Calculate your true cost of driving with this online form:

[phantom power]

http://www.commutesolutions.org/calc.htm

Oh, and here is yet another discussion of car ownership costs and public transit:

Traditionally, cars' pricing is almost purely unlimited use. You buy the car up front, or have a fixed monthly loan or lease payment. You pay registration, property taxes, inspections, and insurance regardless of how much you use the car. Parking is usually free, whether you are a tenant, employee or customer. Your only costs per trip are gas and maintenance, and those you don't even pay at the time you take the trip, but later, when your gas tank is empty or your tires are worn. There's a good summary of the per-mile costs of driving here. Insurance, registration, residential parking and car purchase costs about 50¢ per mile, and gas, maintenance, and tires cost about 14¢ per mile.

When you hop in the car, it's easy to not even think about these costs. Psychologically, once you own a car, keep the gas tank filled and maintain it properly, additional trips are "free". The psychological incentives today promote driving and discourage transit. If we want to rectify that balance, because of externalities like pollution or congestion, safety and noise, then we should move toward more pay-per-use systems for cars.

Charge tolls to drive on roads. Charge per use for parking. Daily or hourly parking charges are better for this purpose than monthly contracts. With a monthly contract, parking is already paid for on day one, so all additional days are "free". Other methods are less common: insurance can be priced per mile. Shared-car services like Zipcar charge by the hour. Taxicabs charge per trip and mile.

It's possible to make some of these changes without changing the overall costs, so it's not even necessary to get into a cars vs. transit debate. If someone pays $1,000 per year in insurance and drives about 12,000 miles per year, it doesn't cost them more if you charge $200 plus 6.6 cents per mile. It would encourage people to drive fewer miles, however (for comparison, gasoline including taxes is currently about 8 cents per mile). Also, if apartments typically rent for $1500 a month and include two parking spaces free, it's not an increase if the rent drops to $1300 per month and you pay $100 more per month for a parking space. Parking at work, which used to be unlimited at $120 per month, could be $6 per day against a pre-paid account instead of an unlimited per month charge.

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=1735

[Realityhack]

1. That 'calculator' is artful.

I understand the idea and a lot of their numbers are interesting... but it doesn't calculate anything remotely accurate.

For example it calculates $0.255 per mile depreciation. At that rate my car would be depreciated below $0 in half a year.
The same goes for finance charges. Gas cost (they don't even ask for MPG). They throw in an arbitrary figure for you time cost (a full $0.119 per mile). Arbitrary insurance cost and finance charges.

Drive an older car (low depreciation), don't count your time as a cost (were you planning on working another job instead of the commute?), maybe good millage and cheap insurance, and you could quickly be off by 30 or 40 cents. That is over 25% of their estimated cost per mile.

Drive an expensive gas guzzler with a large loan, high depreciation and high insurance cost and it could be off that much in the other direction.

In other words plus or minus more than 25%. That isn't exactly the 'true cost' in my book.

[Honeycombe8]

2. Most Americans don't have access to practical public transit, or have jobs where

they're not practical.

I'm one of them, even tho I live in a fairly large city that has a rail system. It goes only certain places. It would take me as long to get to it, as it would to get to work. Plus, my hours are erratic, and it's too dangerous for me to get stuck on the dark streets of downtown, alone, at midnight, waiting for a rail.

I think most Americans are in a similar boat. I'd probably get fired if I didn't have reliable transportation that would enable me to come and go by my employer's daily wishes.