Reasons to Reconsider Your Commute

[image error]Increasingly, folks are spending an hour or more a day on their work commute – either in their cars, on a train or bus. It begs the questions: what transportation offers the best use of your time and money?

According to the American Public Transportation Association, the average household spends 18 cents of every dollar on transportation costs — for most of us, 94% of those funds are going towards the purchasing, maintenance, and operation of our vehicles.  However, the APTA says, for households that favor public transportation, there’s the potential to save over $8,400 every year!

With a number that impressive, I decided to do a little digging into my own commuting conundrum.  From Queens, New York, to Upton Long Island, my partner’s trip into work is roughly 65 miles, a mega-journey no matter how you slice it. After factoring in his car’s miles per gallon, or MPG, I found that the APTA is right: public transportation does cost less than driving.  However, it nearly doubles his commuting time – not to mention he’s bound by the train schedule and can’t come and go from the city as he pleases.  The decision to take public transportation is not exactly a “no-brainer”.

But: when you factor in one of the most important elements of all, his time, I discovered it definitely pays to consider the productivity of the time spent commuting.  I found an online calculator that helps break it all down (I just swapped “bus” for “train” in the tool) and here’s what the math looks like for us:

Converting Miles Per Gallon to Gallons Per Hour

A typical car’s MPG is about 28 on the highway, but you can calculate this number yourself the next time you take a roadtrip by filling up your tank, then taking your mileage and dividing by the amount of gas it takes to refill the tank – that’s your MPG.  Or, look up your car’s fuel economy here.  We’ve calculated our 1992 Honda Civic’s mpg to be an average of 26; I divide by 55mph to find the gallons per hour.  55mph divided by 26MPG = 2.11 G/h.  That is, at the optimal driving speed, my partner burns through 2.11 gallons per hour, or g/h.  Note if our car got 38 MPG, it would only burn 1.45 g/h.

Next, I multiply that by the cost of gas, or dollars per gallon. In Queens, New York right now, it’s around $4.19.  (The current national average is $3.86 at time of publishing.)

So, 2.11/gph x $4.19 / gallon = $6.06 /hr, which means every hour he drive costs us $8.86.

Driving

Driving takes one hour, fifteen minutes one-way by car without traffic, or a total of 150 minutes per day.  It would be a good guess to say the commute costs around $22.16 per day for 2.5 hours on the road – but, that’s with ZERO productivity (or at least, extremely limited productivity, save for phone calls via a hands-free device, or catching up on audio books, etc).

Public Transportation

This commute, on the other hand, costs $334 for a monthly rail pass. (Note you should always factor in the cost of a monthly pass, not individual fare.  In New York, for example, buying a monthly pass saves 50%, based on 42 one-way rides per month).  That’s roughly $8 per ride. 

The train commute is typically 2 hours one-way, door-to-door, or a whopping 240 minutes per day.  That’s about $16 per day for 4 hours… WITH added productivity (working, emailing, reading, knitting, watching media, sleeping, etc).

The Verdict

When broken down like this, it means that it still makes sense for my partner to take the train instead of the car; in fact it saves us around $100 dollars a month for him to do so. But it also makes sense from a productivity stand-point.