Hello again Livejournal
Just wanted to put in a small note that I still do check LJ from time to time, not very often though.
Was reading back through some livejournal posts though and found the one from londonwolf which indicated how much it costs him each year to travel by Rail into London, UK. Some ridiculous amount of just over £4,000.
So I decided to check to see how much it costs to run my car for work, assuming that I only use it for work purposes.
So I took the amount I pay for gas every two weeks, divided by 10 working days, took the cost of my insurance and divided by 20 (to make it simple, some months there could be slightly less or slightly more working days), factored in $60 for oil changes every 60 days, factored in $400 for major repairs/maintenance every 120 days and I came up with a number of $20.09 per day. (btw, I have no parking charges, though when I worked downtown, it use to cost $80/month).
I thought that was pretty good, until I realized that for 2011, it would cost me $5,022.50 to operate my minivan based on 250 actual working days. And in 2012, it would actually go up by an additional $40.18 because of the leap year and how many actual working days there are in the year. Also, this is all assuming that I only used it for work and would apply it to that. I do some driving on the weekend and some driving to other places during the week that have nothing to do with work, so technically the cost related to work is lower but the full amount still applies.
Then I figured out the cost for paying full fare on the bus system here and as horrible as it is, it would only cost $1,375.00 a year for the two bus trips per day. DOH! Of course no bus goes directly to where I need it to, so I'd take two buses (with a transfer), both run every 15 minutes but they can be late, so my total travel time would be somewhere on the order of 45 to 60 minutes. With my car, it's a 15 minute drive, 20 minutes in heavy traffic. I guess there's a cost to convenience and in this case, I'm happy to pay it.
Was reading back through some livejournal posts though and found the one from londonwolf which indicated how much it costs him each year to travel by Rail into London, UK. Some ridiculous amount of just over £4,000.
So I decided to check to see how much it costs to run my car for work, assuming that I only use it for work purposes.
So I took the amount I pay for gas every two weeks, divided by 10 working days, took the cost of my insurance and divided by 20 (to make it simple, some months there could be slightly less or slightly more working days), factored in $60 for oil changes every 60 days, factored in $400 for major repairs/maintenance every 120 days and I came up with a number of $20.09 per day. (btw, I have no parking charges, though when I worked downtown, it use to cost $80/month).
I thought that was pretty good, until I realized that for 2011, it would cost me $5,022.50 to operate my minivan based on 250 actual working days. And in 2012, it would actually go up by an additional $40.18 because of the leap year and how many actual working days there are in the year. Also, this is all assuming that I only used it for work and would apply it to that. I do some driving on the weekend and some driving to other places during the week that have nothing to do with work, so technically the cost related to work is lower but the full amount still applies.
Then I figured out the cost for paying full fare on the bus system here and as horrible as it is, it would only cost $1,375.00 a year for the two bus trips per day. DOH! Of course no bus goes directly to where I need it to, so I'd take two buses (with a transfer), both run every 15 minutes but they can be late, so my total travel time would be somewhere on the order of 45 to 60 minutes. With my car, it's a 15 minute drive, 20 minutes in heavy traffic. I guess there's a cost to convenience and in this case, I'm happy to pay it.