The incentives still favor driving, even at $4/gallon. (kind of a personal rant)

[randomness]

I drive a lot. Most of it is highway driving from Massachusetts to Connecticut. It's about 300 miles, round-trip. In my old Corolla, that's about 10 gallons, or at today's Massachusetts prices, around $36. (It's a couple of bucks more at Connecticut prices, which is an incentive to buy fuel in Massachusetts.)

My car is nearly 20 years old, with 300,000+ miles on it. Thus, minimal depreciation. The largest remaining expense is oil and oil changes, and the occasional repair. My insurance is also minimal. Moreover, there's no marginal cost to it; I'm paying my insurance regardless of whether the car sits or I drive it constantly.

Let's say that all adds up to another $4 on each trip, on average.

If I'm cheap, I drive down I-95 through Providence, and avoid all the Pike tolls.

So it costs me about $40 to do the round-trip by car. And it's usually under 3 hours.

Amtrak, Boston to New Haven, is $43, purchased in advance, on one of the non-Acela services. Add another $1.70 for the T and another $2.50 for Shore Line East. So that's nearly $50, each way, or $100 round-trip.

Greyhound to New Haven is $31 with a seven-day advance purchase. So that makes the bus alternative around $35 each way, or $70 round-trip.

I could, were I insane, take the Chinatown bus to Manhattan, then take Metro-North back from Manhattan to New Haven, then Shore Line East to my parents. That's probably the cheapest possible way. Occasionally, between Bolt and the Chinatown buses, you can get to NYC for a buck. But Metro-North is still $14, even off-peak, and there's still the $2.50 for Shore Line East, and $2 on the subway to get from Chinatown to Grand Central, and the $1.70 to take the T. Add it all up and it's more expensive than my drive and takes more than twice as long, because I'm travelling about double the distance, with multiple changes and 75 miles of backtracking. Sorry, that's nuts. My time is worth something, after all.

(I'll add here that Shore Line East leaves me a couple of miles walk from my parents', and the sidewalks end about a half mile before their place. I've walked it. The car dodging is merely annoying, not suicidal.)

In order for me to break even on the trip, taking Greyhound to New Haven, my fuel costs would have to rise to around $60. That's around $6/gallon in my car. And for my taking Amtrak to make economic sense, it would need to go to above $9/gallon. I mean, it might happen, but it hasn't yet.

The point is that it costs me money to take public transit on the long-distance trip I do most often. I want to do it. I'm a transit buff, so I even have non-economic incentives to take transit. But given the price difference, of course I'm going to save the money and drive; on average I do this trip weekly. And I need a car once I get to my parents'. It's suburban Connecticut, after all.

This is all quite broken if we want to encourage people to get out of their cars.

Is this an exceptional case? Sure. I'm going from an urban area to a suburban one, but I'm doing it in the Northeast Corridor. That's a part of the U. S. that actually has some usable public transportation. In a lot of the rest of the country, the comparison's even worse. (San Fernando Valley to Las Vegas springs to mind, from recent experience.)

But it's the case that makes the most difference to me.

Comments

[evilmagnus]

We live too far from our jobs.

My grandfather's commute was 200 yards - from the stone cottage to the mill. :) My dad had, for part of his life, what was considered a 'long' commute - a 15 mile bus ride (40 minutes) to the nearest city. I believe it was a bit shorter before the Beecham reforms closed the branch railway.

I've been extremely lucky (or just obstinate in my choice of living arrangements) to have been able to walk to work or take public transit (in less than 45 mins) for every job I've ever had, except for one six month period where I had a 65 mile commute, each way. 3.5hrs of my day in a car; something I hope to never do again.

I blame The American Dream. When everyone aspires to a nice house in the suburbs, then everyone has to commute to get to where the jobs are. And you just can't - can not - have working public transportation from 'the suburbs' without massive investment. Even the more urbanized European countries have trouble with that. Hub and spoke will only get you so far.

My parents are delighted they qualify for bus passes now. They told me how they made a (free!) trip to the city the other week, took them 40 minutes, dropped them off right downtown and they didn't have to pay for parking. It was faster and cheaper than driving. That's what public transportation should be like... but that's not going to happen over here anytime soon.

[peacefulmayhem.livejournal.com]

True - we live too far from our jobs. (though when we bought the house I worked elsewhere). But I think I live in the wrong region where to buy a house close to work we'd have to live in a home smaller than the apartment we rented before buying. Yup, all about trade-offs, but here in New England, they are significant. Wah wah.

[totient]

Or put another way, we work too far from our homes. I personally find moving house much more stressful than changing jobs, and I don't think I'm alone in doing the latter more frequently than the former. And I've found that the jobs that have seemed prestigious during the jobhunt have often been the sucky ones, and the ones that seemed kind of random have been the best. So now I give location a lot more weight. Not everyone has a choice when they jobhunt, but the worst thing that happens if you take the closer job is you decide a couple of months later that it was a mistake and move on.

[pmat.livejournal.com]

When we bought our house, my husband and I were starting jobs in the same place, and we chose the house by drawing concentric 1-mile circles around that place and looking first within one mile, then two miles. We never got to three miles; our house is about 1.5 miles from that first office.

Then the company closed that office. Then I got a different job, and then he did. So now we work in locations 25 miles apart, and the closer is 10 miles from our house. The best we could do is to each be 12.5 miles from work, and trying to keep minimizing distance as things changed would have meant moving three times. Since we have kids, who would have had to change schools, and about 10,000 books, that's not trivial.

Our actual current solution is that I drive a Prius 10 miles one way and work at home one or two days a week, and my husband takes the train to center city every day.

There are a couple of encouraging notes in here: his employer subsidizes a monthly train pass, and the local transit system has enough parking and (barely) enough trains. And my employer has made it easier to work at home. And my Prius gets 40 to 45 mpg.

And a couple of discouraging ones. The local transit system has cut back substantially on train schedules in the last year, to one an hour during off-peak times, on one of its busiest lines, because it just doesn't have enough money. And I could also take the train, because my employer sends a shuttle to meet it during commute hours. But instead of a 25 minute commute which costs me maybe $1.50, it would cost me $5 and take over an hour.

Like r_ness, I'm something of a transit buff, and I have been known to take Amtrak instead of flying for trips as far from the east coast as Denver. But as long as we subsidize highways heavily and try to make transit pay for itself, the incentives are going to go right on favoring driving for all but the lucky few.