The time a car saves goes to paying for it
(midwest.social)
happybadger [he/him]
trainganghttps://maxmautner.com/2026/10/11/how-fast-is-a-car.html
The median American worker earns $23.80/hour, or ~$19 after taxes. A used car driven the US average of ~10,900 miles a year costs ~$8,200, counting $1,700 a year for a parking space at home. That is ~430 hours of work before the car moves. A new car takes ~700 hours. A $999 e-bike ridden 3,000 miles a year takes ~25 hours.
i have a cheap ebike with about half a commute's range on the area's very hilly terrain
i have my feet
i have buses, light rail, and shuttles for everything else.
That time saved is so substantial. The best non-walk commute i can hope for is within the range of my ebike without bus assistance, and those commutes are comparable to a car
otherwise I sacrifice hours of my life travelling that car havers get to dedicate to other tasks. Most bus rides around here can get you [somewhere] within about an hour. Crossing the coverage map can take 3+ hours each way though.
the best job i ever had up here? There was a mandatory two hour commute by bus going in and going home.
I had time to work, eat, and sleep except on my days off, where I might be able to out and have some fun on my weekend, but not too late or else i can't get home.
The way bus commuters have their time stolen is insane and i often think about the hours i lose in travel and what i could be doing with them.
There are productive tasks you can do on a bus, but fuck me, there isn't THAT much to do.
I remember looking up the bus route for what is 45 minutes by car for one of my last jobs and it was 3 hours both ways, but I also worked weird hours and the bus was only available one way.
Idk how fast 28mph is but it's faster than the 25kph my bike is limited to. A bike that could go that fast would fix me in so many ways.
Lol I've got one of those eu limited ebikes, 25kph is 15.5mph
It takes me like 40 minutes to ride to work. The idea an ebike could go twice as fast and get me to work faster than a car is a wild thought
I think most people owning cars that I know care most about the comfort a car offers. Also these people don't care about working less because they have been conditioned to do 40 hours a week. Honestly it feels like another of those problems that will not really go away under capitalism.
“Time a car saves” implies there’s another option. In my current situation I’m able to use my new ebike to get to work and can get to a grocery store (the route is long and mostly lacks bike lanes though), but unfortunately for many if not most Americans a car is mandatory.
And even for me if I want to say, visit my parents (about a 1.5 hour drive) there is no way to get there aside from a car. There are no regional busses or trains to take me there.
I hate it here
I feel like there are a lot of places where it's more realistic than you would think, as long as you're willing to be exposed to the weather. I live in a place where I can bike (just pedaling) to several different grocery stores in 15 minutes. My parents also live about a 1.5 hour drive from me, where there's maybe the same grocery store density but more cross streets and traffic. I visit via Greyhound/FlixBus, which has over 1000 stops across the country, covering every major and minor area. The round trip costs me less than $70, which is comparable to gas and wear and labor. I'm pretty sure 70% of the population is either an easy bike ride or a city bus ride from a Greyhound stop, with most of the rest being the godforsaken exurbs.
Granted, it's inconvenient to need to bend my schedule around the bus, and there are places and events that I end up needing to find a carpool to or miss out on. But it's not so bad.
If, like me, you sadly need a car. The trick is to buy cheap 20 year old rustbucket cars and pally up with a local mechanic who works on them
Fuel costs are a bit higher, but my annual repair costs are pretty reliably less than those of new cars.
People who bike everywhere, do any of you live in rural or suburban areas? There have been accidents with bikers here and almost universally people blame the biker and are really dehumanizing toward them. We also have an higher than average amount of giant trucks driving here. And there’s no bike lanes. How do you transport groceries?
I hang grocery bags from my handlebars, but I could just as easily put them in a backpack or a basket on the frame.
Tbh the crosswalks are more dangerous than the rest of the roads, all 3 times that my bike was hit (and the majority of close calls too) were at crossings, less than 10 mph. Hour for hour, driving a car is just as dangerous.
There have been accidents with bikers here and almost universally people blame the biker and are really dehumanizing toward them.
That happens in cities too, americans love murdering cyclists regardless of location.
As for groceries, most people get saddlebags.
How do you transport groceries?
If you bicycle-only it you kind of have to change the weekly shop to 2-3 trips a week, best included in your commute, dunno how feasible that is for rural / suburban (assuming) america.
On a technical level panniers.
Is that not replaced with delivery yet? I don't do a weekly shop anymore, i order online and it comes to me.
Technically better for everyone because even if it's 1 weekly shop per person a delivery driver can be 1 vehicle for 30 houses or however many deliveries can fit as opposed to 30 vehicles.
I don't do a weekly shop anymore, i order online and it comes to me.
That feels pretty contingent about being in a somewhat urban area tbh.
That's why I'm asking. I don't know how it is over there. I don't know what's available or if it's being offered.
It sucks in places without basic infrastructure. Here my calculus comes down to the scale of the fuel crisis. I don't see it getting better before it gets much worse. If that happens, the number of cars on the roads will decrease until they're safer to ride on and there will be more public demand for stopgap infrastructure. At the same time your car will be prohibitively expensive to drive and whatever bus lines run there will also probably be hit hard. I'd buy an ebike in that situation so I'm not entirely stranded, transporting it in my car to conserve fuel where I can safely use it now.
That's how it played out in the 1970s here. Everything was super car-centric until the pumps ran dry, then people had to switch and the region had to quickly start building out cycling infrastructure. I think this is fuel crisis going to be our generation's Big One, so my purchasing is all anticipating degrowth and the worst economic conditions in living memory. At least with an ebike no matter how bad things get I can guarantee my own mobility and ability to carry 60kg for 50-80km without burning calories. A cyberdonkey is collapse insurance.
People who bike everywhere, do any of you live in rural or suburban areas?
I no longer live in the suburubs, but our household had two cars when we did, and it would not have been safe or possible to do our commutes or errands on our bikes. Now we live in the city, and have zero cars.
I bus to work quite often, and I'll probably do it in the winter more often. Not because of the weather, but because it's so dark in the morning now, and so I don't feel safe riding on some sections of my commute. Getting into the industrial park where I work involves a section of strode with no shoulder, and I can easily imagine getting splattered by a semi truck who drifted a few feet off the road.
How do you transport groceries?
We have baskets and panniers on our bikes, as well as a kid's bike trailer which has a little extra storage in the back. We typically shop for groceries twice a week.
We share a Coscto card with a family member, so we'll go maybe once a month with them and buy a bunch of stuff in bulk. So in terms in terms of total volume of groceries, there's an appreciable amount that we transport by car.
We make pretty much all our meals at home too, we're not suplementing with restaurants or deliveries (who can afford that?!). I see the Grocery Transport Issue being brought up a lot, but it hasn't been an issue for us.
How do you transport groceries?
when i had the fortune of living somewhere it was practical and safe enough to bike for groceries i'd get a week or ten days' of food into some panniers and hanging a couple relatively light grocery bags from the handle bars. throw in a backpack and you can probably do two weeks for two people if your life is like that.
if you shop with a basket rather than a cart the point where it gets uncomfortable to put more shit in the basket is decently short of what's reasonable to bike with both by bulk and weight.
I wish i had one fixed location to commute to every day so alternative transportation didn't come with constant route planning and changes to my sleep routine. I don't think I'd be able to sleep if i got told i was going to a job 20km further away tomorrow at 7pm and had to bike to work
my job is to drive and it's also an essential mobility device for me. not really relevant to the discussion at all i just wanna include myself
I just want a society where people in your position, emergency vehicles, mass transit, and large families are the only ones on the road outside of special uses. A car-centric society means I'm compelled to drive when it isn't my job, I'm too tired or sick, and every other mode of transportation is accessible to me. I end up being a totally unnecessary threat to the people who have to drive, or at the very least more congestion and pollution that make it worse for them.
See I don't think completely eliminating them is viable because disabled people and the elderly are always going to need personal vehicles in some capacity. But I'm on board with reducing their usage as much as we can. I think the idea that we could entirely get rid of cars is also a bit urban-centric. Like as someone who lives in a rural area I use a truck to take my trash to the dump, I drive a significant distance to get supplies, have to haul heavy things like propane and water jugs, and various other uses.
So what I'd personally like to see is that we build out public transport on the level of China, and then we PLUNGE speed limits. You can drive, but its faster to take the public transport in most cases. So more people would choose not to drive, or to just ride a bike (riding a bike on a 25mph road is way easier than on a 45mph road). You could also make things like golf-cart style mini-EVs street legal. This would all go towards basically eliminating automobile deaths outside of edge cases. Reduce the mass of vehicles, reduce the speed, and you reduce the energy transfered into a human body when they crash.
See I don't think completely eliminating them is viable because disabled people and the elderly are always going to need personal vehicles in some capacity
There are likely at least as many elderly and disabled unable to drive as elderly and disabled who need to drive, and they just get fucked in current society and stay isolated at home because they literally can't do anything else about it.
I didn't say they'd be the one driving. But idk how your gonna get someone who can't walk to the hospital without a car.
Like as someone who lives in a rural area I use a truck to take my trash to the dump
This is logistically stupid even in a rural area. A garbage truck going to every house is still going to be more efficient than whatever number of trucks going to the dump.
I guess if people who are already going to town for food in rural-enough areas are bringing their trash with them it might be cheaper than a garbage truck. The other poster is fixating on the garbage truck for some reason as if that one truck requires more maintenance than 50 cars in totality. But assuming the other things people go to town for aren't also accounted for in a similar way to garbage trucks, say food, then yeah I could see garbage trucks just being like fast food delivery addition in resource use rather than a subtraction.
The way this conversation goes every time is they go "but I'm driving into town every day for work anyway" and then we have to explain why it's stupid to live as if you're a farmer or a woodsman and use artificially cheap oil infrastructure to drive into a town to work a bunch anyway as every other townie they refuse to see themselves as. They want their rural larp subsidized at all costs. People back in the day who lived rural like that would go to town like once every 2-4 weeks, once a week for church maybe or something. But they don't seem to want that.
It's really not. Trash trucks are huge and expensive. Trash services are expensive. There aren't that many people out here to spread the cost around to which makes them more expensive. It costs me nothing to take a small detour when going to get groceries and throw some bags in a big trash compactor myself. So why would I pay out the ass to have a trash service? Make it cheap and I'd consider it, but I really don't think you can do that for an area where population density is so low. Garbage trucks are designed for suburbia and cities. Think of all the materials it takes to build and maintain that massive garbage truck and to keep it gassed up. And compare that to me taking a 5 minute detour on a grocery run in a truck I already need for other things anyway.
that's significantly upstream of the modern symptoms, but there'll still be people who might be able to walk/bike/transit but have money to spend who'll opt to take golf carts, and we'll be back at congestion, pollution (even EVs with regenerative brakes produce tire dust), and likely even traffic deaths, though obviously on a much lower scale than currently.
There's also the last-mile question; I take the train to my friend's house, but it's a mile from the station. ubiquitous bikeshares/escooters need trucks to redistribute them. all of which is to say there's no perfect solution to retrofit cities designed around car usage to massively reduce vehicle miles traveled.
edit: as an uber (formerly amazon) driver, it's also a huge PITA to navigate around slower drivers, though especially at speeds this low in dense urban contexts a robotaxi makes more sense for every reason, besides makework for me to afford my own mobility device.
I guess we could be imagining a postscarcity utopia where I just get one anyway, but at that point we can also imagine everywhere being a 15 minute city, a pill that makes me not disabled and agoraphobic, etc
See, this is what I mean. Everywhere can't be a 15 minute city. 15 minute city's are great, but for CITYS. You might not like it but it's true that the rural communities of the world are the backbone of society, and despite the fact that people who very much DO NOT need them now drive pickup trucks and the trucks have been overbuilt to be ridiculously big in the US pickup trucks are very much a NEEDED thing in rural life. You can't just entirely eliminate cars until you figure out a way to move a truckload of fertilizer from the store to someones farm without a pickup truck being involved, or figure out a way to not need farms anymore. There's a reason China is pushing rural development so hard.
You don't need every street to accommodate trucks though. For most of the places people live, you don't need to park 30 feet from the door, and you can manage having the nearest parking lot being 100 yards away.
I've been a farm worker, and I've used both a bike and a carpool to get to the farm. The employment simply would not have made economic sense if I needed my own car for it. I suspect that's true for most farms. Not extinguishing ourselves from ecological collapse will necessitate retrofitting the built environment, and that includes having depots and workers' residences less than 5 miles away from farms. Actually it will probably mean getting rid of the conventional fertilizer paradigm too, but as a stand-in for miscellaneous hauling there's still a bit of a need for pulling power.
Your point is that we need to avoid ecological collapse right? One of the worst possible things we could do for the environment would be to come in and try to rebuild all the infrastucture in the world to make it more green. We need to learn how to use what already exists in a more green way. I'm not saying none of what your talking about could work. But it would be a slow and transitionary process. We can't just come in and rebuild everything because it would be better another way. That would be horrible for the environment. So we'd be implementing some of these things but we would still have these huge road networks made for ICE vehicles. So we have to find a way to make use of them in a way that is less unsustainable. For example smaller trucks that are more energy efficient and building things to be easily repairable so theres less waste, and looking into hydrogen fuel cell technology (something China has been advancing a lot recently).
Most food doesn't come from the small-time farmer driving a pickup truck to the store for fertilizer and then returning to the store with that year's harvest. It's from massive industrialized operations for which a pickup truck would be a woefully inadequate supply of fertilizer unless it is to be spread one micron thick.
Well those operations use.... bigger trucks. How is that contradictory to the point I was making?
You were saying that pickup trucks are all-caps needed. I'm pointing out that no, we already largely get by without them. That's how they were able to shrink the beds until they're only big enough for farts without doing serious damage to the economy: pickup trucks are not a pillar of society.
fair enough. I've lived in urban (and had my body kept alive in suburban) areas my whole life and take a lot of stuff for granted or as universal
It's easy to do. I've been guilty of it myself before. Society is just crazy complicated and its easy to see a simple solution for where you are and forget the edge cases or just not know about places where it might not work. I'm totally on board with most of what your saying I just think it's important to note we need to be flexible and keep different lifestyles in mind.
ya fs, I also didn't mean to imply that trucks should be removed from the road wholesale since that would also get rid of ambulances, fire trucks, delivery trucks etc which are about as good a reason to have a paved road and motor vehicles at all as you can get
The whole concept of time is money just doesn't seem to compute for people when it comes to cars. If you're stuck in car centric hellworld you're excused and all but I swear to god half my white collar co-workers could reduce their working hours by like 25% if they just opted out of car payments for like a reasonable used car and then, especially given the fuel prices now, just cycled when it's feasible.
The usual argument is they work so hard and long, i.e. full time, and it's a comfort they like paying for but I'm pretty sure they never even bothered to do any math and figured out that they wouldn't even have to work full time if they didn't insist on a, to me, fancy car, to get there.
There's so much to be said about reclaiming commute time too. If I commute by car, I'm super stressed the entire way right as my body is waking up and winding down. When I commute by ebike, that time is really enriching. I'm interacting with wildlife, stopping for neat flowers and river photos, and getting some gentle exercise while zipping around like it's a childhood bike. It turns the worst part of my day into one of the best, like meditating twice a day. To me the big thing the Mythical Garden City achieves is reconnecting you to nature in an ongoing, mutually healing relationship. Ebikes achieve that better than anything outside of hiking for me.
I agree heavily here but I think the stronger case is usually much more finance-based but you have to look at the cost not from a carbrain perspective. The german green travel sphere has this concept of "effective time" which I think is useful, because it considers opportunity costs.
I.e. if your car journey is 30 mins and your train journey is 45 mins but you can work 30 mins on the train because your job allows that, you save 15 mins per trip, even if it ls longer. Or even expressed in more cold, hard, cash agreements to pick up your post here: If you spend 4 hours a week at work to pay for your car, supposing you also drive everywhere else, you're like a a few bicycle trips in your private life away from working a 4 day week and come out the same financially.
Time is a real cost for driving. If I'm driving I'm engaged and focused on not crashing, it's stressful (especially in heavy traffic) and especially list time. 45 minutes on the train is 45 minutes I can read, play a crossword, draw, whatever. If I want to just stare into the middle distance and disassociate I can no problem (so long as I don't miss my stop) whereas in a car I have to be locked in paying attention.
Yeah reading on transit is 👌👌👌👌
Some days my time on transit is the only time I get to read/relax
If I'm driving I'm engaged and focused on not crashing, it's stressful
I see I may be the odd one out here. Driving doesn't stress me out at all
depends on the situation. uncontrolled lefts are really annoying, i'll drive an extra couple hundred meters or on a slower road rather than gamble for 5+ minutes.
If I'm late or in a hurry i might find a better turn but waiting for it to be safe is fine too
Depends where/when I'm driving. On a country road/a divided highway it's chill, even a little relaxing, but anywhere with traffic (and since I'm in the city that's everywhere) is instantly stressful because I'm also having to keep an eye on every vehicle around me & make sure they aren't making mistakes that I have to compensate for/avoid.
There's a huge difference between driving 20 minutes in the country vs 20 minutes in rush hour traffic
Where i live is touted as having some of the worst traffic. Not on the same tier as like a Los Angeles or something though to be fair.
Windows down music up really keeps me chill in traffic i guess.
Guess you're just built different
Edit: I just can't see how windows down in traffic is at all relaxing, exhaust fumes and traffic noises are already too much
I like that framing. For me the opportunity costs are socioecological because I have socioecologybrain, but financially cars are so miserable to own and they're only getting worse compared to anything else. I could buy a new ebike just with the yearly insurance/registration costs for my econobox car. That's like 100 hours of work to pay for the privilege of using a car.
If you spend 4 hours a week at work to pay for your car, supposing you also drive everywhere else, you're like a a few bicycle trips in your private life away from working a 4 day week and come out the same financially.
what jobs have the flexibility for this? i suppose it's easier if your job isn't tied to your healthcare
I'd argue most white collar work in germany which is the context for this. maybe not so much in some of the more male dominated, toxic tending fields but legally you have a right to go part time unless there's real good reason for your employer to say no. It's far from everyone but not exactly an insignifcant share of the workforce here that this'd apply to. I don't really mean it as universal, either, just as a point that even given the very real options to be less car dependent people don't tend to work it out
yeah i'd love to touch computer 30% as much for 30% pay but there aren't really jobs like that
I read this idea as cutting out the car entirely means you get the financial benefit of the time you work, though it's not well worded. For example if you work 40 hours a week, 5 days a week and it costs 2 hours a day to pay for your car, choosing to move around exclusively by bike, that means you instead spend 0 hours on a car. This would give you 8 hours of earnings back, a full day's wage. This assumes you don't use a car for any non-commuting trips.
Your bike commute is blessed. It shouldn't be this way but for many of us being on our bike would be more stressful because of the car hellscape. Maybe the physical activity of biking cancels it out but idk.
If I commute by car, I'm super stressed the entire way right as my body is waking up and winding down
What makes driving so stressful? I'd rather be able to look at my phone or whatever but i wouldn't call driving stressful
I learned to drive in an ambulance and it's still mentally the same for me. There's a lot of destination fixation, really defensive driving, and I get neurotic about passenger/wildlife safety. Driving can be genuinely fun if I'm doing it alone in a winding canyon, but normally I put on a podcast and stay hyper-alert for the entire drive with accidents in mind. Biking is closer to how I walk- constantly stopping to look at things and exploring on impulse. There might be a brief moment of stress but it's sandwiched between really engaging decompression time.
The constant threat of crashing, or other people crashing into you. Needing to check mirrors, speed, maintain vigilance for pedestrians, other cars, cyclists, and cops.
The driver needs to be on alert to drive safely, which is not a relaxed state
I suppose i thought of stressed out meaning an active state of stress. Is simply not being relaxed the same as being stressed? All those aspects of driving can still occur while I'm bobbing along to loud music.
Your mandatory daily intrusive thought that it's a good time to buy an ebike. I'll pay around $25 this year in electricity costs to do 99% of my urban travelling, with only moving between apartments being impractical. The diesel shock is probably going to deplete inventories that are hard to restock because almost everything is coming from China. Getting ahead of the demand spike is going to be the smart move like it was in 2020. I don't recommend the Lectric brand they chose for this study, but it's the cheapest reliable one with a good service network.
how much snow, rain, and 30c+ days in your year?
Eat bitterness 吃苦
I think people are way too used to driving around in their climate-controlled boxes. Experience the great outdoors!
...but also, riding in the rain does suck. I always sweat under my poncho and get super sticky.
no thanks, i suffer enough physical torture every day just by living without external factors worsening the chronic pain.
I live on the Colorado Front Range which is one of the better/worse areas to bike in the US. It's a high desert so we can expect snow from September-May, but it usually melts within a few days and the bike trails are the first things cleared. June-September brings a lot of 30-37c days with low humidity, usually with afternoon monsoon rains that always hit me on the ride home. It's very hilly and high elevation so biking is rougher than most sea-level places. I've been able to bike maybe 350/365 days out of the past year, only stopping when it's so snowy I don't want to drive or below -20c.
The big thing an ebike gets you is mitigating the weather. If it's snowy but passable, I can use my throttle to slowly trudge along and keep a pace that's faster than walking. If it's rainy and windy, I feel like I have a tailwind. If it's super hot out, even a 10 hour day doing a physical job in the sun doesn't deter me from riding because it's like having air conditioning on full blast. I would have biked maybe 250/365 days on my normal bike while it's only frostbite and ice/deep snow that keep me from the ebike.
the path clearing is a big deal, i don't think i've ever lived anywhere that did those in a timely manner
I don't recommend the Lectric brand
Why’s that? Only asking because that’s the one I bought a couple weeks ago 😰
It's still a perfectly adequate and safe bike. My first ebike was an Xpress 750, then an Aventon Abound. My issue with the Lectric was how cheap the components were. Anything that could shake off did, the brakes felt really inadequate, and the tyres were terrible. I ended up swapping out enough to make it cost more than Aventon's commuter models. A lot of people who bought an Xpedition over an Abound also had similar complaints.
Nearly 2 grand to park your car at home?!
Garages and driveways cost money to build, they cost money to maintain, and it costs money to pay the property taxes on the land they occupy. If you ammortize all those, I could easily see it being the equivalent of $2000 a year in costs.
I love urbanism, I love bikes, I love e-bikes. Fuck cars! Buuuuut... yeah, the numbers are insanely inflated.
Not everybody has to pay to park their car at home. I drive a $4500 manual transmission beater and, other than insurance, the math really ain't adding up:
- Gas 12000 mi/y, 35 mpg, $4/gal: ~$1370
- Insurance, $90/mo: $1080
- 4 oil changes, $75: $300
So gas, insurance, and minimum maintenance comes out to $2750 a year. Now that I've had the car for 4 years, the cost of the car is spread out to an additional $1125/year, so the full total becomes $3875/year. That's assuming the car dies today of course.
In addition to the general maintenance costs of oil changes and tire replacement, these sources typically calculate "wear and tear" per mile to estimate repair costs per vehicle mile travelled while accounting for major expected repairs over the lifetime of the car. These are also going to be skewed based on average usage across the country, using a composite mpg. Your own costs will vary, but these averages also take into account the commuter using a Ford F350 to sit in urban traffic for 30 minutes at 15mpg.
The cost of parking a car at home is typically not reflective of paid parking spaces for apartment complexes with garages, but estimates the cost per square foot based on an average home value and an average mortgage. The post also states that there are considerations made for, e.g., time spent finding parking--so the cost in time is estimated as a function of the model's average hourly wage variable.
If you own a beater that you can do basic maintenance on, if you own your home or have free street parking, if your car gets 40mpg, you'll end up with lower costs than average. Some of these costs are externalized (longer commute for the mandatory zoning regulations to build houses with parking), and some of them are lower because of frugality (buying older beaters, not fixing the broken air conditioning). But that doesn't mean that these aren't the average numbers for the median car owner in the US, whose habits are more expensive.
I can 100% see this angle, so I think the only addendum I'd make to the article would be to also add data visualization for "frugal" car ownership. Of course the e-bike will pull out ahead every time though
or have free street parking
just to note, that just shifts the monetary costs from one person to all of society
I wish he had listed how he arrived at that number. It works out to $141 per month, which I could see being the rent premium you're paying to live in a complex with garages or dedicated parking spaces. A driveway/garage repair would probably cost about the same. I couldn't find a breakdown of the maths though.
Depends where you live, if you live in an apartment/condo you might be paying extra fees for a parking spot
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