How much money can going car-free save you?
On those rare days when you wished you owned a car, just remember this chart!
Why go car-free? Well, we’ve never known anything different.
But on the days we are tempted to get a car (it happens about once a year, typically when we need something from Ikea), we’re always pulled short by working out the costs.
When you realise just how much more money you have for cake, beer, wine, cake, days out, clothes and cake; suddenly getting the train to Ikea doesn’t seem so bad.
One of the weirdest things about the psychology of transport is that we constantly read about how expensive trains are (if you type ‘rail fares’ into Google, nearly all the suggestions are something to do with the word ‘increase’) but car is a far more expensive way to travel.
The problem is that most of the costs of cars aren’t associated with the journey: they’re sunk costs (buying a car, paying for insurance, forking out the tax) whereas nearly all the costs of public transport are tied to a trip. It makes the public transport trips seem very expensive.
How much do cars actually cost?
Here are some rough figures of the cost of running a car from a non-car user. Shout if I’ve got anything wildly wrong:
Insurance: £500
Repairs: £500
Tax: £100
Washing: £50
MOT: £50
Parking tickets: £50*
And that’s before you take into account optional stuff like AA or accessories.
It’s also before you take into account… well, the car and the fuel to power it.
So, a quick search online tells me that a motorist will typically pay about £12,000 for a new car and apparently the average motorist keeps a car for 6 years. That means they spend £2,000 per year on the car.
Having checked the truth at the Office for National Statistics, the average household spends £1,867 on car purchase and leasing. So pretty close.
The ONS also tells me that the average car-owning household spends £1,547 per year on fuel. That doesn’t seem too far off to me: that’s £30 per week, which chimes with what I hear from my car-owning friends.
So, let’s tot that all up and we get to [drum roll!]... £4,664 of car costs every single year!
So what about us?
Now, let’s look at how much Thomas and I spend on all transport every year.
Before Thomas joined TfL, he used to have a TfL travelcard: £1,696.
I, as a writer, has always worked from home but used to spend about £30 per month on Oyster fares. We buy a Family and Friends Railcard for £30. We spend about £350 each year on train fares to go and see my family in Liverpool. Each month, we do a trip or two out of London and the train fares for these typically cost about £30. About £500 on these in total.
We also all have bikes. Bikes for all four of us cost £900, while helmets, rack, panniers, lights, pump, locks, chains all cost another £300. That £1,200 felt a lot of money! In many ways, I expect a motorist feels less like their ‘spending money’ by doing one transaction of £12k on finance than a cyclist spending £1,200 in endless dribs and drabs. All that kit will last years (don’t know how long yet, so we’ll assume four years), so let’s call that £300 per year.
The free Dr Bike maintenance service is magic but we probably spend another £100 a year fixing stuff.
So our total travel costs for everything are £3,206. (In the chart, I’ve rounded everything to the nearest £50).
But what’s really interesting is that while we incur none of the motoring costs, virtually every car-owner I know incurs at least some of our public transport costs. Pre-Covid, most Londoner friends commuted so either had a travelcard or a bike. Or both.
So what does this all mean?
Here’s my attempt to work out which of these costs are unique to car-owning and car-free houses, based on the assumption that a car-owner will continue to commute by public transport, may easily not own a bike and will use their own car to drive to see family and for trips out of town.
Everything rounded to nearest £50
£3,375 is a lot of cake!
* hard one to estimate, this. Maybe the average motorist doesn’t spend £50 a year on parking tickets. To listen to motorists moan about parking tickets, you’d think it was more like £500
