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Commuting to London will not be expensive
Nov. 3rd, 2009 12:32 pmI needed to work out how much higher my salary would need to be to compensate for the cost of commuting, and got a rather nice surprise. It doesn't :)
Cost of train season ticket for a year: £3,440. Plus probably about £800 in tube fares on an Oyster card (yes, I could make that season ticket a Travelcard one, but unless I do a lot of extra travel around London, it's more expensive). So, £4,240.
Cost of the diesel I'd no longer be using driving to work: about £450.
But.... would we even need two cars? It's a 15min walk to the station, and parking is both rare and pricey. I might pull the bike out, I might just walk it, I certainly wouldn't be driving. So we get rid of my little car - or do we? No. We get rid of Dave's big, less economical car, and when we need something BIG at the weekends, we hire it.
Dave did sums about how much that thing's costing us, when you look at car loans, services, difference in fuel cost (35mpg to my 50mpg). We'd save £4250 a year, he reckons. That's a nice figure. It's just about equal to the cost of my train fares.
So, no more cost, I get some exercise every day, and I can spend my commuting time reading/writing, not driving. I like this.
On the downside, I'll have less incidents like the one on the way in this morning, when I swerved to avoid something whose identification went "big lump of wood, or mud?" - "bigger than I want to drive over" - "what is it - it's moving? - oh sh.... it's an animal!". Looking back, total mass considerably bigger than rabbit, dark colour, and shape as it moved, I think it was a mink, and I think that's the second time I've seen one in that area.
Cost of train season ticket for a year: £3,440. Plus probably about £800 in tube fares on an Oyster card (yes, I could make that season ticket a Travelcard one, but unless I do a lot of extra travel around London, it's more expensive). So, £4,240.
Cost of the diesel I'd no longer be using driving to work: about £450.
But.... would we even need two cars? It's a 15min walk to the station, and parking is both rare and pricey. I might pull the bike out, I might just walk it, I certainly wouldn't be driving. So we get rid of my little car - or do we? No. We get rid of Dave's big, less economical car, and when we need something BIG at the weekends, we hire it.
Dave did sums about how much that thing's costing us, when you look at car loans, services, difference in fuel cost (35mpg to my 50mpg). We'd save £4250 a year, he reckons. That's a nice figure. It's just about equal to the cost of my train fares.
So, no more cost, I get some exercise every day, and I can spend my commuting time reading/writing, not driving. I like this.
On the downside, I'll have less incidents like the one on the way in this morning, when I swerved to avoid something whose identification went "big lump of wood, or mud?" - "bigger than I want to drive over" - "what is it - it's moving? - oh sh.... it's an animal!". Looking back, total mass considerably bigger than rabbit, dark colour, and shape as it moved, I think it was a mink, and I think that's the second time I've seen one in that area.