Cost of BART vs. Hybrid

well, that's hard to do because the pluses and minuses that come with having a car, any car, are hard to measure and totally dependent on your situation. for me, even if i had a hybrid it wouldn't be cheaper to pay for SF insurance rates, parking fees/tickets/meters, the time it takes for me to find parking, etc. plus the hard-to-measure but important-to-me benefits of getting out and about on foot or on bike rather than sitting in traffic. even if it's not faster to walk or bike (though sometimes it is with traffic!) it's worth it to me to get out.

but then it sucks to try to get heavy groceries, or just a lot of light ones, it sucks to be worried about safety later at night, and it sucks that i have to rent a car to get a wendy's frosty when i crave it!!

so yeah, it's a really personal decision. i like riding bart because i get to use the time sitting in the bart car to read or write, whereas sitting in a car i'd have to stare at the road and essentially waste that time. 2 hours a day on bart for me spent reading is worth more to me than shortening my commute by 20 minutes, because there i'd be wasting that time.

Too many retards on the road these days driving 90+ mph weaving in and out of cars and too many talking on their dam cellphones, eating, putting on make-up, reading, etc., instead of paying attention. Myself, I wish BART would run later than midnight so I could work out before hoping on the train and eliminate even one more reason to drive. There's just too many people on the road and too many people in Contra Costa County now. The developers having ruined everything. Same with San Joaquin County. What a bunch of moron developers building all those houses with no BART. The developers should have been forced to pay for BART before building one single home or coming up with some sort of other transportation for people. Same with Contra Costa County. You can also count on the roads damaging your car because semi trucks make potholes and ripples which damage small cars. BART is much safer than the road. California had better public transportation in the East Bay in 30's and 40's than they do now. I can't believe they are selling Antioch on e-BART, what a joke.

You might consider the standard IRS dediction for business mileage as good starting point. This is the government allowing people to not pay taxes (the lifeblood of government) on an amount of money, so you can bet they've put some serious thought into what that number ought to be.

Based largely on recent increases in fuel costs, the IRS is poised to raise that deduction amount to approximately $0.58 per mile. Two things to consider here; (1) that number is designed to include ALL of the costs of owning / operating an average automobile - from car payment, to maintenance, to registration, etc.); and (2) Consumers Union (the non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports) calculates the cost of fuel as 21 percent of the total cost of automobile ownership.

(It should be noted that fuel, which you will buy constantly when you drive regularly, is only the second largest cost of ownership. Put together, insurance and auto loan interest cost slightly more than fuel, and price depreciation costs an auto owner TWICE as much as fuel (assuming you buy new.))

But back to the deduction - if you assume a hybrid is twice as fuel efficient as the "average" car, then you will save 10.5 percent off of that $0.58 per mile cost (half of the 21 percent fuel cost share), putting the total cost of owning a hybrid at 51.9 cents per mile (note: while fuel costs might actually be slightly less than half of "average" that advantage is more than offset by the greater cost of auto purchase.)

And now the analysis you were waiting for...run a Google map plot from your start station (Pleasant Hill for me) to your end station (Coliseum / Oakland Airport), take that mileage number and muliply by 51.9 cents.

In my case, I am travelling just under 25 miles for $3.40 on Bart (just $3.19 if you include the small discount for using EZ Bart smart card), and that same trip would cost me $12.98 (total cost of operation) in a hybrid ($14.50 in an "average").

And those costs, of course, are *each way*. Extrapolate out to an average business month (5 roundtrips per week, 4.3 weeks per average month) and you have $137.17 (EZ Bart discounted) versus $558.14 (hybrid) or $623.50 ("average" car).

For each day you swap car trips for Bart rides, you are costing yourself a minimum of $9.79 per day, which would be $42.09 in a month, and $505.16 per year. And that is just one day per week.

I have all the same gripes about Bart as everybody else, but it is pretty darned economical for distance travel.

And following on with the idea of renting cars for occasions when you really (really) need one, we are lucky enough to have three different car sharing services in the Bay Area (City CarShare, Zipcar, and Flexcar) that allow you to rent cars by the hour, on a "pay as you go" basis.

This is a cool option (that eliminates the giant "sunk" costs of automobile ownership from the equation) which you can read about here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/22/MNGDANML2T1.DTL

Hope that helps.

The 58 cent per mile deduction was made official today.