I had never given much thought to this question before. I thought that commuting was just one of those things people had to do. The majority of people that I know commute. It is something we have just accepted as an absolute in life.
If you have to commute to work, you pay with two things; your money and your time. But I think people would be shocked to learn the amount of time and money it costs just to get to and from work.
Commuting adds little value to most people’s lives and the majority of us probably wouldn’t commute if we didn’t have to.
What are the costs of commuting?
There are 5 main costs associated with commuting;
- Travel time
- The cost of the vehicle
- Insurance
- Gas
- Maintenance
If you have a newer vehicle, you might not pay much for maintenance except for your oil changes. If your car is older, your maintenance costs will be higher. Insurance needs to be paid regardless of the distance you drive or the age of your car.
The amount of gas you use will be determined by the distance to your work.
This article will show you how to calculate the approximate cost for the time and money you spend commuting each year. I’ll enter my own numbers as examples because I want to know my commuting costs.
I’ll start with time because that’s the easiest to figure out.
Time
Why is time included as part of the cost to commute? Because time spent commuting is time taken away from your family, friends, passion projects, or hobbies.
Add up the time you spend commuting to and from work each day. Enter your home and work into Google Maps to get an estimated time. If you really want to be exact, you could time your commute each day for a week and take the average. That seems like a lot more work though.
Once you have your round drip commute time figured out, multiply that number by the number of days you work per year. There are between 250 and 260 weekday working days per year.
My Example
For me, my one way commute to work is 28 minutes on Google Maps. Which is about average for a North American commute. But I prefer to work with rounds numbers so I’m going to use 30 minutes for my calculations.
That means I spend 60 minutes per day driving. That’s 4.2% of the day. Another way to look at it is if my work day is 8 hours, I need to spend 1 hour driving to receive 8 hours of work income. So my work day is really 9 hours. Now my one hour of driving accounts for 11% of my work day. That still doesn’t sound too horrible.
Let’s keep going. I’m a teacher so my working days or contract days are usually around 200.
In total I spend 200 hours year commuting. Another way to display that number is to divide the 200 hours by an 8 hour work day. That gives you 25 working days. So I spend the equivalent of 25 working days commuting per year. What if I spent that time doing something else?
Well, if I had a job that could pay $20/hour from home, that adds up to $4000/year.
I’m confident that I could find a job that paid $20/hour. If you have a different skill set that you think you could make more, then change that number. Another option is to find a job within walking distance from your home.
But that’s just the amount of time. What about the other financial costs of commuting?
Calculate the total amount of kilometres or miles
Now that I have calculated the amount of hours I spend commuting. Next, I’m going to examine the financial cost of transportation.
First, take the round trip Google Map distance from your home to work.
For me, it’s 23 km each way which adds to 46 km/day.
46 km/day multiplied by 200 works days a year equals 9,200km/year.
My Example
Cost of Gas for the year
Calculate the km per litre or miles per gallon for your vehicle. www.fueleconomy.gov is a good site to use. Just enter your car model and it will give you the miles per gallon for city and highway.
If you want to covert it to metric, enter the miles per gallon at this conversion website.
My vehicle uses 10.1L/100km.
The amount of gas needed to drive 9200km/year at a fuel consumption rate of 10.1L/100 km is 929 litres of fuel.
Now, find the current price per litre. Because gas prices fluctuate throughout the year, this will be an approximate price. If gas prices are at an all time low, you may want to enter in an average of the prices for the year.
At the moment, in Canada, gas fluctuates around $1.60/litre. Multiply the number of litres used by the price of fuel per litre.
My Example
Cost to own a vehicle
My vehicle costs $30 000 to purchase. If I divide that over 15 year it works out to $2000/year. I could also include the lost investment income for that $30 000 but that is beyond the scope of this article. This would add to the total cost of commuting.
Summary Cost
Conclusion
My total cost to commute per year is more than I would have estimated. For now, I have to accept the cost of my commute. But knowing this cost will factor into future employment and life decisions.
My dream is for one day to work within walking distance from my home or work from home. When you are able to walk or bike to work it connects you more to your community. Just knowing how much it costs to commute can help you make better decisions about where you work or where you live. Let’s not spend our lives commuting.