The True Cost of Commuting

I'm a hater of long commutes (happily with a 1.5 mile one right now), but some of the analysis is flawed:

1) Commuting cost. The $0.17 as a minimum marginal cost per mile is reasonable. The IRS' $0.51 really can't be used as a margnal rate. Simply put, the operating cost of a car is not a linear function of mileage. There are exceptionally high fixed costs, namely depreciation, insurance, (some) maintenance and registration. Personally, as I only drive 7000 miles a year (well below car average), my car ownership costs per mile slightly exceed the IRS reimbursement rate. But my marginal rate is still extremely low - if I drove another 1000 miles a year, it'd cost maybe $200 more ($0.2/mile). Attempting to average a minimum marginal cost and an optimistic estimate of car ownership per mile does not produce a valid estimate for average marginal cost.

2) Mileage to time conversion: I have no idea how he concludes that 1 mile = 6 minutes round trip. Living father away generally implies freeway utlization, where a marginal mile would be closer to 2 minutes round trip. (Anecdote: I live in SF. Thanks to the lack of freeway system within the city itself, a commute may be shorter (and use not much more gas) living 20 miles away from work in the suburbs than 7 miles away within the city borders).

3) Value of time. On a long commute, I'm not necessarily wasting time. Whenever I had one, I deferred actual reading I would otherwise do to podcasts.

I've always found the main benefit of a short commute is flexibility (go home and back in the middle of the day) and reduction of stress (traffic sucks). It is awesome to have a shorter commute, but in no way is it worth spending nearly $250k more on a house solely to live 15 miles closer to work for a typical person.

I bike to work through the winter in Chicago. I don't do anything special except have indoor storage and lube the chain each week.

I just plan for the bike to be ruined and ride a crappy bike that I replace every so often.

I did a quick search through the comments, but didn't see anyone mention crime and schools. Believe it or not, there are start-ups in the Southern states and they tend to be in the cities (New Orleans, Baton Rouge LA, Jackson MS) where crime is pretty bad. If you have children, the public schools are pretty bad, so you'll want to send them to private school which will run you 6-10K per child.

The only alternative is the suburbs. It's tricky, but I found a place about 20 minutes and 20 miles away, but we looked for over a year. The schools are relatively good and the private schools tend to be a bit cheaper.

People don't want big houses (please show me the evidence that they want big houses), but big houses tend to cost more, which means the neighbors you'll likely have are people who are educated, well-behaved, friendly and have a good credit score. "Big houses" is a polite way of saying I don't want to live by people who can't afford a big house.

...I should also mention. Yeah, bus rides - you don't want to do that.

Rent is only steep because the supply far outstrips the demand for these neighborhoods. The government heavily subsidizes the incentives that make low density so economically attractive, skewing the construction and real estate industries towards those ends, even with the high demand. It's much cheaper to deliver services such as utilities and police/fire protection to high density areas, but low density areas pay the same rates and taxes. It gets even worse when predatory, independent suburban cities cherry-pick (thru zoning regulations) affluent households, offering them lower taxes and supposedly better services, which in turn further hollows out the urban areas, exacerbating existing problems.

Industry took place at the center of the city alongside professional jobs. It's only relatively recently that it's been economical to locate distribution & light industrial jobs in dedicated, industrial zoned areas, now that workers have been conditioned to agree to subsidize the costs of cheap land. Further, local governments agree to extend infrastructure to these places almost exclusively for the benefit of these corporations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

The lack of good urban schools and healthy mass transit is a self-perpetuating problem in southern cities, originally stemming from racism. Over decades, a near separate but equal environment within the framework of existing civil rights laws came to fruition.