Originally Posted by
RubeRad
I like to think of it not only as cost per mile, but also per person. So transporting a whole family of 5 makes it 5 times more reasonable/worthwhile to use a car than driving alone.
for sure. and that's what our lone car primarily is: the family hauler.
my wife does use it from time to time to do site visits for her job, but she works from home 80% of the time. our car sits on its parking pad out back most days. it does also help with getting the kiddos over to daycare in inclement weather. their day-care is only a 1/2 mile away so my wife usually just walks the kids over there most days, but if it's pouring rain or 3 degrees out, the car is a nice luxury to have available.
one of our car's main duties is transporting us up to the western burbs of milwaukee where my wife's parents and her two sisters and their families all live. we drive up there not quite once a month, maybe 10x per year. it's 200 miles round-trip, so $100 per visit using that $0.50/mile figure, but that's the total for all 4 of us. if we took the train up there instead, that would be $160 ($40 per round-trip ticket on amtrak). and amtrak doesn't do door-to-door, we'd still need to get from our home down to union station in downtown chicago, and then from the amtrak station in downtown milwaukee out to my in-law's house out in the burbs, which would add cost, time, and considerable hassle to the journey.
sometimes cars just make the most sense for all of the reasons.