This largely misses a big point, lowering the threshold of access to do something.
> Friends visiting from out of town? I’ll pay for their hotel, so I can live in a smaller, cheaper, better located condo for the rest of the year.
Then friends won't visit, it's more of a hassle to schedule - however infrequent these visits are they'll be even less frequent.
> I have to schlep a bunch of kids far away? I’ll get a Modo minivan, a local car share, for a few hours. Let someone else maintain that gorgeous van.
You'll go fewer places and do fewer things if everytime you want to go somewhere you have to deal with getting a rideshare van.
> Need some outdoors time? Walk a couple blocks to a park. I’m not interested in mowing something I only use a couple hours a week.
No backyard cookouts, no sitting on the deck, you'll go to the park less frequently.
It's the same for the rest of it, there are good reasons to reduce some of these things but the reasons he gives dismiss the true value.
Even owning a car vs. rideshare, sure rideshare can work out to be cheaper (sometimes) but having every travel decision be a purchase decision is a lot of overhead and is a constant pressure not to go somewhere.
A lot of this stuff also works even less well when you don't live in a city.
Couple of examples...
On average, I need a car once or twice a week. Maybe three out of every four trips something really dinky like a smart car would do the job, whereas on one out of four I need the mid-sized estate car that I actually own. I live in a small village so to hire a car I'd have to get on a bus to the nearest town, then walk to the car hire place to get the car. That probably adds an hour to an hour and a half every time I need an estate car. Am I going to deal with that BS once every two weeks? Hell no. Even if I did, over time would it cost less than simply owning the damn car? Maybe, but it's pretty fricking marginal. I'd save a bit on fuel, no doubt, but economical cars hold their value much better than those that are less economical so the price of the cars (I always buy used) might not be so different.
I don't "use" my back garden a lot as a place to hang out, but it's certainly a handy place to leave the motorbike when I don't want to put it away, and also a great place for cutting up wood, MDF, and the like when I'm doing DIY.
The space has value that goes way beyond the amount of time that I use it for.
I could list plenty of other examples where this is true.
I lived without a car in a city will amenities nearby and told myself I'll rent a car when I need one. I did that about 10-15 times before I realized if I want to travel or get out of the city it's going to get expensive pretty quickly. I ended up buying one soon after. Having access to a car all of a sudden entirely changed how I spent my weekends. I wasn't dependent on friends. What the OP describes is also very true. When I have to plan ahead and rent a car and deal with taking and dropping it off I avoided it as much as I can. This was with a zipcar membership and a whole bunch of rental cars two blocks from where I lived.
I've been doing the no car thing for 4 years now after my last car was totaled in the middle of the night while parked. The thing that worked for me was to compute out the total cost I was spending per month on the car and set that as the cap on my car rentals and zipcar. I never even come close to that limit, and knowing that limit lets me feel free to spend.
When I did the math the insurance was close to 50% of my cost. Rest was depreciation, then gas, and maintenance.
Agree 100%. From a financial perspective, it seemed like the "downtime tax" (e.g. paying for a rental while you're not actively using it, but are away from home, and will need it to return home) dominated any savings, if you take more than a token amount of weekend trips (e.g. to see family).
Furthermore, the "uncertainty cost" is real. I have to rent a car. Will one be available? Will it be well maintained? Will the check out and check in process go smoothly? Can I get to the car? Etc. Etc. Each one and opportunity for things to go awry and end up in a bad day.
It really depends on the city and your lifestyle/choices. Most people, say, in HongKong don't have a car. The city makes it difficult and expensive to have one but on the other hand they can move easily around. If you live in the US, it's hard to go without a car since everything is planned around people having cars.
Hong Kong is an odd example of a big, dense city with excellent public transit where access to a car can still be a major quality of life improvement, just because of climate and topography. The government’s resistance to ridesharing is incredibly annoying.
As someone who absolutely loves the ability to use (the misleadingly-named) ridesharing, I absolutely hate what the legions of fare-seeking Ubers and Lyfts have done to traffic in SF (well, pre-pandemic).
My completely-without-evidence theory is that there is some amount by which we can cut the allowed number of rideshare cars on the road at any time, and while wait times to get a vehicle might increase, the overall time will be the same or less because transit time will be reduced with less congestion.
Hong Kong's problem isn't infrastructure, though, it's a combination of unimaginative bureaucracy and taxi companies with influential backers. It's the same reason HK taxis are still effectively cash-only, consistently refuse "inconvenient" fares with no real consequences, and are just generally irritating to deal with.
> The government’s resistance to ridesharing is incredibly annoying.
To be fair, the government’s resistance to the rule of law, international promises or basic human rights is incredibly annoying too, so at least they are being consistent.
Particularly once you get past a certain age being dependent on the friend in your group with a car to go away for weekends starts to get old and hard.
one could also argue having to use a car once or twice a week means you are using it more than 95% rule. back garden doesn't fit the rule as well since you are using it 100% of the time to park your motorbike.
it really comes down to how you interpret the arbitrary 95% stated in the article. I agree with both the article and you. I need to sell that mandolin which I play maybe once a month but the patio sofa is here to stay even if I sit on it once a month because they are really nice to look at every day during golden hours. That's 100% usage for me.
As I pointed out to another poster, I'm not using my car at all for more than 95% of the time: it just sits on my driveway.
To spend 5% of my waking time using my car I'd need to drive for 48 minutes every day, which I'm not even close to. I think it's unfair to count time when I'm asleep as time when I could possibly be using something (other than my bed!).
I think all of this debate points to one thing: the article is written from, and generalising from, a very myopic perspective, and shouldn't in any way be given serious consideration by many people for whom it doesn't and can't apply.
What's the fascination with deprecation on a car that you own? You don't get anything back at all when you return your rental car, or take transit. When you sell your car you at least get something back, even if it's a fraction of what you paid...
The car I drive twice a week, I'm using it way less than 5% of the time, so I'm very definitely paying for the 95% of the time it sits unused on my driveway.
The garden, yeah, maybe, but I haven't used it in any capacity since last Friday.
Ride sharing and rental companies are competing for profit as well, and ultimately they'll bring costs to be as expensive as they can until turning people into switching to the status quo alternatives.
Similarly people thought ebooks would be significantly cheaper, however counterintuitively they're not much cheaper and sometimes more expensive than a physical book because digital books are more convenient for many people.
A book author has basically 100% market monopoly on his/her books. He can set a high price and people who want to read the works will still pay.
Whereas ride sharing companies interchangeable and are in full competition with each other, which, in a healthy market, should bring the price down to the point where they're all only making a marginal profit. The cost of alternative mode of transportation does not come into equation (well unless it's overall cheaper and better - then it will kill the entire market segment).
> I live in a small village so to hire a car I'd have to get on a bus to the nearest town, then walk to the car hire place to get the car.
My province in Canada shuttered the government-owned bus service a few years ago, so that isn’t even an option anymore. There haven’t really been any significant private offerings that have popped up in its place. If you’re in a small town with no car, you’re pretty much screwed!
An interesting version of that is how cloud computing relates to development creativity.
On the surface, why have any fixed server infrastructure at all, anywhere? Well, if you don't, you're putting friction in front of anybody not authorised to spend to develop / test / prototype something. Yes, you can give everyone a cloud account and let them use that. But even then you'll have people cautiously limiting their usage to avoid accidentally overspending. By contrast, when that server is sitting their idle half the time, I actually feel guilty for NOT trying out some whacky idea on it. Of course, it can work exactly the opposite way - if you DO give all your developers complete freedom to run stuff in the cloud then they have even more liberty than if you give them a fixed server to work with. But I suspect few organisations would tolerate the potential cost risk from that.
It's a subtle mental difference but I think it can play into outcomes in a significant way.
That is pretty interesting. When I worked at Google I could spin up thousands of workers just to test the real world performance of different distributed strategies. Definitely worth it in the long run, servers aren't that expensive and there are a lot of issues you hit when you start having tons of servers instead of what you can simulate locally.
But at Google you fall in to the first category, right? Where Google has a ton of servers sitting idly all the time, so it costs them nothing (or nearly nothing) to let you use a few thousand of them to do some testing. Or were you renting the server time from another company?
It was same when I worked at Adobe, really. And Adobe doesn't have servers sitting idly all the time. In the old days, getting approvals for a cluster, while feasible, would be a big overhead, take time, and then in 1 year it'd be already substandard. With cloud computing, I could easily spin up a huge cluster without asking anybody for approval, do some work on it, and turn it off after an hour.
I could see how for small companies, "spinning up a VM" would be a thing to consider carefully - but for bigger ones (and especially for "big data" workloads), cloud computing is really a no-brainer.
I think what zmmmmm had in mind is the mindset difference between unmetered usage and metered usage.
For unmetered usage, imagine that due to some circumstances, you end up having exclusive access to 2 powerful physical machines where you could do anything you want. These machines will be idling 95% of the time, but when you need it, they are ready to serve you immediately, with zero friction.
For metered usage, that would be public cloud, as you described.
The workers I had at Google were definitely metered, just that the quota we have was very high so a thousand workers was no big deal as long as you turned them down after. I mean, if you give engineers cloud computing resources equal to a few percent of the cost of having said engineer then you can do this easily. And why not give them that? 20 engineers and $100k worth of experimental cloud quota is worth a lot more than 21 engineers and very limited cloud quota, at least if they are working with data pipelines and such.
I think you make fine points, but they're not universal. I disagree with pretty much all of them:
> Then friends won't visit, it's more of a hassle to schedule - however infrequent these visits are they'll be even less frequent.
I would MUCH rather stay in a nearby hotel (and have my guests stay in a hotel). I would feel less like I was imposing.
> You'll go fewer places and do fewer things if everytime you want to go somewhere you have to deal with getting a rideshare van.
I think there's likely some truth to that, but it also means I rearrange my life to plan for this better and also to make those outings more meaningful.
> No backyard cookouts, no sitting on the deck, you'll go to the park less frequently
The analogy I use is the gym: I can do workouts at home, but the mental routine I have for getting up and going to the gym means I actually go much more often. Similarly, if there was a nearby park I liked I'd use it much more frequently. I know I felt that way when I lived in the city vs. where I do now in the burbs (note - the burbs weren't my choice ;)
>I would MUCH rather stay in a nearby hotel (and have my guests stay in a hotel). I would feel less like I was imposing.
You must be well-off with well-off friends.
My friends would feel pretty bad if I were to pay for their hotel, and it is not an insignificant cost to many (especially since I'm living in the Bay Area).
Crashing on a spare couch? No problemo.
(Even if the economics of the spare couch work out in the favor of the hotel room. There is a utility in the spare couch beyond letting guests sleep on it, and that understanding takes away all the feelings of imposing, at least financially.)
However, all of that ignores the fundamental difference. You're not my guest when you're in a hotel. I can't wake you up for breakfast and make you coffee. We can't watch movies on the couch until either feels sleepy. And so on.
You can't rent the experience of sharing your home with someone if you don't have a home to share.
> I can't wake you up for breakfast and make you coffee. We can't watch movies on the couch until either feels sleepy. And so on.
Couldn't agree more. In most cases I'd rather crash on a friend's couch than sleep on a comfier hotel bed if it means we can hang out until we pass out and not have to worry about getting me back to my hotel.
I don't think extravagantly so, but I have worked in software for a couple decades and saved a lot.
But I think you're confusing the fundamental question here. Sure, when I was in my twenties I crashed at friends' places, and they at mine, all the time. But the article is specifically about the tradeoff of getting a smaller, cheaper, apartment, vs. getting a larger house in the suburbs with a spare guest room. The idea that it's usually a cheaper option to pay for the occasional hotel than to specifically purchase a larger house with rooms you rarely use. Obviously the "crash on my couch" is a different dynamic entirely.
>I don't think extravagantly so, but I have worked in software for a couple decades and saved a lot.
Well then you are well-off. Most people can't swing 5 nights in a high CoL city without months and months of saving. Offering to pay for someone to stay in a hotel creates an extremely bad dynamic when the receiver couldn't easily afford that on their own.
>he idea that it's usually a cheaper option to pay for the occasional hotel than to specifically purchase a larger house with rooms you rarely use.
Yep, but the important distinction is that a hotel room isn't equivalent because it's a very easily measurable monetary burden on the host.
>>I would MUCH rather stay in a nearby hotel (and have my guests stay in a hotel). I would feel less like I was imposing.
>You must be well-off with well-off friends.
As always, It Depends™. I have friends allergic to our pets, some have significant trouble sleeping on inflatable beds or couches, etc. Some have kids, so one couch / one bed won't cut it.
The only way it's reasonable for them to visit without having pretty major issues after a day or so is when we're all up for setting up a hotel + transportation (or similar)... which ends up meaning it's less often than some other friends.
I'm curious, have you actually paid for friends to get a hotel room while they were visiting you? How did that work?
I'm trying to imagine how I'd even offer without making it awkward. I don't think I could avoid making an already uncomfortable wealth disparity even more cringe-worthy.
I think if I had to go that route I would at least rent an entire house on an AirBnb so I could stay with my friends - that way they're actually staying with me, rather than in a hotel in the same city.
Yeah, that was my first reaction to that bit. Most of my friends would feel uncomfortable about me paying for a hotel room for them, and that would make me feel uncomfortable.
I agree on the larger AirBnB option; I think that's a great way to keep everyone together and (both physically and emotionally) comfortable.
> Yeah, that was my first reaction to that bit. Most of my friends would feel uncomfortable about me paying for a hotel room for them, and that would make me feel uncomfortable.
Also, it means that they can basically never propose to come visit you (as they'd put you in an uncomfortable situation of having to approve/deny the hotel expense) and would only come by when you initiate the idea of a visit.
> I would MUCH rather stay in a nearby hotel (and have my guests stay in a hotel). I would feel less like I was imposing.
I think it depends on your relationship with the friends. There are some friends where I'd be really sad if they didn't stay with me or I didn't stay with them. We cook and drink together, and stay up late watching movies or TV or just talking, to the point where we don't want to worry about having to get one of us to a hotel.
One of my oldest friends has a cat that I'm mildly allergic to, but I will always sleep on his couch when I visit, even though the cost of a hotel room is well within my budget, and a hotel bed would probably be more comfortable than the couch. It's just so much more fun to stay with my friend. I get that this isn't for everyone, but that's kinda the point: everyone has different tastes.
> The analogy I use is the gym: I can do workouts at home, but the mental routine I have for getting up and going to the gym means I actually go much more often.
I've tried at various times to do the gym thing, but I just can never motivate myself. I think it's the overhead that kills it for me, the need to get myself ready to go, transport myself there, get into a routine, change, get myself home, etc. What ends up working for me is going for a 3-5 mile run in my neighborhood. I just change my shirt and pants, throw on running shoes, and go outside. I'm glad you've found a routine that helps keep you on track, but, again: everyone's different.
Not owning a car and taking uber everywhere seemed okay when living in a dense city, until covid happened and Uber all but ceased operations for a while.
The small condo in the city was a great choice when you went out most nights and worked at the office but it sucked terribly when circumstances changed and everyone was home all the time.
The main blockers for me are transaction costs - sure I can rent a car when I want to drive to the mountains but the amount of extra time and effort required means I’d probably not bother.
To be clear: it can work - I lived in central London and never bothered to own a car but, well, I don’t now because even something trivial like carrying around three car seats every time I wanted to take an uber would be so cumbersome I’d never do it.
Sorry to hear that this year has been that bad for you.
I don't think your math works though. First off we were talking about individual life choices, living small in a big city and paying to rent services/tools as you need them rather than living on a larger property, owning most of the tools/services you need. This isn't a one time cost, its not spend twice as much in 2019 for a normal 2020, its spend twice as much _every year_ in case a 2020 happens.
As for the covid impact, the US GDP was $21T in 2019, there's no way the economic impact in the US is 75% of last years GDP. That's like a civilization collapse level of recession. Lots of business seem to be doing fine, lot's of people are back to work.
It seems to me that renting a home isn't half the price of buying one, and taking an Uber every day can add up very quickly as well. I really doubt that's half as much cost as owning a car as well.
This isn't about renting vs buying, its about living big and private or small and public.
Renting/buying a small home and using public spaces like parks and transit/walking, or renting/buying a large home with your own yard, renting/buying your own car, etc.
The large home will serve you much better in a pandemic, cause many of those public options will be closed, but is that worth paying for when a pandemic will happen maybe once or twice in your lifetime?
I see a lot of merit to what the author is saying.
However, he completely ignores externalities. Yes, car is not used 95% of time. And he is saying, let's target the 5%. The problem is that it's not 5%, it's rather 3% of planned trips where his model works really well and 2% when you need a car right now and oh... the demand for local car share through the roof, so please wait for next 20 minutes.
And the same is true for everything else. People are buying extra on one hand to use it, but on another case to be an insurance that they can accommodate unplanned.
But some of that 2% it's fine to put off, and the chance of the demand for local cars being through the roof at any particular moment is less than 1% of that, so now buying a car means optimizing for that 1/10000 case. How much is that worth to you?
There are other reasons to own a car - one of them is "comfort". Yes maybe I have to maintain it and it's definitely more expensive then renting in the long run, but man, I have a comfortable, safe car that I can use with no overhead to get out of town on a whim.
With COVID, I avoid taxis & ubers; I can take a zipcar-like rental with relatively low overhead, but one isn't always available next to me. When it is, it's sometimes not very clean. Those services have small-ish vehicles (and mostly electric ones) that are fine for city & surroundings, but if I want a weekend getaway I need to use real rental, and that's a lot more overhead (plus, if I get out 3 weekends per month, just the rentals would be more expensive than the car costs - and that, at a lower quality of the rented car; with COVID I don't get out as often, but previously, I used to).
I think living without a car definitely makes sense for some people; and definitely doesn't for others. But that depends a lot on your conditions, location and lifestyle.
Let me start from another end. Owning a car (a couple of year old, not luxury) could be $400 month (deprecation, parking, insurance, gas, fixes, etc). Taking Uber to drive the same trips will cost you let say $300/month. Please don't read too deep into a specific number, this are all guestimates (they obviously wary in different places). As a result, you save $1200/year, which is nice. You are asking why I am optimizing for 1/10000 case and how much is that worth? Well... Here are a couple of scenarios, you need to drive a kid to an emergency room at 1am or super important business meeting popped up out. How much is it worth you? May be such events happens once in several years, but the price tag on them could be way-way higher than your savings. This is exactly why I used word "insurance". Why does anybody buy insurance? The probably is 1/10000 to get into trouble. The issue is that the price tag of this 1/10000 is too high to ignore.
For the emergency room, I can call an ambulance. For a business meeting, I really doubt it's that important, and why can't I use Uber for this?
Not everything needs insurance. And real insurance has costs that are pretty close to the expected average risk, while buying things just in case could be much more.
And the 1/10000 calculation was not the chance of huge trouble, it's 1/10000 to be unable to get a ride to have any trouble at all. The vast majority of those incidents are going to be worth much less than a thousand dollars. The chance of an event being that major is another factor of 1% or less.
Am I going to pay a thousand dollars a year to avoid a one in a million chance each of missing some important business meetings? Definitely not. Especially when other factors I can't change are much more likely to make me miss a meeting.
I mean, if I had odds that low of major illness I probably wouldn't pay hundreds of dollars a month for health insurance either!
As someone who had siblings that required various visits to the hospital for emergency things, using an ambulance each time would have paid for a couple of new cars.
Most healthcare isn't going to cover the use of an ambulance for a broken arm or a bunch of marbles up the nose and waiting for (and using) an Uber/Lyft in these scenarios is also pretty bad.
> As someone who had siblings that required various visits to the hospital for emergency things, using an ambulance each time would have paid for a couple of new cars.
If it happens that often then the article wouldn't advise you against having a car.
> Most healthcare isn't going to cover the use of an ambulance for a broken arm or a bunch of marbles up the nose and waiting for (and using) an Uber/Lyft in these scenarios is also pretty bad.
If you're going to the emergency room you'll probably be waiting plenty long once you get there.
It is funny where people come down on this. I'm far better off not owning a car than if I had one, for instance, whether you measure in money or aggravation. Public transport here is lovely, rentals of multiple flavors plentiful, and maybe I'm strange, but when I owned a car, I knew what it cost me to own per mile or per day of ownership. It was routine for me to mentally estimate the cost of a trip.
But on the other hand, I own a lot of specialty tools that probably only see a few minutes of use per year each, if that. Not having them means waits, sometime long waits, or making something to make do.
Someone who chose to have kids probably prefers the car. What makes sense to own depends on what you do.
I haven't owned a car in the past 5 years. But that's mostly because I never took the time to take a driving license in the new country I moved in (and the public transport being so good). However, I really miss it, if I hadn't been so lazy with my driver license this far I'd definitely buy a car, even if I used it once a month or less (driving to work makes no sense here). Sure, it's expensive. But you can just wake up one weekend and decide to drive to a different city, see something you haven't seen before. Also, if you need to buy something you're missing, you can just take your car and go comfortable. No need to wait for a bus or a train in the cold or rain. In these five years I barely left the city, but if I had a car, I think I'd have gone to many places over weekends.
That's the problem for me. I don't have a driver's license because public transit is good enough for 99.9% of trips. There are situations where it would be nice to be able to drive a car (esp. to get a rental car for countryside vacations, or for large Ikea purchases). But getting a driver's license doesn't make sense when you never really use it and fall out of practice, so my money is better invested in the national public transit flatrate card.
Between Zipcar and day-rentals, moving heavy things things or randomly taking a trip are trivial.
I don't have a garage, so if I bought a car, I'd likely have to go walk a few blocks to it. When I rent one, the "extra hassle" is I spend a minute on a phone app reserving it first.
I don't see it as a barrier, and at least at my use, way cheaper than a car. But the real gain is not dealing with parking, moving for street cleaning, parking tickets, broken windows, etc.
I suspect your per mile / per day costs were not the marginal ones. Once you've bought a car and insured it the cost per mile is "just" the gas and a penny for wear and tear.
Depreciation is something you consider if you intend to resell the vehicle. It's independent of wear and tear. It's a financial concept, not an engineering/mechanical concept. Jeep Wranglers, for example, hold a better value compared to the average even if they have higher mileage and age, especially if its in a mountainous local market.
Wear and tear is mechanical repairs and maintenance. Oil changes, tire changes, spark plugs, etc.
A good amount of people buy a certain car and maintain it, intending to run the vehicle into the ground completely.
If you really want to do the "simple math", don't forget about the opportunity costs associated with the wait times, scheduling around someone else's schedule and delays due to public transit and rideshares. That's where you realize just how much a car actually saves you. I used to live in Seattle and Portland for a few years (each). I bit that poisonous apple of, "I don't need a car since I'm going to live in the city". 15-20 minute car commutes would be about an hour on average on public transit (that's if they ran on time). Never. The. Fuck. Again.
> A good amount of people buy a certain car and maintain it, intending to run the vehicle into the ground completely.
See my 4runner that's older than I am. I am happy to give it its $400 per year in oil changes and amortized tires, along with $1500 repairs every other year because I know its repair ROI is extremely high (vs. whatever car make the reader believes is unreliable); every repair I make to it represents another XX,000 miles on the road.
I feel like you can easily get per mile wear and tear costs to be 10 cents or less on Toyotas if you run them into the ground. And with fuel at 10 cents to 20 cents per mile assuming a $2.50 to $4.00 per gallon fuel cost and 20 miles per gallon, and insurance is another 5 cents to at most 10 cents per mile ($600 to $1,200 per year for 15k+ miles), you should be able to get the cost of a mile down to somewhere between 20 cents to 40 cents.
Many cities with good public transit are still bogged down by politicians giving preference to car traffic over PT and bicycles, making journeys by PT slower and journeys by bike more dangerous than they need to be.
> A good amount of people buy a certain car and maintain it, intending to run the vehicle into the ground completely.
In such case, yearly depreciation is the cost of replacing the car with a new one, divided by the number of years until you replace it. In my calculations, I estimate I'll be driving my cars 20 years each, and base deprecation costs on that.
don't forget about the opportunity costs associated with the wait times, scheduling around someone else's schedule and delays due to public transit and rideshares
While you're factoring in intangibles, don't forget to factor in externalities caused by air and noise pollution.
I think the best intangible that needs to be taken into account is the self-righteous points. You can't put a price on how high of a high-horse you can get on. Minimalism and rent-culture is just like veganism, if you dont shove it down other people's throats are you really part of the movement?
They're saying it's okay to convince people with arguments about personal sacrifices, but if it's not hurting you directly and immediately then your argument annoys them and they don't want to hear about it.
That's what they are saying? Air and noise pollution is hurting city dwellers like my family every single god damned day. The solution: move to the suburbs and get a car like everyone else. And here we are.
If you want to bring up the value of intangibles, you then dont get to cherry pick certain intangibles that prove your point as to use them as the basis for your argument. You have to take into many intangibles, both pro and against your own stance to have a decent argument, let alone a realistic solution to the problem.
And if you actually pay attention to the argument, I dont mention to do ONE thing, as you straw manned me as saying to move to the suburbs. I say everyone needs to judge their own situations in an honest and logical fashion to better choose a solution for their personal needs. Not just listen to a random elitist trying to get on their highest of high horses to shame the rest of the population in their superficial future signaling. If you live in a heavy urban area with good public transit and high parking fees, hell no, dont own a car. It's a bad idea. But to imagine the exact same solution can apply to everywhere else in the world is a sign of a small minded twat that's never experienced life outside of their tiny bubble.
> If you want to bring up the value of intangibles, you then dont get to cherry pick certain intangibles that prove your point as to use them as the basis for your argument.
Literally what I felt you did and why I said to also consider environmental externalities.
I did not make any argument beyond that. I also did not claim you said to move to the suburbs. No idea where you get that from. It's just a thing I'm considering doing, because I can't stand the noise and pollution in the city much longer.
If I purchase something that provides a capability for a given period of time, there is precisely zero reason why I should not think of it as a fractional cost per use. And there are many reasons why I find it a useful thing to do.
I have no idea why this should be controversial.
> I used to live in Seattle and Portland
Your actual claim is you prefer living the car lifestyle somewhere non-urban. Good on you, but irrelevant to me.
I'm with you on all of those things, but just to play devils advocate, having a yard, a car, and an extra room are arguably all things contributing to climate change. The yard requires energy and materials to maintain. The room requires energy and materials to maintain, clean, and climatize. The car need gas, tires, oil, and maintainance. Even if it's an electric car it's still needs tires and that energy still has to come from somewhere.
Plenty of people in the world live in much smaller places. See HK apartment or the "average" Tokyo apartment as examples.
I owned a car for 19yr old but haven't for 14 of the last 20 years. I don't miss it. But I live somewhere where I don't really need it.
This seems to perpetuate the assumption that existence without productivity is equivalent to failure. You are arguing that every square inch of land and human meat has to be constantly productive and efficient. I think the goal for humanity should be enjoyment of life. If we go wholly into other energy production methods (nuclear with battery and aquatic storage, and a sprinkling of solar to power A/C) we can get out of the rat race of mandatory productivity from every living molecule.
Although I don't disagree with the sentiment, there's a difference between using only what resources you need and maximising the 'productiveness' of every moment of your life.
GP was pretty clear that they described a "goal for humanity", not a quick fix. Consider all the things humanity has done that were fairy dust and pixies right up until the point when they were done.
GP ignored that the argument was about the environment and straw-manned it into being an obsession with efficiency/productivity instead of life enjoyment.
How does a shared car not need those items? It is just not under your management and is accounted somewhere else. But they are needed and you are paying for it. The only advantage could be that you're not paying with your own time and then it depends on what is cheaper, your work time or that maintenance time.
I find this particular aspect to be the reverse for most cases, especially on the receiving end. Staying in guest bedrooms sucks. You have to be quiet at certain hours (and hosts may not be), you cannot do certain things (like walk around without dressing, or return super later, or have sex). I'd stay in a hotel any day, and would be if anything more reluctant to visit someone with a guest room cause it's such a hassle, literally the only reason I can think of to prefer guest rooms is to save money for the visitor.
Similarly with cars (in a couple, you are designated driver half the time, you have to look for parking, etc.; although I do have to own a car to go to the mountains, that's one use case that is simply not covered by rideshares and such), backyards/parks (doing stuff in the backyard is just boring, it's much easier to convince me to go to the park).
Indeed one would expect the "95%" owned versions to be inferior to the specialized ones; after all, the latter are specialized for a particular purpose, rather than a compromise faux replica like a guest room or a backyard.
But the thing op is talking about are visits to friends specifically, not visit in the same city. Those are the sort of visit when you come in for 2-3 days and both families intend to spend evening together and do activities together. So, the late night return is not the issue, because evening is spent together. And yes, saving money for visitor is one of purposes. Other is to make logistic of "being together as much as possible, being able to drink together after kids were put to sleep" is another. Yet another is to make it easy on granda when she visits or even babysit.
It is clear that you dont do those, which is obviously fine. But other people do.
You used a word in here that shoots straight into the crux of the issue: this person's approach is actually good in many ways (and I think financially is one of those ways), but it is a giant hassle. If you don't mind a lot of extra planning ahead and hassle, it seems like a good approach to life. But if that stresses you out, then it's an awful approach.
I was thinking about what this person would consider the worst offender on this front in my lifestyle: early in the summer, we bought a teardrop camper trailer. I calculated how many nights of hotels it would take to even out the price, and it was a lot. But it also unlocked a bunch of trips this summer that we would have never taken without it. We could have rented a similar trailer for each of those trips, and we did look into that before we bought the trailer, but again, it was a hassle. In practice, we simply wouldn't have taken those trips. So a straight utilization comparison is not the right one.
When I lived in NYC, this was the way everything was. You optimize the stuff you do all the time, and the stuff you don’t costs more time and money, but almost assuredly less money than having it all the time (just try owning a car or having a spare bedroom). Once you get used to it, it starts to feel pretty crazy that people have extra/spare stuff, and actually even kind of immoral in a weird way.
We tend to think of commercial services as providing skilled labor, but in some cases they are selling organizational skills.
In these cases, we trade money for convenience, instead of money for finished goods we can't or won't make ourselves (eg, pros are less likely to hurt themselves, so I hire them).
Then there are forcing functions. If you want to lose weight, don't keep snacks in the house. When my place had a postage sized lot, most of it in shade, I volunteered on a public spaces project and met a lot of cool people. (Also, I can highly, highly recommend walkable neighborhoods.)
I would wager that the author has better than average organizational skills if they can pull all of these things off. But perhaps instead of thinking of it as a grocery list, pick a couple of them that are easy to put down again, try them on and see how they feel. You can always buy a pickup truck later, or rent a bigger apartment.
For sure, the author puts a lot of emphasis on cost. Not everything needs to be assessed by cost. I live near downtown because I can just walk to the bar. I would like a garage for a workshop, I wouldn't use it 95% of the time, but the accessibility means I could build whatever I wanted. Having a backyard cookout and swimming pool in a popular neighborhood makes it really easy for me to throw parties.
I wouldn't want to rent a van for the same reason I never invited friends over when I couch surfed the first few months I moved to a new city
I guess it just depends what matters in your life. Some people like nice cars, its a depreciating assets and poor investment choice but if it makes you happy that's a lot of hidden value not being accounted for
I used Zipcar for ~3 years in San Francisco (closest location was 6 minutes away by foot), then bought a used car (my apartment has a garage spot for me). We're a family of 2.
Zipcar was nice, but I avoided using the car most of the time. When I bought a car, I found some sort of relief, and I of course ended up using the car way more frequently than Zipcar, while still biking around in SF most of the time. I did many more outdoor/weekend trips, in the order of 5x/6x.
A different take on your comment, you have made lots of good arguments for how to put the real cost of your lifestyle into dollar values which is an okay analogue for your carbon/consumption impact.
if it's so hard for you to consider opportunity costs when budgeting (a trait unfortunately shared by most humans), this seems like it could be easily fixed by putting the money you save into a discretionary spending account, to be used for renting hotel rooms for friends, or rideshares, or any such "unnecessary expenses". if your original assumption that buying a smaller house or whatever saves money, then this account should still increase in value every year, which can be rolled over into general savings. by keeping the money in a separate account, you can feel free to spend it on things that would otherwise be "free".
Does this actually happen? I'm serious. I'd like to hear some stories of offering to pay for your friend staying at a hotel room while they are coming to visit you (and them actually accepting that offer). How does that even work? I mean socially, in terms of etiquette, embarrassment, and power imbalance?
> (...) having every travel decision be a purchase decision is a lot of overhead and is a constant pressure not to go somewhere.
That's why doing the math once and then no longer worrying about it makes sense. I generally am opposed to paying for what I don't use (prevalence of unlimited data plans in the US drives me nuts), that's why the article resonates with me - I usually frame it as "don't optimize for the edge case". What the post misses to me in the house example is that homes usually at the very least maintain their value, so the added expenses are only related to maintenance (higher property tax, cost of heating, cleaning, etc).
> Unlimited data plans are totally worth it (particularly with visible where it’s only $25/month on party pay).
That's highly individual. I pay approximately that much with pay-per-GB data plan. Except now that I'm constantly home, I don't use the data, so my bills are lower.
> I don’t believe it’s possible to do the math once and no longer worry about it. Every time you call a ride it’s a purchase decision.
Same - it is an individual matter. I can definitely remember cases where I worried about not using something after I paid for it in advance and feeling bad (gym memberships immediately come to mind). Paying in advance makes every moment of your life into a "should I use the things I paid for now or later?" decision.
It's totally possible. I used to have a monthly ticket for public transport. My situation changed and I roughly calculated my expected trips. If it had been close, I would have gone for the monthly ticket again for sheer convenience and as a very minor risk insurance. It wasn't close.
I still take the subway, I don't worry about it at all. The weather is part of the decision, the 2 EUR something aren't. I don't even know how much it is, exactly.
I think it can be considered a one-time decision based on probability.
In my case, I know I don't expect to call a ride every other day, at most once or twice a month (even less now when bars are closed – but that's an edge situation). I know the approximate cost of a ride, typically €12, surge pricing may go up to twenty. So at the most, I expect calling a ride to cost me €20 a month.
That's less than what resident parking would cost for a car for the same month (a few years ago it was €9 / week). So the ride-sharing wins. I can think about this once and re-evaluate the situation every year. Yes, sometimes I may spend more on rides, sometimes less, but on average it's a cheaper way of getting around. So even though every time I call the ride it's technically a purchase decision in that I can decide not to do it and walk / bike / take the metro (assuming it's still open), it could be argued that I had already decided that in this situation I would call a ride. So no decision fatigue.
Note that driving my own car isn't exactly a "decisionless" process. I have to think where I'll go, whether I'll have easy surface parking (free) or whether I'll have to purchase underground parking. Plus, bonus points for underground parking being paid by the hour, so now I have to make a decision every hour about whether I want to stay out (purchase more parking) or leave.
Also, with regard to the data plan, we don't have those in France (that I know of). My plan has 40 GB and I've got it because it was cheaper than my older 15 GB plan. I know my usage never has me go above 3 to 4 GB. If an unlimited plan was available for a few more euros, that would be a net cost to me, for no practical gain in peace of mind or anything.
I suppose not everybody has a "boring routine-based" life so this approach may not work in each and every situation.
>> No backyard cookouts, no sitting on the deck, you'll go to the park less frequently.
Hey, when some people think of the outdoors they think of a communal BBQ in the apartment quad. When some people think "park" they see green grass. When they think 'walk the dog' they mean go to a fenced acre with sections for small/medium dogs. Such people are urban dwellers who probably shouldn't venture past city limits.
But some of us own labradors, huskies or even wolfhounds. Walking them means a car ride to a river with a few miles to run. When we think "park" we think Zion or Jasper ... not Central. Some people like to rollerblade to the corner starbucks with their Havanese dog on a retractable leash. I prefer to save my coffee money and spend it on a proper car to haul me, my canoe and my chocolate lab to a river beside a mountain.
Remember the old Nissan commercials: Dogs_love_trucks.
I've seen many labs and huskies at my local dog park. I myself own a rather active breed dog who I keep occupied with long walks in town and visits to dog parks. You don't need to go out into the woods to take long walks or runs.
He argues as if living on the outskirts is mostly about affording a yard that you don't really need, but there's so much more benefit than that for kids living in a rural area.
When I was a preteen in the late 60s and early 70s I got to explore and be independent in a way that is rare today, though I lived in a vast densely populated suburb. At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction. Today that would be an invitation to have your children seized by child protective services.
It's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the night sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city.
Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans.
Growing up in NYC I walked home alone, took the subway to meet friends, walked around all of manhattan a million times, etc. Most of that started around age 13-14, and as a preteen I would have my slightly older sister along with me.
At 15 I started to bike everywhere. I took my bike to the Hudson river path and I could get anywhere I wanted in 10-20 minutes - visiting a friend who lived downtown, or head up to Central Park to meet up and bike around with others, try out some diners uptown, etc.
At 16 my friends and I would walk around the east side, walking for miles in the middle of the night.
I don't think it was negligent at all, but I felt extremely independent because I could get anywhere as a kid without needing a car. I've always found that growing up in a city that felt safe and had great public transportation made me extremely independent at an early age.
For even more context to this: when you're a child in NYC, the public school system gives you a free MetroCard as soon as you start elementary school. They're meant to be for commuting, but they have a small enough eligibility radius and extra rides to make them generally useful. Once I got one (I was maybe 8 or 9) I was more or less independent, as were all of my childhood friends.
This is in stark contrast to people I befriended in college, who were (1) largely reliant on their parents for socialization and exploration until they were old enough to drive, and (2) incapable of handling the general mishegass that happens in urban environments without me as their tour guide. This doesn't make them bad people or dependent in some profoundly handicapping way; it just goes to show that a frontiersman's notion of "independence" is perhaps not the most interesting one in 2020.
Two of my kids got to see the before/after of this sort of thing when we took them to Berlin for a semester (I was guest lecturing at the TU). Since they had to take the S/U-Bahn to get to school, we got them monthly passes that let them go anywhere, anytime "for free". For a 14 and 17 year old, I think it seemed like heaven. The older one would go to nightclubs and come home at 03:00 and we weren't worried about drunk driving etc. The younger one could explore the whole city (hello, Dolores Burritos!) with her friends, or go to Idea to get art supplies, without us.
Getting back to Philadelphia where everything collapsed back to "Dad, can you drive me to ..." was depressing for everyone I think.
Oh hell yeah. Those cards were like little slices of plastic magic. Every once in a while someone would lose one, or claim to lose it, and you could snag the extra and get yourself anywhere from an extra 3 to 6 rides, and with free transfers that basically meant you could be anywhere any time for free.
I went to school upstate and it was impossible to get around without a car. Everyone was totally reliant on them, and I guess as kids you were always beholden to whoever was licensed/ had a car. To me that's insane, we could get anywhere for free, whenever.
Yep! I seem to recall the MetroCards claiming to only have three daily rides on them, but actually working at least four or five times (presumably as a margin of error/safety for lost kids). I used mine more than once to ditch school and take the D out to Coney Island :-)
What advice do you have for raising a kid in a city in this day and age? My biggest concern is all the addicts in my city. Some 60k live on the street, certainly many are working and are invisible, but the most visible of the unhoused are certainly concerning and have put myself on edge a few times riding pubic transportation, being personally accosted, watching fights break out over nothing due to someone being mentally unstable making eye contact with another person, seeing knives pulled on the train and being trapped in the car until the next station. I worry that if I let my child out and about unsupervised like this that they would be targeted as an easy mark for what little they happen to carry on them by desperate people looking to feed their addiction, because I know adults who've experienced this simply due to appearing vulnerable and alone. The kids I do see on public transit and on the sidewalk are typically shuttled around by their grandparents, or in a pack with a half dozen other kids. Maybe I'll teach them to use my skateboard so they'd at least have a blunt object like I do when I am out and about by myself on transit.
I don't know about your city, so it depends. I wouldn't feel the same way I did in SF, for example.
In NYC you learn quickly what's safe and what's not. I was taught that, at a very early age. You learn how to spot the difference between someone who's homeless and someone who's dangerous. You learn to be aware of your surroundings, you learn to duck into places like shops if you think someone is following you, etc.
It sounds awful listing it out like that, but those were just what we learned growing up. It was just how we took care of ourselves.
Same. I bicycled around my neighborhood with friends when I was I think 10 without any real oversight. I'm guessing some adults kept watch either outside or from windows when we played on our block but we could roam further out on our own.
Yeah, but you had to grow up in a constant cloud of pee smell .
It amazes me how much this doesn't seem to bother people. New York smells like pee. Everywhere. I've only been a few times, but it has always smelled like pee. I don't feel like "all three times I went, everywhere smelled like pee" really deserves anymore chances when no other place I have ever visited or lived has ever smelled like pee, with the exception of a dirty horse barn. Is all of New York a dirty horse barn?
Maybe New Yorkers just like it? I mean, it has to be that. Because nothing in New York is all that great, such that you'd put up with the constant smell of pee.
I'll have you know that Central Park smells like manure, not pee. The rest of the city smells like hot trash, but only in the summer ;)
Joking aside: NYC has a lot of smells, but human urine isn't actually one I pick up all that often (except for sometimes in the subway). As for why anybody would live here: it's one (maybe the most important) of the world's cultural nexuses, as well as the most thoroughly developed urban environment in the United States. Those are sufficient draws for many people.
I mean there are a billion reasons to live there, and I don't even live there anymore. Amazing museums, public transportations, entertainment, restaurants, and parks are some of the universal ones. If you're lucky enough to be well off you then gain access to some other amazing things, such as some top tier private schools.
Last time I hung out in Chelsea I was surprised at how tolerant the residents were of the trash stacked on the street in the heat of the summer. I was staying at a small “normal” place that I’m sure was a least 2 million dollars, and it was, just odd how this amount of trash everywhere was normal.
It's absurd how they tolerate that and pay the highest rent in the country for the privilege of having a swarm of rats scatter when they walk past the trash heap at night. No other city in the country just leaves waste in a pile unprotected on the side of the road like NYC. I don't understand why they don't at least have a god damn huge bin like any other first world city if it's going to be a pile of trash anyway on the sidewalk day in day out. It's downright medieval and I don't understand how it isn't a public health crisis having so many rats so close to eating and living.
Part of the problem is that Manhattan at least basically doesn't have alleys. BTW, if you think things are bad now, don't do any time traveling back to the 1970s/80s.
I don't know what to tell you lol it doesn't actually smell like pee. I lived there for over 20 years. Also NYC has amazing pizza, it sounds like you might just have really bad opinions.
Good pizza, but if there is a bar in walking distance you will be smelling pee. All my visits come with that ripe smell. I get that in DTLA too. It's just what happens when you have people drinking and no public restroom infrastructure to speak of. Maybe you are noseblind, or it's been a few since you've been on the bar scene in manhattan, but the piss smell is very real especially during hot summer nights.
I mean, if you walk around you will maybe smell pee sometimes? But saying the city "smells like pee" kind of implies that it's pervasive, contrasted with "outside of bars, at night, you might spell pee" (something I've never experience by the way).
Depending on how much energy you’re willing to invest in exploring and what your preferences are, it might take you a while to find the slice of NYC that’s appealing to you. Everyone’s different, but NYC definitely has something for everyone.
I’ve lived in NYC for almost seven years, and I’m just starting to feel comfortable. Not because I’ve changed too much, but because I now know what I like, what I don’t like, and how to seek out the former and avoid the latter.
It helps if you have friends who have already lived there for a long time, and who have similar interests, they’ll be able to short circuit you. Otherwise I’d recommend knowing yourself and researching, in that order.
The places that are most well known are the places with the biggest marketing budgets. (you mentioned Broadway). Most New Yorkers avoid those like the plague, fwiw. They’re built for people for whom money is not limiting factor to hedonism.
That's valid, but of course everyone is different. It took me a while. Others get lucky and feel comfortable right away.
I wasn't meaning to imply that most people take as long as I do.
DC and NYC are geared towards different people, and that's OK. pg has written nice food for thought on this topic. http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
NYC smells bad and the trash situation in Manhattan is straight out of the middle ages. That being said, I found New Orleans to have far worse smells. Something about how they do their trash there is even more degenerate than Manhattan. Imagine a little 5x5 alcove cut into the wall with a dumpster full of fried fish grease that hasn't been hosed out since Katrina. It was brutal. The entire city is a health code violation in any state but Louisiana. It straight up made me lightheaded sometimes in the french quarter, just putrid rank smells permeating the humid air with no breeze pushing it anywhere.
> But it's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city.
In my experience this is very common in cities too. It's the suburbs that prevent it. I don't have kids yet, but in my (very urban) neighborhood it's extremely common to have kids out and about on their own. It's generally seen as being very safe.
When I talk to coworkers with kids in the suburbs they're much more worried about letting their kids run around without adults. To be fair, it makes some sense: cars are one of the biggest killers of kids, and they're a much bigger risk in the suburbs (where most streets are wide and fast) than the city.
Extremely common in cities, that's how I grew up in the 90s.
However, the kids I met in college who grew up in rural areas had to be driven everywhere. Looking at their faces when I'd mention taking the bus to a concert as a teen, you'd think I was talking about performing wizardry.
As a city kid I could literally go anywhere I wanted at any time, just walk, hop on my bike, or the bus. My parents left dollar bills in a designated spot for bus fare if we wanted to go somewhere.
There was even "wilderness" in the city I grew up in. I grew up building tree forts of dubious structural integrity and swimming in streams. Without adults being involved, just the neighborhood kids. I loved that there were always neighborhood kids, there was always a playmate around - just walk outside and see who was out and about. This was all elementary school age.
The good part about "neighborhood kids" is you don't get to choose them, they were just whoever lived in your area - so you learn to get along with people you'd otherwise not hang out with.
I live in an urbanized suburb (SFH, but 5 miles from a city core) and kids are out all the time. We have a few helicopter parents that feel the need to monitor their kids constantly, but for the most part, the parks, buses, restaurants, convenience stores, etc are all full of kids/teens. They don't even really cause trouble either. You'd think a group of teenage boys would be assholes, but nope, they just kind of mind their own business.
Once you get to the cookie-cutter subdivisions in the far suburbs, that's when the kids all disappear. Part of it might be helicopter parenting, but I think it's caused mostly by a lack of any outdoor activities. Riding your bike means going to the next subdivision over. Repeat that a half-dozen times and you get to a heavily trafficked road that can be followed for a few miles to a strip mall with a Target. Even all of the nice parks in these places are only accessible via car -- surrounded on all sized by 4-6 lane traffic going 45+MPH.
Cincinnati. The city is old enough that the inner suburbs were established largely before cars became common, so a lot of them are more pedestrian friendly. Granted, the city loses that midwestern economy when you get closer to the center. You either pay out the nose ($1MM+ is not unheard of) for a home close to the city, or you buy a dirt cheap house ($60k- is not unheard of) in a "rough" neighborhood.
>Today that would be an invitation to have your children seized by child protective services.
This is a common refrain, but I've never seen more than one-or-two anecdotal accounts of this happening. Do you have citations or articles that support common CPS intervention in cases like this? In my experience CPS is primarily focused on abuse and malnutrition, and tries everything possible to keep families together.
Parents act like the world outside is scary and dangerous, despite declining crime rates. I think that many younger kids are in dual-income families, and are at after-school care from 3-6 every day. Those that aren't are often in after-school activities, and aren't home, bored with time to burn outside. If the kids are home, they'd rather play Fortnite or Call of Duty with their online friends than build a fort in the riverbed.
You don't see it in the news that much, but you get phone calls because nosy neighbour reports an unattended kid outside. Law in some places say that children have to be supervised until 12, etc.
The phone calls create a chilling effect as parents tell other parents. So if you even want to avoid the helicopter parent trend, society forces you to be their chauffeur.
So no, kids don't get taken away immediately, but the singular phone call is enough to stop it in %99 of cases.
But here are some links (go through the links that the articles give too):
It's funny you ask; the person who runs the linked submission actually got told in 2017 that they had to keep their kids under constant supervision until they were 10, after an anonymous tip that they were letting their kids ride the bus unsupervised.
> To be fair, it makes some sense: cars are one of the biggest killers of kids, and they're a much bigger risk in the suburbs (where most streets are wide and fast) than the city.
On the flip side, I see far more reckless driving in the city than in the burbs. Blowing lights or stop signs or excessive speeding are all more common in the city often directly in front of police. That wouldn't fly in the suburbs, and moreover people sort of expect traffic laws to be followed within reason (people still speed, but it's not normal to go 70 in a 45). Further, I have a strong suspicion that there are more hit-and-runs in the city than the suburbs. In the burbs, streets are wider and the speed limits are higher, but they have push-to-walk buttons and almost everyone stops well before the light turns red.
It does, however, support the quoted statement that (actual level of recklessness notwithstanding) cities are safer than suburbs in regards to getting hit by cars.
Depends on the city. I live in LA and we have probably the most dangerous streets in the country for pedestrians. We were the only city to see our car on soft body deaths rise after implementing vision zero.
My theory is this is a result of the traffic, ironically. You spend 2 hours out of your day commuting at 12mph at best, so the minute you have 100 yards of asphault ahead of you, many people opt to just whip to 50-60mph on 35mph roads and 25mph residential streets to savor the speed. If you hit someone at that speed, death is practically guaranteed.
The streets in LA are also ridiculously wide with few barriers and obstacles unless you get into the hills. This is a recipe for drivers speeding up, and never bodes well for bicyclists or pedestrians who don't benefit from the wider spacing when they're crossing streets or navigating intersections. In my limited experience, NYC has many narrower streets but is still problematic especially outside of Manhattan, and SF is similar in some parts.
One of my favorite games was to catch African chameleons, and run around with them on my finger, pointing them at flies.
That's a game that you won't find too easily in the US.
But it was really dangerous. We had some very nasty snakes, thereabout, half the bugs could give you bites that would take a month to heal, and violent crime was quite prevalent. I learned to be quite careful.
I survived. Not sure I'd want to put my kids through the same risks, but my parents didn't seem to have a problem with it (good or bad? I dunno. They were quite fascinating people, in their own right).
It did give me a unique perspective, though. In my mind, I'm glad to have had it.
A finger mounted tonguegun? Kid me would've loved it! (Adult me too!) Best thing I could manage was a two handed digger (holding a Guinea pig just above the ground).
My wife & I talk occasionally about an interview we read of some tribal group, I believe in Africa. A kid is exploring a machete. The westerner asks a woman why she isn't stopping the kid. She explains machetes are quite sharp, so the kid will either quickly learn to be careful- or be removed from the gene pool (paraphrasing).
It answered a lot of questions we hadn't been able to answer previously. (Mainly revolving around how difficult parenting still is, even with all our modern miracles)
> Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people.
Crime in rural areas today is rampant due to the opioid crisis. I don't know of a small town that hasn't been absolutely torn apart. Ironically while small town crime is way up due to opioids & heroin, it's down in large cities, about as low as rural towns in the 70s.
> If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap.
Tell me which kids don't have cellphones these days? All my friend's kids in rural (very rural) areas have them for "safety", and 2g-3g reaches pretty much every hollow.
Your description does not match the experiences I've had in the last 10 years, and as someone who grew up in a very rural area (~1k people/sq mi) and now lives in a very urban area (~18k people/sq mi).
Where I live in New Mexico it's closer to 10 people/sq mi. There is poor cell phone reception on some high points and none elsewhere. So I hike with a PLB. This area does have a serious drug problem but there are so few people that the threat is low. Where I typically hike I've seen maybe a half dozen people, at a distance, in a dozen years.
Just went with wikipedia's number for my hometown.
The city pop is 3k, but the county is only 16k, for an area of 450 square miles. I did not grow up in city limits, and the area was less than half the population back then.
Just was trying to give some very conservative numbers. More than happy to meet more yokels like me :)
Echoing kgermino's statement, I also live in a (small but dense) city on the East Coast, in a very walkable neighborhood where the train station is a ten minute walk away from my house. There are kids bicycling and playing outside, lots of families with dogs, all enabled because the roads are smaller and we're still a walking distance from food, hardware store, etc.
Do not confuse the singe-zoned, panopticon-esque tracts of land with nothing around but houses with small yards and not a single shred of grocery stores, points of interest or wildlife-allocated land for dozens of square miles (necessitating car travel) [1] with "living in cities." Additionally, crime goes down not just with a fewer number of people, but also with people taking ownership over their community – as you'll see in loved neighborhoods of bigger cities like New York – rather than barricading themselves inside their house and watching with suspicion any person that walks past their shuttered blinds, because in places so hostile to travel on foot, no one in their right mind walks.
In an era of continuously increasing human footprint on the planet, we should not be talking about the (environmentally and fiscally) expensive expansion of humans to the corners of the planet that remain "rural" and a respite for our Earth's natural resources. We should consider how to use properly the space we have already colonized, and we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land.
> we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land
Not everyone's needs and preferences are the same. It's great that your city meets your needs and preferences. That doesn't give you the right to impose your preferred solution on everybody else.
What do you think zoning is, if not "imposing <someone's> preferred solution on everyone else [ who might develop it ]" ?
Zoning is explicitly how communities act to stop people from doing things in with property there that a sufficiently powerful subset (hopefully a majority, but only hopefully) of the people already there don't like.
A way for individual communities to be the way the owners of those communities would like them to be. That's why different communities can be zoned different ways, i.e., one community does not get to impose its preferred way of being on everyone else.
The post I was responding to advocated abolishing single-zoned tracts of land altogether, which is a way for some people to impose their preferred solution on everyone else.
Zoning allows people that do not own land to decide what can be done with it.
That has some positive purposes ... it may indeed be a good idea not to put a toxic manufacturing facility next door to residential lots or a school. It might possibly make sense to focus retail development in a certain area within a community rather than haphazardly throughout it.
But single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing. It is, quite simply, rich people telling poor people "we don't want you here".
> Zoning allows people that do not own land to decide what can be done with it.
Land ownership, at least in every US jurisdiction I have experience in, is not that simple. Yes, technically my wife and I "own" our house and the plot of land it sits on. We have a title deed filed with the county clerk. (I'm leaving out the fact that we have a mortgage because the lien holder on the mortgage doesn't really have any rights that are relevant to this discussion; for our purposes here it would be the same if we owned the house and land free and clear.) That gives us a whole bundle of rights connected with the house and land, but it is not absolute "ownership" in the sense you appear to be using the term. The city, the county, and the state all have rights that don't go away just because someone buys the house and land; after all, they were all there long before we got there, and they all played a role in building the house and improving the land, not to mention all the infrastructure--roads, sewers, electricity, water, telephone, Internet. Our house and land aren't just sitting there in a vacuum; they are part of a community that is bigger than us and that has some ownership rights over the whole community that have to be balanced against the rights of individuals within the community.
Someone who really, really doesn't want to put up with any of that can go out to a highly rural jurisdiction and buy a plot of land that's far enough from all neighbors that they can basically do whatever they want.
> single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing.
Sorry, not buying it. You're welcome to build your own community that works the way you want it to if you don't like any existing communities. But you don't get to just declare by fiat that communities that don't work the way you prefer are evil.
I'm glad that you've outlined why property/ownership is much more complex than libertarians and conservatives typically acknowledge. I entirely agree with everything in your first paragraph, and it's all extremely important stuff.
However, I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing, and this led me to do a bunch of reading about the way this zoning classification is used across the US. That reading left me with only one conclusion: it is almost entirely a classist tool, used by the wealthy to exclude everyone else. Of course, the communities that do this have lots of nice sounding justifications for it which do not sound remotely problematic. But dig a little deeper (I did, really), and I am fairly confident that it becomes completely clear what is actually going on.
> I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing
I agree that such communities exist. However, that does not mean all communities that have some parts of them zoned for single-family dwellings are like that. Every community I have lived in that had portions of it zoned for single family dwellings also had townhomes and apartments, all in the same community and all within similar reach of whatever amenities were provided. (I have also been on both sides of the divide you draw, living in townhomes and living in single family homes.)
It doesn't need to be the case that every community with even one single-family dwelling zoned neighborhood has the same motivation.
As I said, it wasn't until I started reading around about this issue that I came to see how pervasive this use of the law was, and how in so many cases the motivation was reasonably easy to ascertain.
I'm not denying that conceptually speaking, such zoning could be done with purely good intent. I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.
> I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.
And your basis for this claim is your personal anecdotal experience, plus "a bunch of reading" you have done. IMO that's a pretty flimsy basis for such a sweeping claim.
This is attacking a straw man; the elimination of single-family zoning does not imply replacing that zoning with some other equally onerous requirement. Allowing students to attend school without requiring a dress code is hardly "imposing your preferred solution on everybody else".
Also, the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues, like the lack of housing in California causing sky-high home and rental prices. See e.g. a review of the book Golden Gates, which touches on NIMBY-ism in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-...
> the elimination of single-family zoning does not imply replacing that zoning with some other equally onerous requirement
Sure, it does: it explicitly says (not implies) that nobody who wants to live in a single-zoned community is allowed to any more, anywhere. That's an onerous requirement for anyone who does want to live in such a community.
> the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues
I think you mean "present" issues.
The problem I see is the idea that local interests should have no power to block the grandiose plans of politicians and bureaucrats who won't have to live with the results. At least in the case described in the article you linked to, the city manager, as far as I can tell, was also a resident, so he had skin in the game.
I note, btw, that the project mentioned in the article was allowed by zoning rules.
I agree with you - I think that rural life is quite empowering, but can be quite isolating as well. I also think that cities can inspire a sense of independence and self-reliance - in NYC, many middle schoolers ride the subway alone. In my apartment, we fix things ourselves, and my 6 year old already has a working understanding of plumbing and electrical. She's also been exposed to a diversity of cultures and ideas, not all of them pleasant, but all educational.
Overall, I find the suburbs to be the worst of both worlds - overprotective parents shuffling their kids in cars from scheduled activity to activity with other kids of a similar ethnic and socioeconomic background
When people talk about raising kids right, it always pans back to growing up in a rural area away from most people. Besides the dark skies/wilderness why is growing up in a rural area better than in a city for children?
Given that the majority of people live in a city/metropolitan area, I'll assert that my subjective opinion that growing up in a city would be better for a child than your subjective opinion that rural areas are better.
also: kids are not always staying kids. I was happy when I was a teenager that I could explore the city on my own and independent and with friends and not stuck in a (for teenager boring) rural area.
>Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans
Pretty ridiculous statement here.
So, the kids I knew in college who grew up in rural areas all said a lot of their peers (and sometime them) got (sometimes heavily) involved in drugs/alcohol because "there was nothing else to do."
>Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people.
Disagree completely, I believe there is safety in numbers and the community mostly watches out for kids. (Personal experience here)
> But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans.
I grew up in a suburban bordering on semi-rural area, and while I do think living in a rural region certainly has it's benefits (like the ones you describe), implying it by default "grows better humans" than those living in an urban area is ridiculous.
i grew up in a rural area and appreciated the freedoms that entailed, but in no way is that the only, or best, way to develop independence in children.
what you're describing is more an indictment of poor risk assessment, that parents are paranoid and over-protective for no good reason, than some inherent difference of rural vs urban living. crime is not a serious concern anywhere, just like getting eaten by a bear is not a serious concern anywhere.
I grew up in grizzly country in Northwest Montana, spent loads of time out in the wilderness on my own or with my younger brothers, and even saw a mamma grizzly with two cubs in the wild once. They are absolutely not a serious concern.[1] We used to make fun of outsiders who feared just getting out of the car without their guns and pepper spray. :-)
[1] That being said, please don't be stupid: keep your distance and show them all due respect.
Yeah, I'd laugh at those outsiders, too. Campsites are different. Idiots leave food around, which grizzlies find, and come to expect. Then the next idiot comes around, wipes salmon grease on his pants, goes to sleep wearing those same pants, and gets eaten.
I agree with your [1] -- where you're taking the concern seriously.
no, that's exactly the point, it's not. the risk is overblown, even considering bear country. the worldwide risk is on the order a few dozen attacks (not deaths) per year, primarily to defend their cubs, with extreme hunger being a secondary cause (bears understandably don't risk fights without good reason).
You also are dependent on parents to go see most friends, and the amount of kids nearby will be fewer. That independence doesn’t really start until 16 when you get a car. All this to say is everything comes with trade offs.
I grew up in the city and explored the city freely. The issue here is not the landscape, it is that definition of "acceptable parenting" moved on absurdly.
And frankly, rural kids are not more independent. Also, the "skins her knee" thing is strawman. Kids who are small enough to need that adult on tap are not exploring forest alone (say 5 years old). And at the age where rural kids explore forest with dog alone and it is fine for them to get lost, they don't get taps in city either.
I mean the independence thing very seriously, even you see the same age kid going in city alone as unfanthomable, but even now, they actually do.
This is the kind of subtle change in society that I can't describe.
As a kid, at my uncle place in the country side, we used to take bikes with my cousin and go whatever. Far away, unattended, no phone (hell, I don't think that house had a landline at the time).
Nowadays it feels a fantasy novel about another galaxy.
> At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction.
My experience was very different, my subdivision was hemmed in by freeways and expressways on most sides. Going anywhere required a ride from an adult.
Even you encourage everyone to move to the countryside (as you do for example by subsidizing car use), you destroy the very things you like about the country: cleaner air, dark skies, wilderness all around.
The author is missing one big thing: The main point of life is not optimizing for optimal spending, its optimizing for enjoyment.
Of course the rational break-even level math for some of these purchases can be analyzed, including taking into account tail risks and hassle costs.
But I think the point the author is missing is that some things are affordable luxuries that people enjoy. For a long time I didn't have a car in the downtown part of a city I live in. Public transit+rideshare+zipcar was a totally fine substitute (like the author).
But owning a car is better/easier/more enjoyable/more freeing! We didn't do a fine-grained analysis on how much using zipcar+hertz would cost vs buying a car. The car isn't costing a significant percent of our income, we were annoyed with alternative and wanted it, so we bought it.
If you used a blender 2x a year and it cost $1 to rent vs $30 to buy, would you really consider going through the hassle of saving money to deal with renting a blender? I'm not suggesting a car is the same significance for all, but certainly it can be rational to own one even for people in the same position as the author.
If you actually enjoy owning the car/blender, sure, knock yourself out. But my impression is that a lot of people buy these things thinking they'll bring them joy, and they actually end up with a closet full of junk that they never use weighing them down.
I moved last year and got rid of a lot of stuff; to my surprise, not only do I not miss the things I got rid of, I find myself wishing I'd kept less.
Does anyone look out the window and smile at the minivan in their driveway? I don't think a minivan is something people enjoy owning, it's a means to an end - so optimising like this makes a lot of sense. The author's found an approach that works better than owning a minivan all the time, and frankly with five kids I'd definitely want to start teaching them to travel independently as early as possible (bicycles and buses, as in the article) rather than always depending on lifts from their parents.
> The main point of life is not optimizing for optimal spending, its optimizing for enjoyment
I'm pretty much there. And having got there, I'm not convinced (yet) that it's the right goal at all. Hard to divest from it, however, since enjoyment is hard to walk away from.
It's not. Australia calculates fully loaded car costs at $0.72AUD/km. If you add up depreciation, registration, insurance, servicing, fuel, repairs and amortize it the numbers check out.
Surprisingly, ATO is rather generous with this one. Few posts below is my estimate for an oldish car, running the numbers for the "new small car every 3 years" model I still end up significantly below A$0.72. The averages must include luxury cars, which doesn't make much sense.
Just ran the numbers for my 10 year old Honda and my 15,000 km per year.
Accounting for depreciation, interest, insurance, actual service bills and petrol, I ended up with A$0.25 per km and A$4150 per annum, so ATO-sanctioned business travel compensation always rightfully seemed to be a handout to me.
A new BMW can easily cost 6x as much, hence "average body temperature".
In the US, business auto deduction is around 52 cents per mile.
An oldish paid-off relatively inexpensive car will absolutely do better than that on average. But it's actually not unreasonable that the business deduction bases costs on something like a late model leased midrange sedan like a sales rep might use to drive clients around.
Is owning a car (or maybe, a second car?) more freeing? Are you that much happier for owning a blender?
I think there's another take on this advice, that it's not about optimizing spending, but simplifying your life and obligations by avoiding the burden of ownership and minimizing debt.
I think the point is more that renting is a pain in the ass and you simply wouldn't bother. You either buy the blender or you don't use a blender. No one would go through the effort of renting one when they don't need it.
It's not just the 5% of the time you need it, it's also the immediate and guaranteed availability.
I rarely use my car, I'm the exact kind of person this is aimed at. I haven't used it in *monthts. But when I need it, it's there. There's car rental place about 500 meters walking distance from my home, but they aren't open 24/7. There is also a ride share car parked at about 1km from my home, but it's only one car and if someone else took it I can't use it.
These things only work when you know well in advance you're going to use it and even then, they might not be available at peak times. There's only so many ride share cars available, and if everyone wants to visit their parents on Christmas, there's not enough of them. Car rental companies aren't going to buy enough cars to cover their 5% peak use either.
> I rarely use my car, I'm the exact kind of person this is aimed at. I haven't used it in monthts. But when I need it, it's there.
If those months are not hyperbole, you might find that when you need it, it doesn't start. (That just happened last week to a friend of mine who had to bring his kid to swimming class, after leaving the car unused for a few weeks.)
It's shocking to me how cheap used cars are (equivalently - how few people buy them).
I am doing exactly the same thing as you. Bought a ~$3k old used car that is always there for me. I do use it more often, ever week or two, though.
It is even more shocking to me that people would buy a car on credit (except when it has a business purpose, i.e. you can comfortably cover interest payments with the increase in revenue). You're not supposed to use credit for consumption!
Old used cars are great most of the time, but they sometimes break for no reason, or require non-trivial work (e.g. replacing struts or wheel bearings, that sort of stuff). This is of course not a problem if you live in a single family house and have plenty of space to store the necessary tools and to work on it, but if you go all in into the lifestyle of living in a condo downtown that's recommended by the author of the article above, this can turn into huge and expensive hassle.
This has been my strategy for last 12 years. I own a 17 year old Volvo XC wagon and a 16 year old Toyota Camry. Volvo I bought 13 years ago from a 96 year old gent who's family had taken away the keys. Bought it sight-unseen on Craiglist for $9000. I'd put it up against any modern SUV for looks and functionality (except smartphone integration). The Toyota was $4500 and had 30K miles.
The Volvo heads to the shop on Wednesday. I'm concerned that I'm in for an expensive bill from the mechanic (~$1000) for various ailments. Never an easy analysis on a car with a KBB value of like $2500. But on the other hand, I'm driving a $40K car.
Another benefit of second used car is that if friends and family come to visit, they have a car to use.
Still, despite so far putting 150% of the "value" into repairs I realize it does not matter. Large Ratios of a small number are nothing compared to even small ratios of a large number.
Once the repairs are done I get to know the state of those parts. Absolute worst case, and the engine needs replacement, we're still only talking about 1 year worth of depreciation on a new car.
Will I need to replace the engine? Likely not. Would it have been slightly cheaper to spend 2x on a better used car? Sure, but maybe that one would have been a lemon too.
The scary part of used cars is spending money on repairs. Yet even expensive repairs are cheap. They are only expensive relative to the market value, but the market value is based on that lemon market risk.
The end result of having bought a far too cheap lemon: I've still spent less than a properly vetted vehicle and now I know some good mechanics down the street. The vehicle itself now has parts which are known quantities.
I'd really love an excuse to buy a new car. I've got the cash for it, but nothing modern cars can provide justify paying an engine replacement of depreciation every year.
I think the biggest "excuse" is new accident avoidance tech. A friend last year hit a bear. She didn't see the bear but her Subaru did, and probably saved her life.
Low mileage/late model used cars can be relatively expensive. "Clunkers" can be quite cheap but it's a bit of a crap shoot. Donated my old high mileage 2nd car (fortunately) before the pandemic hit. For some new tires and a brake job it would probably have kept going for a few more years but, especially if you want to take longer drives, old vehicles inspire less and less faith and take more and more time.
All of those failures consume time and energy, possibly wasted vacation, missed work, uncomfortable situations, etc. I've had used cars but at this point I'm willing to pay a considerable premium for maximizing reliable transportation.
Credit is fine if the interest rate is low and you aren't stretching yourself financially. I could've bought my car in cash if I wanted to but at a 2.5% interest rate I figured why bother, that's almost nothing after inflation. I might as well just keep the money invested in the market.
Why don't you just borrow money to buy stocks, without involving the car?
You can get lower rate if you use your own stocks as collateral, i.e. if you use brokerage margin. Heck, these days margin lending is so crazy common that there are even ETFs that package leveraged equities for you to go anywhere between -300% via 0% to 300% long, just change the allocation with a few clicks (or taps on your phone).
I actually looked up statistics from my country’s equivalent of the AAA of the road-side breakdowns they service before I bought it. The Mitsubishi Colt I own is one of the most reliable cars you can get. Japanese cars in general are very reliable.
The only reason to buy new is if you have some sort of aversion towards someones boogers on the wheel and fart dust in the seat. We bought a 2018 toyota for 9k out the door. Nearly 10k off msrp for 2 years used.
In the city that the author is writing from, car insurance can cost between $100 and $300 for minimum coverage on most cars unless you've been driving for a substantial amount of time crash-free. Likewise, gas is about $1.3 to $1.6/L
I'd pay about the same as your car for parking in my building for a year. Luckily rideshares are way more common around here, and I can often find one at walking distance (or else I can uber/ride my bike or a rideshare bike to one).
That is the trade off you made. It might not be right for the next person. There are things you cannot do with a rental car (off road). There are times when you cannot get a rental car when you want it. If you have hundreds of dollars per months that you are not spending anyway it might be worth it. (though my yearly costs for my truck that I drive a few times a year are much less than $100/month - it is paid for years ago though)
I'm American so any questions about health insurance automatically are predisposed towards absurdity. But yeah, I do. I don't want to be stuck in a hospital with a multi thousand dollar medical bill for an emergency. The worst that would happen without me owning a car is needing to rent one on a moment's notice. Maybe there's the odd moment when I would need a car for a city-wide evacuation? Seems like that's such an exceptional case that I would not spend my money maintaining a car just to be prepared for it.
As I read the article, I compare the author's world view to that of the "survivalists" and "preppers". The guys who stockpile food, water, ammo, etc. that they'll likely never use but might. They deliberately optimize for the 5% or 0.5%, rather than the 95%. They assume independence will eventually be needed (running water may one day be unavailable), where the author is willing to risk relying on inter-dependence (car rentals and hotels will always be available). The survivalists firmly espouse the "when I need it, it's there" point of view. I don't know if one view is right or wrong, but they are clearly opposite approaches to dealing with tail risk.
Even on a short time scale, as prices get higher, many people will discover that they have some alternatives or can wait a while, leaving the product available to those who really, really need it.
Have you tried to order an uber from a suburb that isn't very near the city center? You wait 20 minutes while you watch them drive from the airport to your house, and half the time the driver cancels the ride after you've been waiting for 15 minutes when they realize how far you are from the airport where all the fares in the area typically come from.
In small towns or bigger villages, the number of taxis/ubers, whatever might only be around 10 to 20. Once they are gone, you have to wait till they are a viable again.
It saddens me to see your correct answer being voted down. I get there's a moral condemnation of surge prices in certain circles.
Nonetheless this condemnation, once legislated, have removed the very practical ability to purchase important services or goods when they matter the most to you. Instead we end up all over-buying just to ensure we have it at the key junction.
This isn't life optimisation, it's putting cost optimisation over happiness.
Having a yard/garden with kids is wounderful, open the back door and shove them outside without shoes to play for accessible easy outdoor time.
Half the fun of Friends staying over in the guest room is when you can have a few drinks and everyone relaxes knowing no one is traveling. The next morning you can all have breakfast together.
Car shares are great for going to the shops on Tuesday, getting a car for Christmas when you want to see family is a different ballgame.
My father summarizes this concept by saying that if you consider the actual usage time, a prostitute is way more cost-effective than a wife, and still it just isn't the same thing.
That depend on whether he interacts with his wife only for sex. There are obviously many other tasks a wife can do, which could require hiring the prostitute for basically all waking hours, and that's not even getting into the misalignment of interests with a freelancer versus having a partner. I think the proper comparison for rent-versus-buy should be a girlfriend versus a wife.
A slightly more polite way of putting that would be that sex with your spouse is incidental, the reason for the relationship, is the relationship. A prostitute can't provide that.
I think it goes beyond the relationship, as a marriage is a commingling of finances and legal rights. A marriage is a common way to achieve pooling of resources and division of labor, with a long-term outlook for the benefit of all parties. Not the most romantic way of looking at it, but this must be taken into account as unaligned goals for the above are the most common reasons that marriages fail.
in 2019 (i.e. before covid), I threw a party at my centrally located, but also quite small, 1 br apartment. Had some friends in from out of town and put them up at a hipster boutique hotel 3 blocks from my apt. They hung out at my place for as long as they wanted, stumbled back to the hotel when they were done, and retreated to privacy of their own hotel room. We all walked to breakfast the next day.
The way the math works out is that I would be able to pay for three nights per month in that hotel for the difference between a 1br and a 2br in my building.
I don't think everyone reading this article needs to shoehorn their own situation into the analysis, but for me it makes a ton of sense. I kind of want a 2br, but I really wouldn't use the space that often and I have excellent alternatives.
As someone living in a 1br, I'm not sure how you aren't constantly pining for the 2br like me. It would change so much. Right now my living room houses my hobbies, my job, my tv, my dining room, my gym, and my couch where I can fit 1 friend awkwardly sleeping with their legs sticking out the end. A second bedroom would become the office, the gym, the guest room, the music room, and would free up my living room for, well, living.
I dream of that day, but I don't expect to see it for another 4-5 years at least given the nature of the beast in this field in this city.
This is also a perspective I could have much more easily bought into pre-COVID.
We have kids, and live in a rural area, and honestly, many summers, don't get a ton of use out of our property and home because we spend most our free time and income on travel. Generally, we're gone at least 2-weekends a month on car trips, fly away for a few weekends a year, and try to fit in 1-2 international trips as well.
Obviously, all that's changed in the last year.
With COVID, we've felt incredibly lucky to live in a rural area where our kids were able to spend basically all summer just "playing outside." No need to interact with other people on mass-transit. No shared elevators or public spaces.
When we did start socializing a bit, it was very nice to have a nice private, outdoor space to (more) safely entertain our guests in.
COVID is hopefully a very temporary, one-time event. But it has changed my perspective.
Still, while I agree that the article takes optimization to sort of silly lengths, I do see a solid point behind it.
I apply the same philosophy to boats, RVs, vacation-homes and the like. (Though, I admit that COVID has tested my resolve there a bit). Expensive investments that aren't really going to make sense unless you're using them far more than our family would. Plus, with any major purchase like that, you're "locked-in" to doing that one thing if you're trying to maximize the value of your investment.
Buy a vacation home, and you're going to have a mental barrier going on vacation somewhere else. Buy a boat, and you're going to feel like you're wasting money when you spend a week of vacation somewhere besides a lake.
>Buy a vacation home, and you're going to have a mental barrier going on vacation somewhere else.
I would probably agree with OPs sentiment in the context of vacation homes. They're not necessarily a great investment. They sort of lock you into a location. They're another thing you have to manage. And so forth. I'd much rather just get a hotel room, a B&B, etc.
I've even thought of buying a small place in the city. First of all, I'm really glad I didn't do that in the last year or two. But, really, while I wish I had done it 10 years ago knowing what I know now about property values, I also don't miss having another property to manage and I can always get a hotel if I want to spend a weekend in town every now and then.
This is, in turn, where AirBnB and companies like it add value to the world.
There are some really bleak effects on affordability in urban areas, but for someone who owns a vacation home they use two or three weeks out of the year, it's great: employ someone local to handle keys and cleaning, cover mortgage/taxes, maintenance, and maybe enough profit that you don't feel so bad going somewhere else once in a while.
In turn, someone like me can rent it! The best of my experiences with AirBnB have been this exact sort of rental, while the worst were situations where I discovered that the rental was illegal.
The only problem with AirBnB in high cost of living cities is that it gobbles up supply zoned for housing and uses it for ostensibly commercial purposes, which hurts the people living there who might have had the chance of signing a lease for that vacant apartment you don't use. Instead it goes to people looking to save $30 a night on a hotel.
We use our car almost every day (groceries, errands), it would cost dramatically more and take more time to rent vehicles. These sorts of posts always seem over-fitted to highly walkable areas. And maybe that's the intended audience but they rarely qualify the advice.
You're over-fitting to a specific example in this post. It's not about that; it's about the principle.
If you either determine that you use that car a ton, or you do the math, work out exactly how often you'd need that car, and what the costs are for the nearest viable alternative solution, and the car's TCO is cheaper - great. You did what this post is trying to tell you to do: Stop thinking about an unattainable hypothetical 'I shall be using this at maximum usage all the time', and start thinking about what you actually need, and how often you'd need it.
Aren't both arguments just overfitting then? The article is an overfit of a situation unique to them (great walkability and on-time, frequent public transit is not commonplace) and the OP you're replying to sees a high need of independent travel on their own unique schedule outside of their local public transit time frames and rideshare availabilities.
Perhaps the lesson to learn is simply judge and balance your own unique situation to your needs, and drink a large cup of stfu when it comes to judging others for what their needs are rather than push your own choices/agenda upon others?
At which point in the would be future you could peform the calculation again based on present use cases and weigh whether or not you should buy the car. "Don't throw away that extra axe, you might be a lumberjack one day" isn't great advice.
Yeah. To his condo point, fine. But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom? (And if you own a house, you may well have a spare room that can be used as a guest bedroom but you also use for other things.)
As for vehicles, I have a mid-sized or so SUV and sometimes I transport people but I often transport stuff from the home improvement store, etc. I have no interest in owning a small vehicle and then have to rent on a semi-regular basis.
And, yes, I own tons of stuff that doesn't get used much. But most of that stuff can't be easily rented or borrowed for the times I need it. Should I rent an electric drill or a weed whacker every time I need one? There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
> But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom?
I think this one is not quite like the others. if you only need a car for one week each year, you don't lose much by renting. but putting your friends in a hotel is not really a substitute for having them stay at your place imo. if I only get to see a close friend once a year, I want to make the most of the time that they're in town, cooking breakfast together, staying up talking until we can't keep our eyes open, etc. it's really not the same if a day of hanging out starts and ends with transit to/from a hotel.
Honestly, if they're a close friend, buy an air mattress or let them crash on the couch. I've done it plenty of times when visiting someone who didn't have a guest bedroom or there were a bunch of us.
I agree on the car if you're really only using it for a trip or two a year. (Indeed, I wouldn't even consider owning a car in that case. I probably would if I were going away a couple weekends a month though.)
That works fine in your 20s but not in your 30s when your friends are shackled to highly dependent screeching children, or in your 50s when your friends start having shitty backs and can't crash on your couch or leaky air mattress anymore.
I did this by renting a hotel room next to my friend for a few days. It’s actually fun and renting 2 rooms for up to 2 weeks per year is significantly cheaper than paying for an unused bedroom in a city. More importantly you retain flexibility to use that for more than just an empty room.
Couch surfing is also a perfectly reasonable alternative.
> There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
There's monetary and temporal costs. Instead of having to spend minutes to an hour to arrange and get a rental, you could have the item waiting in another room, ready to be used.
The author doesn't even say not to get a car. He says don't optimize your car purchase for something ("schlep a bunch of kids far away") you almost never need it for. Optimize for the common use case. So buy a small car for day to day and rent the mini-van for those occasions.
This doesn't work for rural and suburban America. What are you going to do, drive half an hour to pick up your other car? And spend another half hour waiting? That's incredibly inconvenient and costly.
The car-agnostic ideal won't work outside of major cities. The backbone of America is car travel. People outside cities have more space and more stuff. They expect hauling and utility function in their vehicles. This isn't changing.
Maybe if you can convince suburbanites to downsize, you might have a point. But that's also a city-centric viewpoint imposed by limited space and desire to move easily. Neither of those things are desired in the suburbs.
City dwellers don't get it because they don't live that life.
> This doesn't work for rural and suburban America. What are you going to do, drive half an hour to pick up your other car? And spend another half hour waiting? That's incredibly inconvenient and costly.
Maybe. Maybe not. The point is to do the exercise for your use case. If it costs you 1.5 hours and rental fees to get a minivan and you need it once a year, that's one side of the scale. On the other side you have purchase, insurance, maintenance, depreciation, storage and fuel costs.
The point is to be honest with both sides of the scale and to actually do the comparison rather than taking an automatic answer "I need to drive extra kids to camp sometimes, so I must own a minivan." Maybe. Maybe not. Just be conscious about the choice, not automatic.
Just so I can get an idea of the magnitude of the number, I am making an estimation. Please point out any egregiously incorrect numbers.
Price difference between smaller car and larger car: $15000
Lifetime of car: 8 years
Frequency the larger car is needed: once per month
Additional time to pick up and drop off rental: 3 hours
Money saved per hour: $52
So it seems that if someone values their time more than ~$50/hour, they should buy the larger vehicle.
Edit: Forgot to take into account the rental fee: $150
Money saved per hour: $2
It looks like it doesn't make sense to rent, as buying would allow the convenience of using the larger vehicle any time, especially if it is more than once a month.
I think your car lifetime is off by a factor of 2, and you're neglecting that a larger car will likely be less fuel-efficient and may have higher maintenance costs, but otherwise seems like the right ballpark. For something once per month, that seems like a reasonable conclusion for you.
I have a mid-sized car, and I go to Tahoe 3-4 times a year, and probably end up being the driver 2 or 3 of those times. For me, it makes sense to rent a 4WD/AWD SUV with snow tires for those 2 or 3 winter trips, especially since I'll split the cost of the rental among the friends who ride with me.
There's also the comfort/style/happiness factor: I like my car and generally don't like driving big bulky vehicles that are high off the ground; having an SUV as my primary vehicle would make me unhappy.
Do... do people really not drive to different places to have fun anymore or... is fun dead? There's a slightly bit more to life than just utilitarian living. In a 1 hour drive radius to where I live, I have countless many national parks, trails and nature reserves. That doesn't even include the beach, where I go to maybe too often. I get it that they're in the dead and cold lands of Canada... but there's more fun to be had that's outside the city that's kid friendly. Cannuck land has national parks, trails and stuff, doesn't it? I thought it did. Then there's all the "commercial" fun things to do with all that money they've saved... sigh...
Actually, I legit played that game on a road trip since this conversation came up with a friend right before we left (2017 timeframe). I counted and kept track. Through Colorado north bound i-25, roughly 60% were more than 1 occupant. Through Wyoming, then west bound i-80 was about 40% more than 1. Didn't do it on the return trip. Throughout east coast Florida city driving doing it every now and then (especially at traffic stops) ranges from 40-60%. Rainy days seem to be high single occupant days from what I've noticed.
Sure, anecdotal, not perfectly scientific or even at a good enough scale... but I don't really believe the 10% idea. I'd love to see where their scientific data is on that.
If you used the service linked in the article, it would cost you about $60 to get a car for a 5 hour 50 mile trip every month. If it takes you one hour instead, you're saving $90 an hour. And since you just have to get to the closest suitable car, 1 hour is probably more than enough.
And I think most people would trade an hour driving for $50.
This was based on the parent's comment of half an hour to drive to the rental place, and a half hour wait. To err on the conservative side, assuming that this adds another half hour to drive to the destination, this is 1.5 hours for picking up, and 1.5 hours for dropping off.
The result gets worse when you consider that $15K is probably not how much extra you would spend for a larger car, unless your two options were subcompact and full-size. Also, 8 years is 2/3 of what a typically abused car lasts, if you optimize for ROI you can easily get twice that.
Let's say 10,000 miles a year, 30 MPG for small car and 15 MPG for large car, and $3/gallon gas. That give an extra $1000 in gas per year for the large car, or an extra $83 per month if a large car is needed once a month, or $28/hour saved for the inconvenience of the hours spent picking up and dropping off the rental.
Either way, the delta is much smaller than what I was expecting, in the range of a couple of hundred a month at the high end, depending on which way the numbers swing. It can be something that's not worth worrying about, for someone who has a middle class income.
Definitely all the numbers have lots of leeway, and you can play with different scenarios to get different results. However, changing the MPG from 15 to 25 would make only a small difference ($17/mon difference in gas), and my point is still valid.
Assuming all else is equal. But what if you need to move further from work to get a house with parking space for your extra vehicle? Then you should also account for your extra commute time.
Honestly, why not? I grew up in the suburbs in a two car family, and on a couple road trips we just opted to go to enterprise and rent a giant van to better fit all of us and our crap for a week and keep the mileage off the regular cars. It wasn't a novel thing, either, a few families I knew growing up would do things like that for traveling.
The delays and uncertainty associated with renting make that a total non-starter for parents with busy schedules. The only practical option for most of us is to buy a bigger vehicle. Or buy two: a big one and a small one.
Perhaps the 95% in your situation would be more like getting a smaller car instead of, e.g. a minivan? I'm not saying you own a minivan, just that his general advice is not "don't get a car," it's don't get a car that based on some vision of what you want to do with it that only ends up actually happening 5% of the time. The insight is that it's usually cheaper to rent for the long tail use cases than to buy outright and leave idle for the vast majority of the time.
Many minivans are less expensive than many small cars. I do think there's a good life hack here of "don't spend a lot of money on a car" but I'm not sure it says much about the type of car.
Right, you have to pick the dimension of comparison to matter to you. Maybe the extreme case is getting a sports car that you only get to drive on the track once every couple months instead of a cheaper workhorse vehicle you'd use every day.
I am quite sure he is not talking about your situation. If you saturate the capacity of that car, then it seems warranted to buy it.
It could also be buying that DSLR camera for going photographing twice a year instead of renting for these occasions, or buying that 3000$ workstation to play games that require that power once a month instead of going to a net cafe (or using Stadia or whatever).
I'd refine that some to "places where most development occurred post WWII, and they didn't maintain a tradition of mixed use development", so a lot of the US, especially in the west, Australia and Canada too, most likely, although I'm less familiar with them.
The US used to have corner stores and fairly walkable places, but it's something you find in the older parts of towns and cities, and it may have decayed since it wasn't prioritized much for many years.
And in Europe, too. Sure, America is huge and there are a lot of cars, but in Germany (as an example) there are still over 500 cars for every 1000 people.
When I went to a business trip to Germany my German coworkers told me to rent a car. The city I was going to didn't have good public transport. Sure if you go to one of the cities in Europe (or Asia) at anyone can name there is good transport. However even in Europe (or Asia) there are a lot of tiny cities and towns either without good transport, or limited transport. (There are of course some tiny towns with good transport)
Notice above I qualified it with Europe or Asia. If you go to South America, or Africa odds are even the city you are going to doesn't have good transit for most people. (A handful are building, but there are lot of cities that could have good transit that don't have it)
I don't think this is true at all. Most of the world population lives in third world conditions. They may not have a car, because they can't afford it, but that doesn't mean their neighborhoods are "walkable".
Visit the slums of Mumbai, or the shanty towns of Lagos, or the favelas of Lima. These may be high density, but they're certainly not "walkable". Either in the sense of being pedestrian friendly or having many services easily accessible by walking/public transport.
There's a reason that the motorbike is one of the most popular consumer products for middle income countries. In the vast majority of the third world, the populace is desperate for any sort of personal motor transportation.
A lot of people seem to think that the choice is between modern US cities (where indeed it's often hard to get around by foot or decent public transit) or the core of Amsterdam (or a number of at least parts of European cities). And that all of Asia in like Tokyo. I assure them that Jakarta and KL are not Tokyo.
Your car doesn't stay idle 95% of the time, then. While the general principle might still apply in your case, the original examples don't, because your situation is different.
Agreed, but maybe it's best to think of the 95% as a convenient placeholder to remind you to account for extreme cases rather than a hard and fast rule.
I think it might be even more useful to think about the time you saved - i.e. without a car, will you be spending more than 5% of your time on transportation?
Data point: as someone who grew up in villages and small cities in eastern Europe, I've seen cars being used for whole hours a day in total. Driving somewhere for thirty minutes a day is still a short total commute time relative to what I have experienced in rural and little-urbanized regions.
Tangential, but my god why'd they have to name it that. All I can think of is that dirty viral video from a decade and a half ago. Damn my millennial early internet upbringing.
I also think that leasing or buying used negates the car-rental argument. The costs of owning a used sedan are very low, and the on-demand convenience imho beats renting a car for $8/hr. Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit.
> Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit.
That's not accurate. With a lease you're just paying for the depreciation directly, at a predetermined rate.
It can definitely make sense, though. I leased a Bolt for my wife for $6K for three years. Even if she only drove it once every week or so it would be hard to do on-demand rental for less.
I lived like this for a while, both in Hong Kong and in Los Angeles, with two kids. There's a sense to it.
But what's not discussed in this article is the friction of this sort of lifestyle. The time when you couldn't get the rideshare when you needed it. The time lost using less efficient public transport. The hassle you go through every time you need to do... anything.
And as the children get older? Well, the lifestyle gets old too.
Don't pay for what you don't need and won't use. I agree. Just keep in mind you're paying for more than just the few minutes you're actually in a car.
I rented a mini van once for a road trip over a national holiday. I got to the rental office, was in line for an hour, and then they told me it was no longer available. Not even a sorry. Drove our two cars instead.
It takes 15 minutes each way to the nearest Home Depot to rent gardening tools and another 20 minutes in line. Then factor the drive back, and the return trip and it adds up to to 100
minutes of my time. Also, if you are using the tool more than a couple of times, it’s probably cheaper to buy. The only things that make sense to rent are specialized, expensive tools.
Guest bedrooms can be used for many things. If you are sick, you can isolate yourself to prevent other people in the household from getting sick. You can have actual guests over and you don’t have to drive them to/from and get to spend more time with them.
Whenever CalTrain breaks down, Uber prices surge. You either wait 30 minutes or pay quadruple prices. SamTrans will make you wait for the bus that comes every half an hour.
So the pluses are availability, reliability, optionality, and lowered transactional cost.
The author is essentially advocating a low-margin lifestyle. There is little spare capacity or other tolerances engineered into their choices. They may have cash in the bank, but they don't have any reserves of interior space, exterior space, or transit capacity. Instead, they rely entirely on being able to acquire that on-demand.
That works out most of the time, but it's a risk. And, like any other risk, it needs to be planned for, and it carries its own emotional and experiential weight.
This argument ignores tail risks. Sometimes that 5% max capacity usage is something that turns out to be incredibly important and not substitutable short term.
I'll be a lot of people are regretting not building some slack capacity into their housing and transportation right now, when public transit is potentially dangerous and the whole family might be working from home thanks to COVID.
Oof this hits close to home. Moved right before COVID started and got an apartment right next to my job. Figured I didn't need space for an office. My commute is short and I can just use the apartment common areas if I need to wfh. 1 month later and I'm wfh full time in a studio apartment and my desk is in my closet because I have no space and the common areas are closed.
This is a really good point; the cost of excess capacity is effectively just an insurance policy that you buy ahead of time, lump sum, one time payment. I'm not sure you could replicate this with an actual insurance policy to collectivize the risk and reduce costs, at least not with the example of housing in a pandemic in mind.
How much slack capacity is reasonable though? Sure, it's good to have a non-zero amount. But that doesn't mean that the opposite extreme - having 20x the capacity that you actually use - is the right way to go.
If the best place is anywhere in the middle of those two extremes (e.g. to have 5x the capacity), it won't be possible to achieve while everything is based on individual private ownership. We'd have to share, and build the slack capacity into the shared pool of vehicles.
This depends on the cost of the item, the risk associated with not having it, the cost associated with renting it, how wealthy you are, and so on and so forth. No single number makes any sense.
A plunger can probably expect <0.1% use of it's capacity. But being stuck without one really sucks, the cost to rent is... once you account for the spent traveling back and forth would be higher than the cost of buying, and as a result literally everyone just buys them.
On the flip side a 20 year old fast food worker with $0 in their bank account probably just plain can't afford to have 5x the housing capacity they actually use. That would bankrupt them. So they just don't do it.
Roads are not safe to be on during earthquakes. During the Northridge earthquake overpasses collapsed and gas lines below road surfaces exploded into fireballs. You won't have any notice to do much of anything when the quake hits. If you live in an area where a tsunami is a risk after an earthquake, you should walk on foot to higher ground.
It's easy to say that, seeing how difficult COVID has been for many people, but should we really be optimizing for what is likely a once-in-a-lifetime event?
In the last 18 months I've lived with 2 kids in a condo in SF with a car, a downtown condo in an Asian megacity without a car, and in suburban silicon valley with a car and large yard. For us, by FAR the best quality of life has been in the suburbs.
Having a yard is exceptionally valuable with kids. They can be free to run around, play yard games, explore - all without draining the emotional reserves of parents. You can do this while you make dinner, work, or do other things that are unrealistic at an urban park. And you can play with them too. It is not that expensive to get someone to care for your yard if you have some financial flexibility.
In a family there are many kind of resources - time, money, energy, emotional reserves. Scarcity in the first two are easy to focus on because they're quantitative. But scarcity in the latter two - especially emotional reserves - is actually the limited resource in many families. Having to deal with the stresses of children (even if they are mostly well behaved!) puts a real strain on relationships. And the friction from an urban environment, especially one like SF which is not child-friendly, or a giant megacity that has very high density, just drains away the scarcest resources that a family like mine actually has.
If you have some financial flexibility and need serenity and quiet to be your best, combining kids with an urban environment in exchange for spending less is a very poor allocation of resources. It's an example of optimizing for the thing you can easily measure, instead of what's truly important.
your blog server sits idle 95% of the time. don't pay for capacity to handle hypothetical peak load if you were to go viral by hitting the frontpage of HN. if that were to happen, just fail and let the punters read the blog from archive.org / google search cache
This feels a bit like a strawman. Does he have experience living the lifestyle of suburb house + car or is he just trying to justify his own choice of living downtown?
Having done both, I can tell you they are very different lifestyles. There are certainly perks to the downtown lifestyle, but it isn't all peaches and roses.
Taking the bus is a huge mixed bag and depends a lot on the transit system layout. Taking a newborn on the subway and transferring to a bus to see a pediatrician sucks. Hyperactive kids fighting all day when you're trying to work from home from a shoebox apartment sucks. You don't get as much leeway in your choice of schools (and btw, the highest ranking ones often aren't downtown). Etc.
By contrast, the north american suburb lifestyle generally involves driving kids around pretty much all the time: they might go to a nicer school that is a bit farther out (did I mention good school areas have expensive real estate?) One might drive out virtually every weekend because getting ice cream at ikea takes as long as it does to walk/bus to the nearby supermarket. When one drives, they can also pack more activities in one day: Going for groceries then checking out a dozen books from the library in a single outing isn't a recipe for back pain. And you can actually get home before lunch time. Etc.
With a bigger house, your parents can come stay for a few months (this is very common in many cultures).
Yes, you can save money by living the downtown lifestyle, but there's certainly a hit in various aspects of quality of life.
The article author is having fun. Kinda of like how hyper-milers were working so hard to minimize their gas use when Toyota Prius were all the rage.
I could not imagine raising my kids in an apartment, it sounds like a nightmare to me. We lived the American suburb lifestyle you described. I loved every minute of it while it lasted.
It’s generally true that you have two options—you pay a big capital cost for a chunk of capacity which is available to you whenever you need it, or you pay operational costs for renting as you go. This applies to guest rooms, cars, and computers.
The maxims aren’t very good. “Don’t pay for something you don’t use” is weak advice, because sometimes it’s cheaper long-term to pay for unused capacity than it is to pay for usage when you need it. And this all gets muddled to hell as soon as you factor in the opportunity costs. Each option has a different amount of risk.
“You’re paying for 5% usage, 100% of the time” is just not a solid foundation for making these decisions.
> Your computer is probably 95% idle. Just saying.
On that point, my next machine will be in the cloud. 32 GB laptops cost around $1,500. For the same cost I can buy 6,250 hours on a VPS ($.24 / hr) which is three years' working-hours use. It's even cheaper if I only need all 32 GB for a fraction of the time.
In return I get zero risk of theft, zero risk of hardware faults, zero capital outlay. The best part is that I can try it for a month for $10[1] and if I don't like it I can revert to the status quo!
Not that long ago, I provisioned a VM for myself and started doing some development there. I wanted to compile a fairly large project, so I stopped the VM, changed it to a much larger instance (32 CPUs, 128 GB memory) and ran make -j32.
The build finished ten or fifteen minutes later, and I swapped it back out for a smaller instance. It’s nice.
There are situations where it makes sense. If you don't particularly want a pickup truck for other reasons, don't buy one because you might want to pickup a load of mulch or a tree in the spring. Rent a truck at the home improvement store for an hour or pay for delivery.
But the vast bulk of the things I own and don't use on a daily or even weekly basis are things that would either be a hassle to rent or pay for as a service, would end up costing more using them that way, or simply aren't practically available at all as a rental item.
I think convenience is the hidden cost here. No one is going to bother renting a car to move some dirt. They would pay for it to be delivered however because thats even easier than picking it up yourself and the savings from having a smaller car make it cheaper too.
The big question this doesn't get into is: what do you want to have available instantly, with no acquisition cost beyond "remembering where you keep it"? What do you want to be able to customize perfectly to your needs?
As an example of the latter: I've tried bikeshares but they just made me long for my own bike: they're all too low for me, they usually have three gears at best, they have hard-to-move solid tires, the cargo area is usually in the front instead of my preference of the back. The cheap, beat-up seven-speed I own is a lot more fun to ride on.
I love my roadbike, but it's not always convenient to deal with the shackles of ownership of said bike. It's like having a car in the sense that you need to think about where you can put it and take it with you when you leave. If you go out drinking, the bike has to stay home. If you go to the airport, the bike has to stay home. If you take it on the train, you are 'that guy' taking up three grandmothers worth of standing space with your bike and causing a disruption as people give you zero time of day to deal with maneuvering your bike up and down escalators. If you take it on the bus, everyone on the bus gets pissed that you are making them late for work securing the bike to the front of the bus, and in my city sometimes busses are ambushed at red lights for the bikes mounted in the front so it's not a great spot security wise.
On the other side, with the bike share, I don't care about what happens to the bike after I'm done with it. Someone could rip it apart for scrap money or throw it into a river for all I care. Me finding another one in working order is trivial, compared to replacing my stolen bicycle. Plus many of them are electric so I can do it in a full suit.
I live in NYC and renting a car, either with a car rental agency or via ZipCar is an utter shitshow.
With ZipCar, the cars are usually either (1) changed last minute to a different garage, (2) have mechanical issues (I showed up once and the battery was dead), or (3) strong smell of smoking. A few times I have had multiple of them occur in the same reservation (the third garage we were sent to had a functioning car with check engine alerts).
I have tried rental cars, but then what if you want to go away for a week at a time? What if the car doesn't have an EZ-Pass? How do you get to your final destination from the car rental place? A few months ago I waited one hour for a Lyft driver to pick me up (in a jalopy van on a toll-less route with no AC) to take me to the car rental place.
There is something to be said of having a functioning car waiting for you near your place of residence, even if it is only for 5% of the time. I imagine the same applies to other things in life.
This is kind of related to the lean supply concept that's been waylaid by COVID-19. You think you can just pay for capacity when you need it, until it turns out everyone needs it at the same time. I can't imagine anyone who lives near wildfires in California not owning a car. Lots of people don't live near parks, or the parks are poorly maintained. A friend might lose their job and need a place to stay for a few months.
There are lots of what-if scenarios which are individually unlikely but cumulatively probable. If you have the resources, why not prepare for them?
"Your car sits idle over 95% of the time." Ok, but hailing a cab-van with 3 carseats 5-6 days a week is a headache. Plus a good used minivan costs just $15-23K.
"Your guest bedroom is occupied one week out of every 52." Mine is 4 weeks a year, and we have a murphy bed in it so we use it for other things the rest of the time.
"Your kids use the yard less than 40 minutes a week." WHAT?! They're out there 24/7. I have to drag them in kicking and screaming!
Silly article. Stop pretending you know how to grown-up.
Does the cost/benefit really work out, though? Suppose I buy a $50,000 minivan which I expect to keep/last 10 years. At $8/hr for a rental, the breakeven is 50000/8/10/365=1.7hrs/day. When I was growing up in a family of 4, my parents easily spent more time than that in our van, shuffling us between school and other activities. And of course this doesn't count the depreciated value of the car after 10 years.
I can imagine the hotel argument working out better mathematically, but it's definitely very much dependent on where you live. In a rural area you'd probably be crazy not to get a bigger home. In an urban area, a hotel could make sense.
The author has other articles about how he's taught his children how to use the bus on their own to get around, and how they ride it to school daily. The "take the kids to school" use case isn't true for everyone, and I feel like people are also missing the point of the article.
You're supposed to analyze for yourself if you need to own a car full-time, and if the answer is yes, perhaps a smaller one might do? If you're constantly shuttling large groups around, then the answer to both might be yes, and that's fine too.
Your calculation doesn't count for insurance, tax, maintenance and fuel. That being said, I consider nearly 2 hours a day spent in a car to be a massive amount of time and would definitely want to have my own car if that was the case.
Then again I used to walk to school and today I walk or cycle to most places. I wouldn't be able to do that if I was living in one of those US suburbs.
Not noted in the article that usage of car share, hotel rooms, and parks are all already highly correlated with local conventions for work holidays.
Sure, you can get an easy car share 95% of the time, but the 5% of the time that you actually need one is also the same 5% of the time that everyone else in the city needs one -- the long weekend when everybody wants to head out to the countryside. Likewise hotel rooms and the facilities in parks. So you may need to plan waaaaaaaaay ahead if you depend on access to these shared resources.
The author does not account for the tail risks of driving an unfamiliar rental car long distances, especially in a dangerous country like South Africa where hijackings are super-common, especially in Johanneburg.
How certain are you that the brakes won't fail and the CV joints won't go in the middle of a hijacking or a blockade of burning tyres in the middle of the national highway (a weekly occurrence in ZA)? Or that you'll be pelted with rocks by a mob of protesters on your way back from work (common)? Or that an unroadworthy minibus taxi will swerve in front of you without signalling (a daily driving experiience in ZA)?
My Subaru Forester is costlier to maintain than a rental, but I know all its faults and limits. I know fast I can corner without sliding and I know I can get out of a sticky situation with all-wheel drive and a 2.5L turbo. I hope I don't need to, but I can outrun most hijackers and drunk drivers (there are many).
Taleb says only insure against risk of ruin. I regard my SUV as tail-risk insurance in case shit hits the fan.
The Gautrain is fine, though pricey. The issue though is with the last-mile travel. How do you get from the train station to your house? Walk and you'll get mugged, esp. if you walk a regular route with expensive equipment on you, otherwise you take an Uber.
The minibus taxes aren't roadworthy and drive like demons. So most people in Gauteng own a car with anti-hijack coatings on the window, or they Uber.
In Cape Town there is no longer a working rail system because the trains were burned by the protesting populace. Even when the trains were running (with huge delays), you'd get pickpocketed on the train. You could never risk travelling at night if you had anything valuable on you.
I haven't, but my roommate from university had to outrun a Toyota Corolla with four guys trying to pull him over on a mountain pass in his Subaru Outback. Since then, things in ZA have gotten worse.
While I do agree somewhat with this article, keep in mind that ownership of things results in different realized costs. Owning a house is a very different cost than owning a car, not only in terms of longevity but usage and storage. The fact I don't have a place to "store" my house does not affect the resale value, compared to that of a car that was only stored in a garage.
If you want to maximize value of something, finding alternative uses for that item usually results in lower cost of ownership. My yard currently has about 200 square feet of garden in it, which provides a substantial amount of food to eat, at no additional cost than the water and minimal gardening supplies to keep it going. My kids can also use the yard, along side my garden, maximizing value. Once my house is paid off, my yard has a realized cost of close to zero. Friends can setup a tent in the yard with an air mattress instead of needing a guest room.
That fancy mini-van? I can also be the person that rents that out as a potential income source. Suddenly, something that was a liability is now a revenue stream, and I still have the convenience of using it basically whenever I want.
Most things you'll find you use only 5% of the time you own them, but their cost is low so they get no mention or attention. Other things are stupid to justify in terms of financial costs. Kids are expensive, and looking at them as an asset or a liability is laughable.
Instead of figuring out the percentage of time the item will be used, try and instead maximize value from it. Split the cost of a lawn mower with your neighbor. Rent out your car on a car-share app. Car pool to school and work. When trying to purchase a big item, try and figure out what you really need, and fight your ego. Can you buy it used? Is a specific color really worth thousands of dollars? Life isn't something that can be explained through an algorithm, don't try and run every decision through it.
> So what motivates people to plan for occasional peaks and idealized usage, rather than actual daily utilization?
The question presupposes the answer.
I fondly remember being a kid and riding around in the van-with-a-tv owned by the family who for whatever reason enjoyed being the family who drove the van-with-a-tv filled with their kids with all their kids' screaming friends.
You don't want to be that family, and that's fine. But you should be explicit in stating you don't want to be and are not that family. Don't convince yourself you could rent that minivan in the case that it becomes socially necessary at some unspecified time in the future. Everyone in your life has almost certainly already heard you quote your statistics from the article, and they have adjusted accordingly so as to route around you-- for example, when they decide how to vectorize transport of their offspring.
This is a fine argument for simplifying your life, but it is not a good economic argument.
Hotels are expensive. Rental cars and Uber are expensive.
If you even take a few Uber trips a month, you're probably better off owning an affordable car.
If you have visitors regularly, you should probably buy a house with that extra bedroom. It's an asset that you can sell and recoup virtually 100% of your investment later on. You can't sell all the hotel rooms you've previously rented.
Having a yard turned out to be a fantastic thing to own this year since parks were all forced closed. Trust that you will always have access to that local green space (and that it will be safe and accessible) turned out to be misplaced.
> If you even take a few Uber trips a month, you're probably better off owning an affordable car.
My wife and I live in the city and downsized from two cars to zero after doing the math last year. Granted your definition of "a few" might be different from mine, but it takes way more than my definition of a few rides to break even.
If you ask someone to itemize the costs of car ownership, they tend to miss or underestimate a few. The big ones are insurance and depreciation. I am confident that my total rideshare costs over the past year are less than just the difference between my city insurance premium and my suburb premium on the same used car, and my record is spotless. The math is surprising. (Any cost of ownership estimate or calculator I share here can be reasonably challenged, so try it with your own numbers.)
This isn't to speak of the other costs and risks of non-ownership. Every situation is different. We are lucky to have subsidized public transportation passes, corporate discounts on rentals, walkable commutes, grocery stores in every direction, etc.
> If you ask someone to itemize the costs of car ownership, they tend to miss or underestimate a few. The big ones are insurance and depreciation. I am confident that my total rideshare costs over the past year are less than just the difference between my city insurance premium and my suburb premium on the same used car, and my record is spotless. The math is surprising.
I did this exact analysis on my car some years ago, after 5 years of ownership. I took into account all repairs/maintenance, purchase price, depreciation, insurance, gas, city fees and parking (yes, I keep track of all those expenses).
It came out to $288.77/month.
In reality, it was a bit less, given that 2 years later someone wrecked my car and their insurance paid more than it was worth (with no major repairs in those 2 years).
I then bought a much, much cheaper used car (about same value as my old one when it was wrecked), so the cost would be significantly less what I show above ($100 out of that $288.77 was just depreciation).
Depreciation seems to be the major cost, and my car was fairly used (8 years old when I bought it, but low on miles). Don't buy a used car for more than $10K - mine was less and you can still see the amount of depreciation! A lot of people think they're beating the game by buying a 2-3 year old used car, but the depreciation will still be really high. Of course, you can get good cars for under $4K, but it may be risky to go long distance in those.
Of course, the other trick is to get a reliable car. Pick only models with good histories (buy the Consumer Reports guide as one reference for this), and do a buyer's check before buying it. If you go to a used car lot and they don't let you do that check, then refuse to buy it.
The people for whom the advice of "buy a 2-4 year old certified pre-owned car" makes economic sense are the ones who are otherwise buying a new car. There are a ton of people who seem to default to "I'm buying new" for whatever reason.
I've had excellent savings (and frankly, minimal hassle) from buying an 8-year old Mercedes diesel with 180K on it, a 7-year old Honda CR-V with 165K on it, and a 7-year old Alfa Spider with 24k on it in my younger days. The Mercedes was bullet-proof but painted with an eco-friendly paint system that ensured they prematurely rusted (oh, the irony of taking a perfectly functional car off the road to save the pla). The Alfa I sold running well with 125K on it a few years back as we were planning to have kids. The Honda is still my SO's daily driver with around 215K on it.
I do my own wrenching on the cars, which also keeps the costs down, but even if I paid an independent (non-dealer) mechanic to do everything, decent cars just don't break that much any more. (The Alfa was extremely reliable. From 1993-2009, it broke exactly once and that was the failure of a Bosch distributor, nothing to do with the Italian heritage. The Mercedes took no major work over that time. The Honda did need a clutch which was $750 in parts and would have been around $1000 in labor.)
Not feeling the need to carry collision insurance is another big money saver.
> The people for whom the advice of "buy a 2-4 year old certified pre-owned car" makes economic sense are the ones who are otherwise buying a new car. There are a ton of people who seem to default to "I'm buying new" for whatever reason.
a lot of people just want the shiniest new thing they can get a loan for. I do think there are some legitimate reasons for buying new/CPO though. a lot of people (somewhat frivolously) plan to own a car for about five years, so buying new/CPO leaves the car in its original warranty for the majority of the time they own it. this probably isn't better economically, but knowing that a) cars are less likely to break during warranty, and b) the dealership will fix it for free if it does might be worth it for the peace of mind. there are some cars (mostly cheap performance cars) that I simply wouldn't consider buying used out of fear of what the previous owner may have done to it.
somewhat of a tangent, but I was looking at a couple online TCO calculators recently. not sure how they do their calculations (or how accurate they are), but I got some very surprising results. for all the models I was considering buying, the five year TCO was almost the same for CPO as it was for new, only lower by a few percentage points.
> If you have visitors regularly, you should probably buy a house with that extra bedroom. It's an asset that you can sell and recoup virtually 100% of your investment later on. You can't sell all the hotel rooms you've previously rented.
if you're buying a house, it probably makes sense to get one more room than you typically need. like you say, it's likely that you recoup the cost at the end anyway. if you're renting, it's a little different. a decent hotel room is $100-200 a night in most cities. that's not cheap, but having one extra bedroom probably adds at least that much to your monthly rent.
I argued in a different post that a hotel room isn't necessarily a substitute for a spare room. it's a much less intimate way to entertain visitors. depending on the guest, that could be a pro or a con.
A hotel room also isn’t a substitute because it can’t be used as flex space. The pandemic has many of us wishing for dedicated home office space, an extra room serves that purpose. It can also serve as a home gym and hobby project space, sometimes all at once.
Elastically scaling your transport and housing needs works great when you live in a city but fails hard when you live in rural or suburban neighborhoods. Since the author is a strong advocate for public transit, I'll preempt the "this would be more viable if public transit were widely available" with "yes, but that's a massive inconvenience and additional time you have to account for".
Of course, if the author is subtly implying that everyone should live in a city, then, well, not everyone wants to live in a city nor should they have to.
Articles about how most people are doing it wrong or optimizing for the wrong thing always leave me wondering who they are trying to convince, me or themselves.
As so many people mentioned here this article seems to put cost benefit over personal comfort.
Having a car/garden/guest bedroom adds to your quality of life. I had these conversations before when I was in my twenties and almost owned nothing (no car, tiny apartment without a garden). Now that I'm married and more settled I moved my preference a little bit more towards the "paying for things I don't use that much". My wife and I share a car and I have an electric bike (during the week my wife takes the car to work, I work from home). We have a guest bedroom which also acts as my office (when guests are here I work from the kitchen table). We don't have a yard but will definitely make this a priority in our next home.
So the question really becomes: "What percentage of idle time are you OK to have". You will always have >0% idle time on anything on you own.
And if it's truly about cost effectiveness: What's stopping you from renting out your car/room and to an extend even your yard (saw an app today where you can rent private pools)?
I'm very into mountain biking + backpacking and I've realized that it's totally worth it for me to own a car. I've gone years without owning one and I've regretted it later. Yes, it sits there 98% of the time, but that 2% of the time it connects me to absolutely magical moments.
It's not parked in my garage, equipped with racks set up exactly as I need, next to all my outdoor equipment ready to go.
I drive a 16 year old car that has been paid off for many years. Insurance is <$1k/yr. Average maintenance & repair is pretty low since I don't drive a heck of a lot (1-2x trips/week typically).
Is it strictly cheaper than rentals? Maybe, maybe not. But it's cheap enough to not matter, and instead optimize on convenience rather than cost.
I'm even considering buying a new or very lightly used car in the nearish future, which would cost considerably more in the short term, but I would hang on to it for a long time barring unexpected circumstances. Cost (within reason) is not even a top 3 factor compared to convenience, comfort, and safety.
While conceptually I agree with the idea, I'm not sold that the identified things the writer labels 95% idle are correct. For example my brother and I easily averaged more than an hour a day outside on a half acre lot growing up. And it's very nice to be able to sit on a patio and not worry that the neighbors can hear everything.
I also find that in the modern world it's often cheaper to buy low quality stuff and treat it as disposable ish. For example I bought a very cheap electric chainsaw with the intention of destroying it (very sandy environment) because it was less expensive than renting the right tool for a job, and now I still have it if I need to cut a small branch or something.
The principle seems fine (if you don't use something much then the overhead of renting when you do need it is probably worthwhile), but it feels a bit odd applying it to cars in particular unless you live extremely close to work -- a bit of a moot point with wfh right now -- since you'll be using the car enough that your dominant costs are variable rather than fixed. If 50% of your yearly car ownership costs stem from gas and other variable costs then "paying for the 95%" is a strawman since the variable costs won't decrease by renting a car (and in fact are often many times higher), so you can only reduce your total costs by at most a 2x factor.
It's weird to imagine that you'd have a guest bedroom that you keep immaculately clean and empty, like a vacant hotel room, for 51 weeks of the year.
We have a guest room. It's also my wife's home office and creative space and gets used every day. When we have guests, she's happy to relinquish the space to welcome a guest into the house (it's not an imposition).
Then the guests have a nice, relatively private room in a nice part of town and can hang out with us easily - a lot easier than negotiating the rather weird idea of paying for their hotel or airbnb-type rooms (which would, IMO, be a strange negotiation to have with most grown-up people we know).
The author likes living in a city. The people the author is comparing themself to prefer the suburbs. The usage argument is a secondary rationalization. I never use my spare bedroom. I barely drive my car. I don't make much use of my yard (or do much maintenance on it). The thing I value most is not living in a city. The car is a necessity (and cost me a whopping $1500), the house is cheap ($900/mo) and comes with more rooms than I need. The yard doesn't actually require any maintenance. At least I don't have to live in a city.
A fifth wheel costs about $35,000. Many of my neighbors have models that cost $50,000+. You need to factor in renting out the campsite for a week, fuel to tow your camper there (it might be 100-200 miles away), and the fact that you need a large pickup truck to do the towing.
You could rent a lot of hotels for that kind of money, or rent a cabin to stay in, and drive there in your car. "Roughing it" seems expensive.
Note that you said 100-200 miles away. If you are driving much longer than that the cost of gas to pull it vs a mini-van is probably more than a hotel + restaurant meals. (depending on how expensive your tastes are). Maybe it works out if you have a luxury camper (read would splurge on the expensive hotel rooms), like to cook your own meals, don't drive too far every day. There is a reason most campers don't got very far from home: they need a lot of fuel.
Having had a RV (which I lived in all summer - I didn't move it), and done real tent camping I object to calling any form of RV roughing it. I've been 10 hours be canoe from the nearest car before (it took us a full week - I've talked to some who did the same trip in a long day which is where the time estimate comes from), I know what roughing it means, and a RV isn't it.
my sister and her husband lived out of an over an over cab camper for, literally, years. From San Diego to Montana to Alaska. She was working medical jobs in San Diego and parking in the RV parks. Saved a ton of money.
Living in the same city as Adrian, I very much agree with all of his points. Cars are expensive to operate, park, and maintain here, meanwhile we have 3 carshare options that are way more pleasant than owning a car. For excursions outside the city, I've decided to rent a car for every situation that I need to, and then consider a car purchase if the math works out better. So far, even after having rented a car 5 times this year, I haven't surpassed just the cost of insurance for the year, or the tax, or the annual maintenance cost, and I've increased my time spent at parks, in the mountains, and elsewhere.
So far there's been one exception to this, which is super early morning and multi-day hikes that I can't get to without a rented car. That's it.
Likewise, I'm visiting the prairies where I'm from, and spent an hour today raking away all that leaf falling and dog poop action the yards have been getting.
I do enjoy long distance drives, so my partner and I rented a car for a month and split the cost. At about $400 each not including gas, it's in the range of the same car plus insurance monthly, but we don't pay for what we're not using.
We didn't use our guest room much last year (although we did still use it for storage), but it sure is nice to have it now that we need two home offices.
After 4 years of city living we recently bought a SUV. It was purely emotional and just like the author mentioned the numbers don't work out. But I wanted to treat myself after years car-free living. Since COVID lockdown has started I would say public transportation in my city has become more reliable, and free. Given this change and more time working from home I have even less need of a car.
All this free time at home had me thinking of roadtrips, boon docking, overlanding, and camping. So I bought a European 4WD SUV. Basically a money pit in fuel, maintenance, parts and reliability. Financially, it doesn't make sense. But all the money I didn't pay in car loans, maintenance, fuel, and tolls went to saving for a car I truly wanted.
For me, buying a car makes as much sense as buying a gaming PC. It should be something you really want and willing to spend money on. If you need a car for work, get the cheapest one you can and factor the mileage into your salary. I've turned down many offers with small pay bumps simply because the expense of the commute made the salary bump a net negative.
kind of a tangent, but I'd argue gaming PCs aren't uneconomic unless you also need a laptop. a decent laptop with a 1TB ssd is already around $1500. with that kind of money you can buy or build a desktop that thoroughly outclasses even the newest generation of consoles.
obviously that doesn't work if you really need a personal laptop, but how many people fit this criteria? I only use my laptop a week or two out of the year when I go on vacation. I'd probably get more out of vacation if I left the thing at home anyway.
I guess what most comments here are missing is the analysis behind certain purchases that come almost as a default in certain people's life like a bigger home, better car, etc.
Not everything has to be cost-optimized some things can be just for pleasure or for the peace of having something available when needed.
What I do think is that for a lot of people many of these purchases are just a default path to follow.
The sad part is the black-and-white thinking. In his blog post as well as in the comments here.
He has a point. In big cities the carsharing model is very meaningful. Or the park-instead-of-backyard. It is insane to try to own all this in a big city. It's never gonna work for _everybody_. At the same time the argument only stretches this long. You own a stove? A musical instrument? A toothbrush? Insane! You use them less than 5% of the time!!
For his blog post that's totally fine, he is trying to make a reasonable point and naturally pushes its boundaries. And look at his profile, that's basically his job. But in the comments here which just go 180 degrees against, it's less forgivable. Of course there are examples where this does not work, like those that I mention above. But they are ridiculous. His point is valid nevertheless. He makes you think, that's great. But many comments here don't do that. They just want to ramble.
Here's a point that I don't see raised anywhere in the comments: short-term rented items are stateless. Wear, tear and failure is undone by the rental company, but so are any customisation, decoration, or adjustments to make them better
If you need a car adjusted for the needs of disabled persons (whether it's yourself or a member of your family), or if you want to put up a picture frame or a poster in a short-term rented room/office, then those adjustments will be treated as deviations from the norm, and "corrected" at the end of your rental term if you leave them in place.
Part of human condition is the need to self-express, and you cannot really do that with short-term rented items (and to some extent, even long-term rented items). This can discourage personalisation and customising your environment altogether, which may feel like being in a prison.
I agree and disagree. I think it is indeed incredibly wasteful to buy something you will only use rarely. I myself am a minimalist; everything I own fits in my car, and if it doesn't, then I start throwing things away. I think this lifestyle is motivated by the fact that I'm young, single.
That said, I think people who have money have the right to spend it on whatever they want. It is totally valid to purchase something for the option to use it on-demand, regardless of the cadence of that demand. Why should I be discouraged from purchasing a cottage that I'll only use for one week a year to give my family a great vacation experience?
I think there's an idea here, though -- we should encourage re-use and renting things we own, but not force it. If sharing was as easy as possible wouldn't people... share more? Think about that.
I think in the case of the cottage example you'd have to consider what your ownership of that cottage means in practice. Is the area with your vacation home experiencing a housing shortage and therefore high housing prices? Is there a family of 4 living in a van on the curb outside of your empty cottage? In many high cost of living cities, this is indeed the case.
The main motivating example given is rent vs. buy scenarios for a family minivan. I feel that the author may be biased by the last 7-8 months, during which, the rationale behind having two cars has largely vanished.
Another example given is the yard. Interestingly, usage of the yard would have shot up for a family with young children during this period. Here, again, I assume the author knows that a yard is a multipurpose area: playing, lounging, working during parts of the day (laptops make it easy to camp out in the yard for part of the day), swimming (assuming a permanent pool or an above-ground pool). If you use the yard for some combination of the activities above, then you would almost certainly not be able to substitute the neighborhood park for it.
On the whole, I do not see how the 'You are not using 95%' premise itself holds here.
Many of the comments here orbit around an idea that's been percolating in my mind for many years:
We overpay, sure, for extra "capacity" which seems wasteful. But when the burst demand arrives and you're not caught flat-footed (need a car now, need our online game/app to handle surge now, etc etc), the peace of mind makes it seem worth it. The entire wage economy exists to scratch this itch. Various auto-scaling strategies may creep in. But as soon as you lose business or lose an opportunity due to its lag time or "sensible" upper bound (or whatever), it is very tempting (and often makes sense) to abandon them.
Another way of saying it: "The point of life is not to min/max everything."
The guestroom/hotel thing misses one important point: The hotel is far away. Your guests have to leave you and get back to you at some point. Especially the leaving part might make it difficult to enjoy a shared dinner (when the guests have small kids).
His point is definitely worth considering. I'd argue, though, that part of the 95% is about putting slack in the system. I don't want to have to wait for an Uber to show up when an emergency arises.
The tail case is often the only case that matters.
I wonder how this guy feels about his no-car-small-apartment in 2020? :)
My second bedroom has become an office. I bought my first car a few months ago (after 8 years of living on the outskirts of London) and it has dramatically improved my pandemic life.
It’s not about the frequency of events that happen in “typical cases” (guest bedroom used a week per year) but rather it’s paying for an insurance and peace of mind that if things get real serious (companies go out of business, pandemics, family situations) you’ll be covered.
Take the example that there was a situation with your parents or grandparents that need care for several years, the guest bedroom scenario would beat the overoptimized condo scenario.
You would just need to think about one outlier event to justify the purchase.
One way to think about not overoptimizing life is that you want to be able to accommodate events you did not expect to happen (which will happen).
It must first be said - western economies are based, to a great extent, on excessive consumption, through planned obsolescence, cultural enforcement of fashion, socialization and hiding of the mounting costs of resource disposal, de-legitimization of reuse and recycling through fixing, etc. GDP must grow grow grow! ... or there are crashes. And there are crashes.
In this context, I commend the author.
At the same time, it seems that in addition to frugality or "non-spluring" he is advocating a life of precarity, and strong dependence on each of a bunch of commercial corporations, and this I don't like as much.
Even setting aside the fact that the article is only really applicable if you live in a metropolitan environment where any asset-as-a-service is available on short notice, there's still this one problem: what price do you put on convenience?
If you don't own that 95%-unused asset, then either you'll always end up paying the highest price for the equivalent service because you need it now, and this quickly becomes un-economical, or you have to plan everything ahead, at all times. The difference is just the convenience of a readily available asset.
I like the overall concept and have used similar sorts of thinking in my life. I think it's useful to have a raw numbers audit of the costs in your life and to figure out if they're worth it or they're things you could eliminate. However, I think at some point you're going to have to be okay with some "inefficiency" in your life, assuming you are doing okay financially, of course. Stressing about efficiency can take its toll on you mentally if you're the kind of person who likes to maximize every little thing.
With that kind of reasoning I should get rid of my screw drivers, sell my watch, throw away the oven, and take my showers at a spa.
It's with thoughts like that I think that we destroy our lifestyles.
For many, it's too costly to own a car these day, leasing the couch on airbnb may become an obligation more than a choice. While ordering from door dash since fast food is cheaper than cooking at home. We already let the plumber, electrician and whatnot take our cash for things we could easily do with a bit of learning.
I agree wholeheartedly with this, but I think this probably only applies to people with particular mindsets, and depends on what people value.
If it'd be financially difficult for you to live in a city center with enough room for a guest bedroom and a garage for your car, and you really really really value living in the city center, then you'll probably sacrifice that car and guest room.
But nothing beats the convenience of walking out/down to your garage, hopping in the car, and driving off. Being able to host friends in your home is arguably more hospitable than putting them up in a hotel (though the hotel is an awesome gesture if you don't have the space). Having a (fenced, perhaps) backyard means allowing appropriately-aged kids to play outside mostly unsupervised.
If you can afford the extra expense without reducing your quality of life in other ways, then I think it's absolutely worth it, but... it is expensive, though, in money and time. I have a car, but I could probably make more than $4k/year renting out my garage space, and the cost of insurance, registration, maintenance, and depreciation adds at least another thousand or two to that. Given how little I drove pre-pandemic, I'm pretty sure a ZipCar membership, or using something like Turo, would be more cost-effective. But I know people who drive a lot more than I do, and I'm not convinced they'd save all that much (if anything) ditching the car and switching to rentals.
There's also the right-tool-for-the-job argument. My car is fine for the city and nearby. When I want to go to Tahoe in the winter, I rent a car with 4WD/AWD and snow tires. So it's not like owning a car eliminates the need for rentals, and frankly I just don't want a big bulky snow-weather car for city/local driving.
From an environmental and community perspective, yeah, using shared things is way better. Fewer cars produced and shared among more people is a good thing. Higher housing density (within limits) is a good thing, and having a guest room that sits unused 95% of the time probably isn't a great use of space. Going to a park and interacting with your neighbors is great. Riding public transit and reducing traffic and emissions is great. Those things do have a cost, though, and I think Americans especially are raised to be more individually-minded than community-minded.
Sitting smugly about having a car and a yard and an extra bedroom during the COVID pandemic.
I don’t want to crap of the author, though: 2016 was a different world than we have today. I hope that we can all reflect on how this mess we are in today is, at least in part, due to efficiency and optimizations in all aspects of humanity. And, I really hope that we can cut it out before we all kill ourselves.
Most people already called out most of the problems but number one for me is time to access.
Paying to have it ready now/on your schedule and not having to spend time scheduling or getting.
Is it less financially efficient? No.
Is it worth reconsidering depending on your financial health? Yes.
Is it universal? No.
Does the article can be interpreted in way it suggest it's universal? Yes.
I WFH so I only use my car once per two weeks (to get groceries). My SO doesn't WFH, and hers is more comfortable so we use that when we go most places. My car is 17 years old, but only has 100K on it. Runs great. Low maintenance, so I keep it knowing that if I need it it is there. But, I can afford that luxury partly because there's no care payment and the insurance isn't tremendous.
>>> So what motivates people to plan for occasional peaks and idealized usage, rather than actual daily utilization?
>>> Ego is part of it.
The article held together well enough without the ad hominem.
Logistics is part of it. Renting a minivan in my locale takes a couple of hours, and must be planned in advance. The minivan that my family owned for 16 years wasn't exactly a status symbol, even when new.
I was living this life, with the kids, and enjoying it... until COVID.
With the schools, playgrounds, libraries, and museums closed, the city life lost a lot of its appeal. And with my office closed, WFH with kids was... difficult.
We’ve moved to a bigger house in a small town.
It’s better for now. As far as when the world eventually settles into the new normal? I guess we’ll see!
It has been a long time since I counted as a kid, but my recollection is that it was more like half an hour per day, at least. This was also the baby boom, so there was apt to be not just my brother and me but eight or more other kids there, playing kickball, tag, touch football, etc.
I think it is useful to not over-optimize your life. You want to be prepared for the 5%. That's why I bought a car recently, even though I advocated for the OP's philosophy before and rented where I could.
"Don't cross a river because it is 4 feet deep on average."
This is quite an impressive approach for having FIVE kids. I have just two (young kids) and doing anything together is a huge collective action problem. Not having a car readily available would put the kaibosh on basically any out of town plan. Not to mention car seats.
Say you weigh 150lbs, and your car weighs 3000lbs. 95% of the fuel you burn or electricity you spend is used to simply move the hunk of metal that is the vehicle, and 5% is used to move yourself. Not great efficiency by any means.
The guest bedroom makes for a decent storage space
A yard has aesthetic value and you might be living in an area like greater NY metro area where land is worth more than the house built on it, so it's going to make financial sense down the line.
The perspective of the author doesn't seem to come from the same background and experiences as many of the people reading the article, especially since the comparisons of the decisions they made to the "normal" are based on a very strange normal. That's fine, but it might be nice to get a sense of where they come from and what type of lifestyle their social group is living. Looks like "modo" is a canadian service - maybe canada is wildly different from the US but at least from my brief visits to metro areas in that country a significant portion of the lifestyle for the people I met in the toronto area seemed to be a lot like your typical american urban/suburban lifestyle in the US. I guess I just don't recognize the people "paying for the other 95" since I can't imagine anyone buying housing in an urban area with condos and public transit and parks that also sees property land area as purely recreational space instead of a financial investment, or people with young children that can't afford a 50k car that would think it makes more sense to rent out a minivan everytime they need to take the kids anywhere rather than get a 10 year old odyssey that'll keep running for 10 more. And I certainly can't imagine anyone that would decide to get a smaller house without a guest bedroom for financial reasons and then be so magnanimous that they're willing to pay for their friends hotel's when they visit! If they're not visiting to hang out with me at my place, why am I paying for their vacation? I wouldn't expect them to pay for mine!
That was a sort of odd touch for me. Mind you, I obviously don't know the details--maybe an old friend that he knew didn't have much money. But, yeah, I'd consider an offered guest room a nice offer but I'd never expect someone to offer to pay for a hotel if they didn't have the room.
The other people's reactions were also odd - the first reaction to hearing someone say they'll pay for a hotel instead of buy a house with a guest room is discuss the cost of the hotel? Is that just a Canadian thing I don't know about? It sounds like the friend group also all share the same idea that you are expected to provide for lodging when a friend visits. The only context where that sort of obligation even slightly makes sense to me is if your parents are visiting.
The funny thing to that reply is that it's my dad who feels really strongly about paying for accommodations if I or my brother visit him. But, yeah, absent some serious wealth disparity it seems weird and, even then, it would probably be something I'd throw off with a line like "I have more credits at that hotel than I know what to do with" or something like that to avoid anyone being embarassed.
TL;DR. Ride sharing / taxi vs car ownership breakeven is at €10 per short trip (5km or less), but only worthwhile if I could totally get rid of the car: only 25% of car ownership cost is fuel, 75% or €5000 is maintenance + depreciation.
my calculations (sorry if formatting is off)
depreciation:
13000 purchase (5y old ex-lease car)
1000 after purchase: change of timing belt + water pump etc
resale: 5y after
6000 ?? residual value
1800/y depreciation
annual maintenance:
250 (1000 for 2 sets of seasonal tires every 4 years)
garage 75/m (comes with my apartment)
900/y garage
total cost: 6680 €/y
total cost: 0.334 €/km
I also figured I do 500 trips during school year (40 weeks, 12.5 trips per weak)
total cost: 13.36 €/trip
This is surprisingly high. I need to find a way to make more trips :)
OK, that includes holidays in which I do half of my annual mileage (10.000km) but in the end most of the cost is fixed: depreciation + maintenance. Sadly, even at free electricity EV is not going to be much better. Only 100% ride sharing will bring a cost reduction that will influence decisions.
Car maintenance is pretty heavily influenced by mileage. (Albeit less so in areas with snow/salt.) Though some of the things you include as maintenance are mostly annual costs.
Often, when you want to use something, many other people will too. Over-provisioning guarantees you won't be starved out of access to what you need even in the face of high demand.
hmm by this account I really should throw away all my tools. Robustness/availability is in direct competition with efficiency/cost I feel when you measure them in shorter time line.
With high availability/robustness you'd need to invest up front, having things ready to go. But that increases your initial investment.
> Friends visiting from out of town? I’ll pay for their hotel, so I can live in a smaller, cheaper, better located condo for the rest of the year.
Then friends won't visit, it's more of a hassle to schedule - however infrequent these visits are they'll be even less frequent.
> I have to schlep a bunch of kids far away? I’ll get a Modo minivan, a local car share, for a few hours. Let someone else maintain that gorgeous van.
You'll go fewer places and do fewer things if everytime you want to go somewhere you have to deal with getting a rideshare van.
> Need some outdoors time? Walk a couple blocks to a park. I’m not interested in mowing something I only use a couple hours a week.
No backyard cookouts, no sitting on the deck, you'll go to the park less frequently.
It's the same for the rest of it, there are good reasons to reduce some of these things but the reasons he gives dismiss the true value.
Even owning a car vs. rideshare, sure rideshare can work out to be cheaper (sometimes) but having every travel decision be a purchase decision is a lot of overhead and is a constant pressure not to go somewhere.