Thursday, March 6, 2008

Giving up the car - Week 2

OK, so I've had to hire a car a couple of times this week due to the fact there are still many places even just a few kms from the CBD that are completely inaccessible by public transport. Unfortunately these more industrial areas are where I often get the work. But, I'm still in the money.

With planning, you can cram a lot into those hire car days... grocery shopping, going to the cash & carry, taking all that old stuff to the charity shop, popping in to IKEA for a couple of things and coming out $500 later...and so on. Why spread all of those chores out when you can squeeze them in to that one or two days when you have the luxury of a car.

The best part about hiring a car has to be the fact that you get a new, well-maintained car without 3 pairs of smelly socks, football boots and old chip packets on the back seat.

  • Money saved: -$67.46 (To date: $265.84)
  • Exercise: a lot !

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great Post Penny. It is great to see another family going car-free in the Brisbane suburbs. We did it over a year ago and now I run a carshare service in inner-city Brisbane to help people reduce their dependency on cars. I'm going to link you to our facebook site if that's ok. See http://www.facebook.com/pages/GWhiz-Carshare-Service/8745801106

Go well, Emma

Bunco Squad said...

Penny -

How will you carry all those large items - including the weekly groceries - when there are no cars (not even hire cars) and no facilities for them? The point of your experiment is to be independent of cars, yet you need to use them for those frequent times when you have too much to carry.

You say you are saving money, but you are wasting time in order to do it - by working around your lack of a car. Is your time as important as your money? They say that time is money.

You may not really be saving money. Only 25% of the costs of running public transport are paid for by fares; the rest is paid from taxes. You directly pay the costs of a private car, so those are easy to see. But you pay indirectly for the costs of public transport, since the government owns and runs it. To compare them fairly, you have to add what the government pays from your taxes.

Multiply your fares by four to get the real cost.