been some time since you've tried Uber there, but I'd recommend trying it again. Also my family members there now swear by it for trips to either the DFW or Love Field airport.
I have worked at Uber for 4 years, but I spent the first 22 years of my life as a resident of Lewisville. It’s been amazing watching the transformation from when I first started (No cars available) to now (ETA ~5 min) around my parents’ house. The last time we were there, my wife dropped me off at a coffee shop to get some work done while she did some errands, and when I was done I got an Uber back home.
> Lyft wants to make a point: Its services help lessen traffic
How can this be true? They'd need a very significant fraction of riders using lyft line (the multi-passenger service) to make up for the the overhead in the driver having to travel extra distance to pick someone up.
Or people opting for public transport part of the distance. One thing these services make convenient is to use them to get to/from train stations and the like without worrying about parking etc., or being stuck without a ride on the other end.
Indeed, hasn't this already been studied? Lyft & Uber have increased traffic, not reduced it, because the cars are driven a significant amount of the time without any passenger.
> We surveyed 30,000 passengers and 37,000 drivers in 52 major cities.
I suspect they may have done some generous extrapolation here...(e.g. "0.1% of the 30,000 Lyft passengers we surveyed got rid of their cars for ridesharing, so 0.1% of the U.S. population must have ditched cars for ridesharing")
you've thrown suspicion on the study without any reasoning behind it. unless your population size is small, all studies extrapolate results. why do you think it's incorrect?
for example, maybe the 52 cities they surveyed aren't representative of the whole population (this can be true if they chose the 52 largest cities rather than a random sampling of cities).
yes. note that the article doesn't extrapolate anything to the US population, that's something that @awwstn added in.
lyft, in the article, says 250K people on its platform have dropped car ownership according to its survey. they extrapolate that total number from a survey of a sample of it riders and drivers in 52 cities.
Ok, then the error is much less egregious but there is still a sampling error I can see (at least based on my own usage pattern of Lyft).
As a user of Lyft who owns a car the odds of me being sampled by this survey were significantly lower than the people that depend on Lyft daily.
It's the same problem with surveying people in an airport to determine how often flyers fly. Heavy users are more likely to be oversampled because they are in the airports more frequently.
So for Lyft to overcome this they would have needed to survey people in population adjusted parts from each usage tier. Otherwise the 1% or whatever that ride everyday are going to throw off the whole survey. Especially since the most likely to answer surveys are frequent users.
that's definitely a possible sampling error but lyft doesn't seem to tell you enough to know if they made that error. for example, if they only solicited survey takers after a ride, your assertion would be true.
So there's something like 260+ million [1] vehicles registered here in 2015. That 250k number seems like an impossibly high percentage of people that have given up on owning a car because of ride sharing apps.
Why is 1 in 1000 too high? I used to recommend that new San Francisco residents keep a car if they could afford to. I no longer make that recommendation. Even my suburban parents decided against a second car because of Uber.
I don't know if it's true or not but it seems at least plausible. I can easily believe that Uber/Lyft make a difference at the margins of owning a car or a family owning a second car in relatively urban areas, especially those without great taxi service. Take out ridesharing and short-term rentals and there are definitely people who get away without cars today who would probably want/need to get one.
ADDED: Their numbers actually suggest something higher because this is just among Lyft's user base. It doesn't count Uber or other ridesharing apps.
Did Lyft claim that the 250k ditched their cars _because_ of ride sharing apps? I didn't see any causality implied in the article, just the number. It's like saying 250k Lyft customers quit smoking last year, it's just a stat based on the user base, I don't think they were claiming to be the main cause of it.
Well that number includes work vehicles, non daily-drivers, collectables, etc. A better place to start would be a survey of how many adults have their own dedicated vehicle.
My wife and I share my Jeep but I tried really hard to be carless in Austin, TX. I even experimented with a variety of Segways (at the expense of many jokes) and alternatives to a bike for the longer-hauls so that I'm not drenched in sweat when I get to the office. [1]
I was totally fine when we lived downtown as it's becoming very walkable, but it's pretty impractical when you live even a short distance from the core. There are people that do it, we have decent running and bike trails, but it's just not suitable for us. My wife and I are on different time schedules which makes commuting together hard, and Austin lacks great public transportation combined with terrible traffic which drives up the Uber/Lyft cost per ride.
We decided to buy a 2nd car again but this time a used EV (BMW i3) so that our total cost of ownership is really low. Based on my napkin math and the deal we got on the car, I suspect we'll break-even or better compared with using a ride sharing service.
Counter example: I did NOT own a car until after April of this year, which is when Car2Go discontinued service in my area. We don’t have Uber or Lyft, so those were never an option.
Now, out of sheer necessity, I do own a car. And it costs me $550 a month for insurance, financing, and fuel. $550 would have bought a hell of a lot of Uber rides. More than enough for my needs.
i've found the value proposition of lyft/uber less compelling over time.
typically i can either (1) take a bus or train or (2) take a lyft line (or uber pool, if it's much cheaper for some reason--i don't mind uber paying part of my trip). but because my trips are often 2-3 miles or less, the time savings of a lyft is taken up by (1) pickup time, (2) driver confusion/mistakes, (3) poor driver routing due to not knowing the local traffic conditions, and (4) other riders added behind us en route. so no time savings, which (to me) is the big advantage of lyft/uber. the buses and trains are on a schedule, but they usually come often enough that the time savings of a lyft would be less than 5 minutes.
i can pay $1.75 for the bus or train, or pay $4-5 for a lyft line. lyft line is usually more comfortable, but sometimes the car or other riders smell bad or are rude, so that's not always an obvious win.
and if i'm not really rushed, a little walking on either end of the trip is a good thing.
consistently paying 2-3x for short trips on lyft don't seem to make sense, and so my usage has gone down over time (occasionally i'm in a big hurry or are going farther, and in those cases lyft does work out better).
i don't think this bodes well for lyft or uber solving the last-mile problem.
In 2017 I returned to America from living overseas. My mom passed away early in the year and I wanted nothing to do with shopping for a car, much less driving a car. So I just took Lyft to my new job until I had my feet under me and felt up to driving again.
In the end I never felt up to driving full time. I now share my wife's car (we did get her a car eventually), but we only purchased the 1 car. We either ride in together, take mass transit, or one of us takes a Lyft. Sometimes we use Lyft to bridge to mass transit.
Either way, "ride sharing" has definitely taken one more full time car off the road. I know it's not that simple and I know it's an economically dubious arrangement in the first place, but I think there's something to this idea if we could figure out the economics of it (how much drivers should be paid, etc.).
It's true that the same miles are still being accrued, just by a Lyft car rather than a personal car.
However, when multiple people use a lyft car throughout the day, it is more efficient than having each person own their own car. Maintenance, insurance, and the construction of the car itself are all shared.
I don't get how using lyft/uber as your only form of transportation can be at all cheaper.
Let me run some basic math. Uber wants $11.50 to take me home right now. Lyft wants $13.40
$11.50 * 2 = $23/day
23 * 5 = $115/week
$115 * 52 weeks = $5980/year (I am ignoring vacation weeks for now.)
My yearly cost for car ownership are roughly as follows. (Assuming only work and back.)
Insurance(1): $886/year
Fuel(2): $292.50
Maintenance(3): $1000
Car purchase price(4): $1000
Total yearly cost: $3178
(1) I only run Liablilty + uninsured/underinsured but I run cheap cars
(2) 2340 miles/year (Work is just under 4.5 miles.) Figure 20 mpg (I get better but have not calculated it in a while.) Figuring fuel prices at $2.50 although the last year has been much closer to $2 and less at times
(3) This is way more than I would put into a car yearly if I only drove it to work and back but I do many of my own repairs so I am boosting it a bit for those unwilling to do so. Also including stuff like taxes and tags here
(4)I buy cheap cars off craigslist, run them into the ground and replace them. My normal cost is $500-600 but by the time you add a new set of tires ($250-300 installed) and fix whatever random issues the car came with $1000 is closer to actual purchase price.
That's the same calculation people do when thinking about vegetarianism or veganism. What's the benefit of replacing all of your turkey with tofurkey? Well, no, most vegetarians don't simply replace all of their meat with fake meat any more than people with cars replace all of their rides with Lyft.
Consider:
* Many households have two cars. I might "ditch owning a personal car" if I know I can occasionally borrow one, or if my husband/wife/etc can drop me off at work a couple days a week, and maybe I can use Lyft sometimes when the household car isn't available.
* Many people don't drive to work even if they have a car. Maybe you own a car for occasional errands.
* The cost of parking in some cities is prohibitive. Do you not pay for parking? I recognize that I live in an expensive city, but if I commuted by car I would likely be paying over $5,000 per year for parking alone.
* Some people have much higher insurance costs, and not necessarily due to fault of their own (e.g. single 20-year-old male drivers).
* Not everyone is willing to buy cheap cars off Craigslist, and most people don't do their own maintenance.
Maintenance is time too. So pulling over and getting gas, bringing a car in for an oil change/replacing air filter/shocks/tire realignment etc.
You have to get smog checks regularly. Parking tickets, speeding tickets, street cleaning. Maybe even a parking sticker.
Also, don't ever get into an accident. I think a range depending on your risk profile makes more sense. Low end would be $3178 high end might be double that.
Do you drink/smoke weed/sleepy as hell and drive ever? Owning a car puts you at a higher risk for paying much more for making poor driving mistakes whereas a comparable situation wouldn't hold you personally liable for the same mistakes if it happen in a ride-sharing car.
On top of all this, you run your car into the ground and regularly buy a new one?
You've grossly underestimated the cost of owning a car to a frustrating degree. Owning a car blows if you live in a city.
You will spend longer waiting on uber/lyft to show up than you will fueling once a week and getting an oil change every 3k miles. A full set of tires takes under (1)30 minutes.
Arkansas does not run any emissions checks outside of 2 counties. However when I lived in texas they did. The cost was state limited to $5/year. Falls under the category of maintenance.
As for accidents I have 2 on record. one at fault and one not. I am not running the cheapest insurance but I am insuring a 90s/2000s car. It is much less than full coverage on a newer one. If I had a new car that I could not afford to eat the replacement costs I would definitely run full coverage but as it sits it is better not to.
I do not drink or smoke. Driving sleepy something I rarely do although it happens sometimes. However if I nod at all Ill pull over and park it. Not worth the risk. As for drinking uber and lyft is by far better. I was never trying to argue against them when needed. But for an only vehicle it seems to be higher costs.
I do treat my cars as disposable. When a transmission goes out and I can get a better car all around for less than a transmission rebuild would cost I don't waste the money fixing what I already have. I usually get a new (to me) car ever 2-4 years. I put yearly in my calculations because buying a nicer $3000 car every 3 years averages out to the same cost.
If anything I over estimated the cost out here although I do admit that the big cost other keep mentioning is parking and nobody around here charges for parking outside of meters downtown. and those are 10c/12 minutes. But if you live were those are an issue the cost would be more.
(1)A bit off topic but it can vary widely. I have taken a single tire to walmart for work several times. Took up to 3 hours to get done and never under 1 hour. However we have had a Discount Tire (The actual name. The service is not discount) open up here recently and I have had 2 vehicles in and out. car one was 2 tires in 15 minutes and 3 (spare) in 20 minutes. Car two was a set of 4 in 22 minutes. At this point I would recommend my local one to just about anybody. It greatly suprised me how good the service could be.
10,000 miles - it was also $4000 down, but you get $2500 back from the California EV incentive program so it comes to $1500 down and $90/month for a three year lease.
You can get lucky and find deals where the money down is even lower. I missed one where it was $1500 down so CA was basically paying you $1000 to take the car (or if you factor in the monthly fee cost around $60 a month).
Part of the reason for this is that it's a compliance car. I think the way it works is CA requires the MPG of your fleet to meet some very high standard. In order to meet this manufacturers that want to sell in the state make an EV with a very high MPGe that helps the average. Then they have to sell a certain number of them (it can't exist in name only). You can end up getting lucky.
I would guess it's enough when comparing to the people that are dropping car ownership for lyft or uber (especially considering that lyft and uber would be very expensive at those mileages).
FCA and other manufacturers sell or lease such vehicles at a loss purely to comply with arbitrary government requirements for zero emissions vehicles. So it isn't a sustainable situation, but in the short term there are great deals available to buyers in a few states.
So you're using your own time to repair these cars to keep the cost down, which is totally fine, but I think it's unfair to not count some of that time as a "cost" of owning the car in your model. Also, do you not have to pay for parking anywhere? What about time spent finding parking (again, may not be an issue, but it certainly would be time-consuming and expensive where I live and work).
It might not be "I went from driving everywhere to Lyfting everywhere". It could be "I went from driving everywhere to mixing Lyft+bus". Or "I went from driving+bus everywhere" to Lyft+bus everywhere".
There are probably plenty of people who would be down to take the bus (or bike) to/from work, but keep a car around for a couple longer trips a week, or for inclement weather.
AAA found average car ownership cost was over $8000/year[0]. This is pushed up by people who buy cars new, so you can certainly be lower, but that's apparently the average.
We've been talking about this a fair bit at my mostly-college student house lately. I think a number people in the house would get rid of their car if they had to pay just for their own insurance--it would certainly be cheaper for a good number of them based on their current usage. But their parents pay, so we end up with an overflowing driveway.
Those numbers are going to be very different for different people depending on their situation, especially if they live in a dense metropolitan area. When I owned a car parking costs alone justified a move to Uber/Lyft.
I now use commuter dollars and Uber Pool for daily commute (~$5 each way before tax savings).
Plus most people rely on a combination of Uber/Lyft, public transit, bike shares, car rentals etc. rather than a single option.
I don't think people are typically making a spreadsheet and plotting out whether or not this is really cheaper or more expensive. What's happening is either:
a) They don't have a car (or a second car) currently, they spend $X/mo on Uber, and they don't think that they could get a car they'd want to drive and/or park and/or deal with for that same amount of money.
OR
b) They know that they have a car sitting in their driveway / street / etc. and they're currently spending $X per month on it to mostly sit there idle, and they're pretty sure that they'd save money not using it, so they try a month of just Uber and sure enough, it cost them less than the idling car (or they just liked it better, whatever).
People think a lot about yuppies in the city as the Uber crowd, but in my experience Uber / Lyft is far more impactful on families. Instead of needing 1 car per adult to function, you may need only 1 car per household, or maybe 2 cars for a family with kids in high school (as compared to what we used to call the "used car lot" in front of all the High School kids houses back when I was growing up in the burbs).
[EDIT] My guess here is reinforced by this quote from the article:
> In 2017 alone, it said that almost a quarter of a million passengers on its platform dropped owning a personal vehicle, due to the availability of ridesharing specifically.
^ Note that the phrasing there would apply to anyone who dropped from one car per adult to sharing a car among a family.
My insurance (younger driver, no history) was about $250/mo ($3k/year), car payments (again, young with no capital & no credit history) were $300/mo ($3600/year) for a modest Hyundai.
Average cost for private NYC parking is $430/mo(!) or probably about half that in rent premium if you rent a (very rare) building with parking, but realistically you're parking on the street - a solid 30-45 minutes of looking for a space every time you drive and remembering to move the car when the alternate side parking rules are in effect. If you drive to work, you'll either need to work somewhere with parking, or pay for a space at the destination too - doubling parking costs.
So that's up to $13k/yr to have a car in NYC, or $35/day. I could ride Uber/Lyft to work and back every day for the equivalent cost.
However, most of the time I take the subway which is $116/mo (can pay out of my pre-tax payroll too so real cost is about $80) - my car would be dormant for all but a couple of trips a week & it'd just be a pain to have to move it around for parking. I have a car2go membership that I use once or twice a month (costs about $50, or $0 if I don't use it) and I use Lyft maybe a half-dozen times a week. Once or twice a year I rent a car for further drives ($150 to rent an SUV to move some furniture, or $400 to rent a Tesla from Turo for a weekend trip upstate)
Far cheaper and more convenient to use ride sharing and public transport than to own a car here in NY. I have zero desire to go back to car ownership.
I'm sure. NYC (the densest parts anyway) is pretty much the canonical example of a place where it doesn't make sense to own a car. Many people still do but, as you say, the costs are high, transit is pretty good, taxis were ubiquitous even before Uber, and [Urgg EDIT: few] people are heading out of the city every weekend by car.
I also derive tremendous personal value from getting the opportunity to meet the people driving the cars.
Hearing different perspectives, sharing interesting stories, and generally engaging in real human interaction are something I don't get enough of in my regular life, and Lyft has materially changed that. Of course unfortunate that I don't get enough of that outside of a transactional transportation arrangement, but it's real for me.
Overnight parking in San Francisco, for most people renting: ~$200 a month (last time I checked was closer to $250, so who knows what's up to now.)
Daily parking in San Francisco (if, say, you have to park at work): ~$20 a day, although you might get some tax benefits on this.
Annoyance of finding a parking spot anywhere in San Francisco at any of the times you might want to use the car to meet friends (lunch, dinner, weekends): very, very high. Annoyance of not being able to drink more than one drink: varies by person.
So, YMMV. If you live and work in a heavily car-based city (say Minneapolis) then using Lyft or Uber won't make much sense. If you live in a metropolis with decent public or company provided transportation for commuting, then it's cheaper to use Lyft for going out and getting the occasional ZipCar or Thrifty whenever you travel for the weekend.
Not everyone has beater cars that they work on themselves and park for free. Where I live it's $300 or more a month to park which would be more than your whole annual cost even if you get free parking at either home or work.
I can't park for much less than $20 in downtown Washington, DC. Now, if I had to drive, I could get monthly parking, but that seems to run $250/month on up. Maybe an employer would subsidize that, maybe not.
You're taking an upper-end Lyft case vs a remarkably low-end ownership case ... and ending up with actually fairly close numbers. Replace some of the chauffeured trips with cheaper paths (bike, hoverboard, bus, telecommute), and use more normal/realistic car costs (purchase around $20,000 over less than 10 years). Result will be much closer numbers; throw in issues like urban parking (very expensive) or higher fuel costs, and suddenly Lyft/Uber become much preferable.
This is exactly what I thought. Of course one can purchase a beater car for a small amount of money, but the cheapest car I ever bought was $3000 and I recall spending $500-1000 a year on 1-2 breakdowns a year. The inconvenience of the breakdowns was actually worse for me than the cost of repairs, as (at that time and living in that place) I couldn't get to work when the car was broken down, so I lost income in addition to losing cash for maintenance.
I think it depends on your parking circumstances too. I know that in the city I live in, the average monthly parking is $250 (probably higher near where I work)
Additionally, many apartments and condos in the city charge $100 per month to have a parking spot.
Right there you're increasing your car ownership costs by $4200/year.
Also, the model of buying burner cars is fine in certain circumstances, but many people aren't willing to deal with that additional overhead in car ownership.
Because of uninsured/underinsured drivers in my city insurance is one of the highest in the country. $250/mo is the avg quote I got. That's down from $280/mo after the first year because I haven't had insurance for years.
The only cars I see in that 500-1k range have basically been worn to pieces, smell of cigarettes, smell of mildew, or the suspension is completely bottomed out.
$1,000 purchase for a car? Is it just a deposit or full price for the car? I think it would be more comparable doing these calculations with some sort of median car, so medium sized sedan, 5-8 years old. Surely it would cost at least 10k to buy an average car like that?
I don't think it's fair to make these comparisons using these super cheap cars as presumably better car gives you more comfort and smoother / quieter / more comfy ride experience. Average Lyft/Uber car would cost way more than $1,000 to purchase.
On the other hand, the correct way of making this comparison would be to compare x years of Uber/Lyft usage vs X years of car ownership and I think 10-20k cars that you own would come out ahead in a 5 year comparison, for example (reasonable period of time, most people don't buy new cars more often than every 5+ years).
If you buy a 10,000$ car every 10 years that's 1,000$/year. Also, if you don't drive much you can average less than 1,000$/year in depreciation without driving a junker.
You can’t compare buying $1000 cars and spending your own time repairing them to getting picked up in an Uber which is a much more modern, comfortable, and safe car, and not having to care if it breaks down (as long as it’s not during a trip!)
the problem, from a business perspective, is that I live in silicon valley, and still have the expensive parts of owning a car; there's still the parking that came with my residence, and my employer is still paying for parking at work. (I dunno about you, but my desk is rather smaller than a car parking spot.)
If Uber/Lyft were to raise their prices to profit-making levels, all I would have to do is buy the car, which is, as far as I can tell, not the most expensive part of the infrastructure required to support owning a car, at least not in my area.
If uber/lyft want to make this sticky enough that they can raise their rates, they need to hurry to lobby the cities to build housing without parking, or otherwise allow me to opt-out of buying car infrastructure, otherwise... well, yeah, I'm going to get driven when it's subsidized (I take uber and lyft, whatever is cheapest) but once that subsidy goes away? if it becomes as expensive as I think it will, I'm just going to buy a car again.
I have managed to get by for around three years now without a car in San Diego. I sold my car awhile back in order to keep working on a now defunct startup. Since then I have worked for other startups and still had a small income so it wasn't easy for me to get a car. I just take Uber everywhere (cheaper than Lyft).
I can't afford to live downtown. Honestly if I were to "get a life" things are so spread out in socal and most everyone has a car.. I would almost have to buy a car if I were to somehow miraculously acquire a social life. But since I have no life and work from home, things have been significantly less stressful on a daily basis not having to drive. So it's kind of like I don't want to have reasons to start driving all over the place again because of the stress and risk. Since I only go out once or twice a week now the car trips seem like the primary risk in my life and I'm not eager to start braving traffic on a daily basis.
It won't be long until the majority of people will never need to leave their apartments. Amazon will deliver their meal subscription by drone each day (subscribe and save!), we will be able to work from home, and vacation using VR. Cars will be a thing of the past very, very soon. This will be better for the environment, and reduce congestion for any of the unlucky workers who are still required to be on the streets, i.e. garbage collectors, pizza delivery drivers, etc.
I plan to support any politician in the future who is brave enough to enforce this arrangement via legislation. We have been consuming too much for too long, and we as a species are finally close to having the technology and will to limit our impact but not negatively impact our overall living standard.
The main downside to not owning a car is that it's really hard to get anywhere outside the city or urban areas. If you enjoy the outdoors, it's a huge disadvantage.
I don't currently own a car as I recently moved countries, and I'm basically confined to urban areas. Sure, I could hire a car, but that does start to get expensive quickly, especially if you have to pay the obscene premiums they charge for being under 25 years old.
It's at least $150 to rent a car for the weekend, and then there's the hassle of trying to pick it up and drop it off. A reasonably good condition, reliable car, would cost me $2000, plus maybe $1000 per year for registration, insurance (third party only), and repairs.
Lyft and Uber actively encourage and assist drivers to purchase, rent or lease vehicles in order to drive for them. How many cars have they put on the road?
Ride-hailing services have massively increased car traffic in major cities:
Living in a small northern Ontario town, I wish we had Lyft or Uber here. Instead, just taxi's (or family) and public transport.
Our public transport is based on a center hub topology with the hub being downtown. So if my kid wants to take the bus to work, about kilometer away, it takes 45 minutes half of which is in the wrong direction and involves at least one transfer. Oddly, it takes even longer to get home.
Yes, I do most days, here it's usually below freezing for most of December - February. Yesterday it was -20C (-4F) with windchill. Just get a good coat, pair of boots, hat and gloves and it's fine.
Sure, I walked 30min everyday to grad school in Chicago weather. Unless it was pouring rain (ie. not freezing) then I would occasionally take the bus part of the way.
I live in Ann Arbor, which is a small college town that has a pretty good bus system considering we are in the midwest and so close to Detroit. I recently sold my car which was huge boost to my quality of life. Having said that, I had to pay relatively a lot for my house to have the luxury of being within 2 miles of downtown where I work.
Even in this small town, automobile transportation can be extremely difficult. The UoM hospital parking is an absolute nightmare. Even getting the premium parking pass (~$250/mo) does not guarantee an employee a spot in any lot, let alone the one closest to their destination. Patients end up circling the lots for upwards of 90 minutes looking for a spot -- a common reason for showing up to an appointment late.
There really is no other solution besides better public transportation here. Hopefully that will be the driving factor to increase bike lanes, bus lines, and incentivize people to only commute via automobile when absolutely necessary.
> Wait until these kids start families of their own
Maybe they won't. I've talked about this with my wife, and I think we both concluded that cost of living played a subconscious role in my wife deciding not to have kids.
There were other reasons, but that certainly soured the prospect. If I was to poll my coworkers (many of us older with no kids), I'm guessing they'd cite that as a contributing factor.
Correlation != Causation. I moved to a city and sold my car, and shortly after used ride sharing for the first time. But I don't use it much and it certainly didn't cause me to sell it. I wouldn't be surprised of that's just how many of their customers recently moved to a city.
That depends what the question was. If they'd asked outright whether I specifically sold the car for that reason, they no, I wouldn't. But to be honest, I suspect the survey of being designed by their PR dept to generate this result, and I can imagine questions I might have answered 'yes' to that could then be interpreted in this way.
Meanwhile in Berlin, i just paid 14 EUR on uberCab to get to work last week because i had an important meeting and was late. For a 5km trip that took 10 minutes. Since uber is not allowed here and the normal stuff is so expensive, this whole market does not even exist here.
This seems like a huge impact. Not sure how they came up with that number (I'm guessing customer surveys, so it's probably not that accurate).
How does this change the debate that ride-sharing congests up cities?
That's only relevant in places limited to street level parking.
The general case is driving to a parking lot/garage which could make the trip shorter or longer depending on where it's located relative to your destination. You might spend more time driving in a garage, but that does not impact street level congestion compared to all those extra Miles drivers add going to pick you up.
As to density, cars parked in a garage take up vastly less land than than moving cars on a road as they stack vertically and need less space around each other.
I think there's an argument to be made that ride sharing apps means people have an easier time relying on public transit, though, given they can use the apps to fill in gaps, making the leap from owning a car easier.
Though it seems to be doing the opposite. In London where car ownership is low (at least in inner London) it seems to be taking share from public transit. Nearly 100k uber/minicab drivers have been added and bus ridership has collapsed.
A) from less usage because of Uber
B) because all these extra taxis have caused mass congestion which means buses are unbelievably slow compared to even a few years ago
It only makes sense if they are transporting two or more people that would otherwise have used two or more vehicles. But I think that kind of rideshare system is the absolute minority of Uber and Lyft rides.
Perhaps, but with ride sharing you're less likely to make more stops, preferring to get to your destination in one continuous trip.
And if you ditch your car in favour of ride sharing, then you're likely to make less trips overall. You'll think twice before driving somewhere you could otherwise walk, more so than if you owned a car. And you're less likely to make impulse trips that can be avoided (to get a chocolate bar you're craving or something else pointless).
At least, I'd imagine that's the case - as there is the additional time of hailing a ride with one of these services and a more measurable cost to it.
It'd be interesting to see the number of households that dropped from two cars to one because they didn't really need the second car often enough. It's just more cost effective for us to use Lyft as a second car when needed, since it's maybe for 6 trips a month.
However, before Uber/Lyft, having two cars was worth it because public transit where we live is trash if it isn't rail station to rail station. The buses run on 45 to 60 minute intervals and are always late.
How sustainable is Lyft's pricing in comparison to Uber? I've been getting absolutely dirt cheap Uber Pool fares in the Bay Area. From my apartment to work the fare is often less than two dollars (which is around what BART would cost me), and I've even had fares less than dollar. I would be amazed if this is making anyone a profit, but if the price even doubled I would be way less likely to use Uber/Lyft on a whim.
Uber, and I imagine Lyft, are banking on automation. So what is sustainability? Self driving vehicles, at scale, could profitably provide service for a lower cost per mile than a person who owns their own vehicle. And that industry is going to have incredibly rapid growth likely culminating in a monopoly that could yield the largest company in existence. We drive in the ballpark of ~300billion miles per month [1]. Consider the worldwide market. A profit of even just a few cents a mile starts to look very insane very fast.
Sustainability is having a business that doesn't depend on a rapid rollout of a technology that doesn't work in weather that most people won't trust for years and that isn't even legal yet.
- By the time the technology is at the 99.999% level, the game will already be over.
- Things are legal by default. If self driving vehicles are not explicitly made illegal by a state, they are legal.
- Peoples' trust changes rapidly. I think as a culture we've become much more scared of technology and change, but the change from horses to internal combustion engines and brakes was many magnitudes 'scarier' than having AI manage navigation.
I have my driver license, but I'm not buying a car anytime soon. I may at some point, but for now public transportation + renting a car when I really need one + Lyft/Uber/Taxi is a lot more cost-effective. On top of that, I'm sure I'd walk less because I'd find myself driving to places I walk to right now. So all in all for my context I'm quite happy without owning a car.
I stopped using a personal auto last year in favor of biking everywhere. When I'm injured or expecting to have to coordinate using the family car after work I'll catch a Lyft, but the availability of ride sharing had zero impact on my decision to give up a personal auto. I wonder if their metrics are counting folks like me in that quarter million (inadvertently or not).
Lyft for me. Amazon Prime for everything else including groceries and milk. For everything else I just walk. Serves me fine even in a state like Texas where local transit is absolute shit.
I've done the math, for sure. It would cost me $1000 per month to use Lyft or Uber for my commute. That's almost exactly twice what my running costs are for owning my commuter car.
What about all the times a car owner takes a Lyft instead of taking a taxi? Does that mean they ditched their car or does it mean that they were in a place where they needed a taxi?
in emergency situations like hurricane or earthquake, the current ridesharing system might provide very limited mobility when you need the most. Keep your options open at any time might be priceless sometimes.
Or you get in a car and sit in traffic until you run out of gas and then you're stranded on a highway in the middle of nowhere during a hurricane, as happened to so many people in Houston this past fall.
Few of our cities are actually evacuable in an emergency.
Hah, sorry to self plug[0] but I feel it’s relevant. I just wrote about this the other day, except I was using Uber instead. It turns out that for my personal situation it’s not worth it to go with a ridesharing service. Right now I’m spending $4,560 a year on Uber. Does anyone have bicycle recommendations for under $400?
I think driving is a good life skill so I got my license in my early 20s, but I still have zero desire to own a car.
That said, I live in Seattle, where there is good public transportation.
Here are my numbers:
Parking (I work downtown): $250/month * 12 months = $3000
Parking spot at my apartment complex, 5 miles from city center: $130/month * 12 months = $1560
Gas: $100/month * 12 months = $1200
Car registration fees in Seattle: ~$400/year
Insurance for a 25 year old in Seattle: ~$1500 (It might actually be higher?)
Maintenance: we'll say $1000
So the total cost for me would be ~$8660+ per year. And that's excluding the cost of the car!
With a 5 mile commute, public transit 3 days a week plus Uber/Lyft 4 days a week is cheaper, hands down. Uber/Lyft 7 days a week cuts it closer but is still cheaper.
So yeah, it depends on where you live.