Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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If only our public transport was affordable. We pay way more than other European countries (besides maybe Germany and the Scandinavian countries), especially when you consider how little distance you're really travelling. As an example, to get from Eindhoven central station to Amsterdam central station you take 1 train, it takes you 1 hour and 20 minutes and you pay €22,70 for a one way ticket. If we're looking at distance, this is about 120 km. This means that to get there and go back home you pay €45,40.
If you travel by yourself you can argue that it's worth it to take the train there since parking + fuel isn't that cheap here either. However, as soon as you have more than 1 person the car quickly becomes the cheaper option, even with parking included. As long as they don't solve this issue I don't see any success in their push to get people to use public transport. And I know the solution will probably be to make everything even more expensive but that's not going to help in the long run either...
A lot of people only tend to look at the fuel costs and maybe parking. However you're forgetting a big part of the costs of driving which is that every km adds to the depreciation in the cars worth as well as requiring more maintenance.
It's very easy to say just buying fuel is pretty cheap, but those costs are easily doubled if you look at the full costs. Check out https://www.anwb.nl/auto/autokosten for examples of how much variable costs/km actually are.
That said, this is for solo travelers... It's true that when you add more people the costs become much lower / person if you go by car since the costs just get multiplied with public transport. Exactly why my next vacation with 4 people will still be by car...
However I've started taking the train for work now which still comes out a lot lower (40% discount outside of rush hours helps a lot too!)
Depreciation and tax and insurance is mostly a sunk cost. Once you have a car, these are mostly irrelevant when comparing to public transport.
If I were to drive my car to work I would double the amount I drive per year. If you don't think this adds a lot of costs then I don't know what to tell you. If you drive somewhere incidentally sure, it doesn't really matter.
You can save on insurance if you're not commuting for work, too. I'm classified as a leisure driver since my work is remote.
I actually do work remote but come in once a week... Which happens to be a long commute 🤷♂️