One Car

My household owns one car. Insurance is $60 a month. My wife tells me we run about $100/month on gas. (Car gets only 18.7 mpg, but it was cheap, so oh well). We drive a relatively tiny amount. (7000 miles per year). I always wonder if we'd be better off not owning a car, and using Lyft/Car Rental instead.

For most of our trips (groceries, work), Lyft would be fine. If I added $100 a month into an account, that's ~20 trips from home to grocery, etc. But we went car-less for a bit, and the killer was the trips we didn't make. Partially, that was elective. But partially not.

Elective trips, it was a budget thing. As is, our car-use is in the budget. It's budgeted for. Money is allocated to it. But while car-less, things like Lyft were coming out of the 'fun money' budget. And it was always an unexpected expense. Had we had a 'balance' that we added to monthly, I think we would have made more use of Lyft for regular travel.

It's the 'partially not' that was the killer. We didn't go camping. We didn't go skiing. We didn't visit friends or family nearly as much. (We tend to visit family on Sundays, during which time transit is largely useless). I would like to claim we could have rented a car. But car rental places aren't nearby. The cheapest place to rent a car is the airport. Which is like 4 miles away. Which is a 45 minute journey by light rail (including a 10 minute stand-in-the-rain transfer). And at the counter, even with the car reserved, with ID and credit card on file, it would take another 15-25 minutes. Renting a car wasn't just cost-expensive, but time expensive. And an unpleasant hassle. And when all we wanted to do was get out of town, it was prohibitive. Trying to pick up a car to drive to Moab, and killing that time is hard, when you know that the cost is time-not-spent in Moab, and time off-work (vacation burned).

Overnight trips also a pain: Got to have it back by 11am, or it's another day. So if I go visit the inlaws in Idaho (3 hours away) I have to leave at 8am, which means I have to get up at 7am, which is not how I want to spend my weekend.

Hourly car-rental doesn't cut it either. The car-share that used to exist (and which I made use of) no longer seems to exist. No shock there--even while carless, it was never convenient enough to be useful. (Ubiquity matters). I used it a number of times, but it was hourly, so it was always stressful trying to get things done within the hour. (Like trying to get back to your car when the meter is running). It was good for pickup/drop-off stuff, but terrible for shopping (who wants to shop on the clock?).

So when we pay for a car, we aren't really paying for the mobility, per se. We're paying a lot extra for the mobility on demand, the 'freedom' if you will. Freedom from hassle, freedom from opportunity costs, freedom from time-pressure.

But as the saying goes 'Freedom isn't free'. And we pay a lot for it. $160/month+repairs+cost of car. (I'd estimate the cost of car at $135/month, assuming a  2009 Toyota Camry as a reasonable replacement).  But it does seem to be worth it.

That said, I love living someplace where one car _is_ a viable option. If we lived someplace suburban, we'd need two cars, or else every time the car left, it would strand 2+ people at home with no transportation access.