Anyway, for how I am living right now, being car free was the obvious option. I drove a 1997 Subaru with almost 200,000 miles, ready for it to die any day. I purposely moved to a place where I knew I could find a green job, make enough money to pay the bills, and live close enough to work and the places I need to go for biking and walking to fill 99% of my wants. For the past 6 years I’ve been wondering why people get trapped in the car using cycle, where a good amount of money made at work goes towards paying off a car, so I’m glad to have sucessully avoided that. I don’t need to work to pay to get to work!

Here are my expenses:
Bike: expected to last 5 years, loosing $100 value per year = $8.33/mo
Repairs: estimating $50/yr = $4.17
Getting my exercise on the way to work: priceless! ha

So my estimated commuting costs are about $13 a month, which about 2% of what I earn, and that sounds good to me. There are still car costs I have because my girlfriend still has a car, which I generally never drive. She commutes 20 miles in a week with that, but might start trying the bus to see if those times work for her. The main problem is that her shift ends close to the last bus time, and if for some reason she missed the bus I would have to pick her up, or she would have to walk 3 miles.
Keep up the good blogging!
-Andy

I don’t think I saved any of my many price comparison spreadsheets, but I believe my options looked roughly like this (in Washington, D.C.):

-Cost of car: $2,000-3,000 (used Toyota, Honda, or Subaru with a good history). Monthly payment would probably be in the $200-300 range.
-Insurance each year: $500-600 depending on the make and model of the car (quote from Geico–horrifying!!!)
-Cost of gas: Who knows! When I had a car over a year ago, I filled the 11-gallon tank around once a week. A year ago I paid around $3.30/tank. Probably a low estimate to say $40/week x 52 weeks = yearly cost of $2080
-Possible maintenance on car: Unknown

Cost of transportation:
-$3 a day to ride the bus to work; this is reimbursed in full by my job (they pay either parking or transit fees).
-$85 hard-wearing Timbuk2 bag to hold all the stuff that my car used to (jacket, umbrella, lunch, etc.)
-Time waiting for buses and trains
-Difficulty transporting large or heavy items
-Difficulty or inability to go certain places

You can see how easy that decision was to make, at least financially. Housing is extremely expensive here, and on one income using transit I have something left in the bank at the end of the month. If I had a car, I’d be buying gas and groceries on credit cards.

I admit that sometimes it is a huge pain to not have a car. Shopping is problematic–forget bringing your IKEA purchases home on the bus. I grocery shop about three times more often than I used to since it is cheaper than renting a Zipcar (in my area, car costs range between $8-15 per hour depending on the car (and traffic guarantees that I would never get anything done in under an hour!). However, there are no cars within a mile of me, so depending on the errand I would probably need to pay for transportation on one or both ends of the trip. Costs are also higher on the weekend when I would be most likely to use the service). Right now I live in an area with accessible transit, but many other cities have far fewer options (one county a mile away from me has no buses on Sundays), and I still have trouble on weekends as the buses stop running at midnight and my metro station doesn’t have a cab stop.

Overall, I enjoy having what I think is a slower but more active lifestyle (on average, I walk two miles a day). After the first few months I mainly quit being annoyed about all the “wasted time” that I spend waiting for buses (DC’s MetroBus is notoriously late). I bring my mp3 player and a book everywhere so I can entertain myself (I read more than twice as many books last year than I did the year before). I found driving and sitting (in my un-air conditioned car) in traffic far less enjoyable than sitting on a cool, peaceful bus listening to podcasts. Also, MetroBuses run on natural gas.

/longest comment ever