Longfemur

Car free shouldn't be about saving money anyway. It should be about restoring some kind of sanity to our civilization, restoring breathable air in our cities and the planet in general, and it should be about people using their legs to get around.

Newspaperguy

There are probably as many reasons for going car-light or car-free as there are people choosing these options. Some want to save money, some want to save the planet, some want exercise, some want to restore balance to their lives and some live in places where car use and car ownership do not make sense. All those reasons and more are valid.

fotooutdoors

Amen to the last couple posts. Assuming that going car-free is going to save you money is okay (though it can be misguided, depending on your car, your bike, etc), but it misses the larger social and environmental problems of the car in our society.

Alareth

Any money I save on not driving my car I end up spending on my bike. You should see my new panniers though, really spiffy

Longfemur

The big money is in the ownership of the car, not the actual driving that much. So, if you decide to commute to work by bicycle but you still own the car, you're not saving that much, except a bit of gasoline. Oh, and by the way, with cars, depreciation should be factored into cost of ownership. With bikes, as long as you avoid becoming a Lance-wannabee and you stay away from the Cervelos and Madones, you won't have to worry about any depreciation.

uke

Depreciation is irrelevant; if you buy a $10,000 car or a $500 bike, you've lost $10,000 or $500 right off the bat. End of story. The money is gone. If you eventually sell it, subtract what you spent to buy it from what you made selling it. However, the moment you make the purchase, the money you've spent is gone until further notice. You never have to worry about depreciation unless you buy everything with the intention of selling it, which is an illogical way to look at purchases.

uke

Furthermore, I think our society's obsession with "depreciation" with regard to purchases like cars and houses is indicative of a cognitive dissonance between our inabilities to truly afford those objects, our desires to have them anyway, and our beliefs that if we're savvy enough, we can have our cakes and eat them too. It's puerile and ultimately unrealistic. If you can't afford to buy something without wondering how much money you'll lose if you try to sell it, you can't afford it to begin with. If more people understood this, they wouldn't buy $20,000 cars or $200,000 houses and bleat day and night about depreciation. Why don't you worry about depreciation when buying a book or a backpack? Because you can afford it, and you're not greedily thinking of how many dollars you'd be able to squeeze out of it in five years if you tried to sell it. But when you scale this up to cars and houses, people begin to think they're all going to "beat the game" by factoring in "depreciation", and that if they play their cards just right, this huge thing they can't afford will someday be justified by what they'll get in return. I've lost count of how many people seem to believe this, and never stop to think of how unreasonable the belief is.

hairnet

I'd have to say that not buying a drop of gas over the last couple months has saved me a few hundred dollars. I'd say I'm saving a lot of money. <_< I'm too cheap to spend that money on my bike

Platy

If you're a cash buyer, yes, you can ignore depreciation.

On the other hand, depreciation becomes critically important if you need to sell the vehicle but you have a loan balance that exceeds the depreciated value.

It also factors in if the vehicle gets totalled in an accident, where the insurance company will only reimburse you for the depreciated value, not the replacement value or the actual cost to make repairs.

AsanaCycles

en mass
most people are owned by their things

Roody

Good point, one that the backlashers on this forum never seem to get. Yes, backlashers, depreciation of your car's value has no effect on your cash balance. But, by definition, depreciation does affect the value of your car. A car is the largest asset held by many people, other than their homes. If the car's worth less than it used to be, then YOU are worth less too.

uke

And as I've said, many people can afford neither the cars they drive nor the houses they inhabit, which is why so many cling to the rabbit's foot of depreciation.

uke

If your car is on loan to begin with, you couldn't afford it. Again, these discussions are symptomatic of the core problem of living beyond one's means.

Longfemur

Seems to be the same understanding of economics as is running the country. Whatever money your car or house cost you, even if you paid cash, it's money that you couldn't use for some other purpose - such as earning capital gains or at least some interest, or being used to produce something - whether by you or somebody else. So, depreciation certainly does factor into the cost of car ownership. What, are you getting your financial management lessons from the Obama gang?

Platy

Well, some people are just fiscal fundamentalists, and actually I kinda sympathize with that. These recurring discussions about the cost of car ownership always turn on what flavor of accounting a person likes.

I kinda sympathize with Asana Cycles too.

Longfemur

LOL, if people were fiscal fundamentalists, nobody would be buying cars at all. It rarely makes sense financially. It only becomes a necessity because of the choices that we make or that are made for us about where we live.

Oh, and Cervelo, Trek, Specialized et al would probably also go out of business, because people would be buying the bikes that they actually need :-)

Cosmoline

I'd want to see those car costs broken down. How much is insurance? Repairs? Loan payments? Licensing and registration? Gasoline? Oil changes?

I know people who can operate used cars for pretty cheap, but they have access to an equipped auto garage with tools and the knowledge to repair the @$@# things. If you factor in the original cost of those facilities and tools, you will again have extremely high expenses.

For most of us, a craigslist special means we'll have to pay enormous sums to mechanics to repair everything from CV joints to fuel pumps. It literally never ends. So you pay one way or the other--no exceptions. You either pay extra for a new car that won't break down for awhile or you pay for repairing your old clunker.

Bikes also need work, of course, but they are far more simple machines within the ability of most people with some basic tools. Even more advanced repairs and alterations can be done for a fraction of the price of a car.

And none of this gets into the question of secondary costs and benefits. The bicycle increases fitness and reduces medical costs. Obviously there's the chance of an accident, but there's also that chance with autos.

uke

I wonder how many exceptions will have to be pointed out before the "no exceptions" line is dropped; each time these absolutisms are made, car light folk (like myself) with inexpensive vehicles show up, yet the line persists. Oh well. I guess it's the other end of the spectrum; some extremists believe bicycles are useless toys that adults should never ride, while some extremists believe cars are always unfathomable money pits. So it goes.

uke

Ah, this is the other favorite economical misunderstanding of car-free extremists: opportunity costs. It doesn't have anything to do with depreciation, but let's bring it in anyway! Anything to make cars seem like quixotic endeavors. Why aren't you working 24 hours a day? Think of all the money you're losing with those hours! And what of the lottery tickets you could buy that could make you millions? Oh, opportunity cost, you are a cruel mistress!

Roody

This is a carfree forum, so I don't think it's fair to call somebody an extremist because they think cars are a waste of good money. I also don't think it's very reasonable to propose that the frugal car habits of a few carlight people are at all typical of the car costs of most real world Americans. Most people can't own used older cars, for the simple fact that if they did, there would be no market for new cars, and the auto industry would crash. Oh...never mind...that already happened!

Seriously, though, YOU might have a good way to operate a car cheaply. But this is not the case for 95 % of Americans. So don't get all huffy with the people here who do think that being carfree could save MOST people a lot of money!

Roody

If somebody didn't spend $20,000 on a new car, do you think they would just throw that 20k out the window? They MIGHT spend it on something else, invest it, or save it.

Or do you believe that a new car is a good investment? After all, you don't believe in depreciation, so the car will be worth as much in 10 years, or maybe it will even be worth a little more than you paid for it.

uke

Irrational statements that paint cars as 100% wasteful are a disservice to all of us, car-free, car-light, or car-dependent. It should be possible to state one's reasons for being one way (e.g., CF) without implying that everyone who isn't is living a poorer life or hemorrhaging money or incompetent or...etc. Incidentally, many folks here (e.g., Newspaperguy) manage to do so. It's unfortunate many cannot.

I've never claimed to speak for all Americans; when will you get tired of using this strawman? Or do you believe that homeless people begging for change at the side of the street represent 95% of people who are car-free? If you can't formulate an honest argument, that does make you an extremist for your point of view. Do you not see a difference between the way you describe a CF existence and the way others do?

This is a respectful way of engaging in dialogue. This is the kind of response that encourages lurkers to consider going CL or CF. Antagonistic responses hurt your cause far more than they help it.

uke

They "might" do a lot of things with that money, depending on their circumstances and priorities. Holding up "opportunity cost" as a branding torch against car ownership is a clear sign that one is thinking of what s/he would do with the money, rather than what the person in question chose to do with the money. The thing is that neither you nor I nor anyone else here gets to tell someone else the "right" way to spend their money.

Please see above about strawmen. Again, you do a disservice to people considering becoming less car dependent with such arguments.

Robert C

Part of calculating depreciation, for non-working assets, is the numbers game we all like to play. For example, I decided that the service life of my motorcycle is 75,000 (when I got it I said 50,000; but, now that it is approaching that, I am extending that number to 75k). S, if I ride it into a dumpster at 75k, throw in after it the pink, a gallon of atomized gasoline, and a match, it will have cost me 8.67 cents per mile for the motorcycle alone. If I resell it for the $1,500 that I estimate it will be worth (called salvage value in accounting terms) the price per mile will have dropped to 6.67 cents per mile. Remember, all we are talking about here is equipment costs, not operating costs (by way of reference, my last car cost 1.71 cents per mile)

Now, if we factor in inflation, the numbers change slightly lets see... $6500 six years ago... $7320 and 1500 (that is really a conservative estimate, but i will use it) in three years... $1332 so today 7320 - 1332... with salvage and inflation that comes to 7.98 cents per mile for the chassis alone... call it 8 cents per mile in today's money. Pretty close to what I came to the last time I did this.

I did this once before, when I factor in everything, I come to just under 16 cents per mile (the car I mentioned was 12 cents per mile and I was being paid 28 cents per mile).

Back to the point, depreciation can be useful in determining real cost per mile. To make it easy you can use a salvage value of zero, but that shows a higher than true cost per mile.

I used his once to show a friend that the equipment cost of his pickup cost more that the sum of all costs per mile for my motorcycle. Shortly after that he started using a bicycle for short trips too.

And yes, I often apply utilization costs to items before making even mundane purchases. I may choose to rent a wierd tool rather than purchasing it based on this. I may even consider, before a flight or long train ride, that a paerback will run $6-$7 and provide 10 -12 hours of distractoin while a magaxine will cost $4-$5 and provide about 1-2 hours of distraction (at most, in both cases). There are a lot of little places we factor in the utilization of an item v. its cost. Depreciatation is just one way of determining its real cost.

Lamplight

I'm a little confused by this paragraph. I would think very, very few people in this country don't buy their food from a grocery store. Unless the grocery store has a fully functioning farm with all kinds of livestock, and many acres of fruits and vegetables, then every store gets their food via a truck. It doesn't matter if that store is in the middle of a city or in a town of 300 in the middle of nowhere. I suppose one could argue that a truck might have to drive slightly farther to get to the middle of a city, but I imagine that wouldn't be much different than driving to a little town that's 60 miles from the nearest interstate.