Holy cow, I'm bleeding from my eyes! I just used the new
Abogo website that gives you an estimate on what you pay in transportation costs per month, based on the neighborhood you live in. My estimate was $1045, hence the bleeding from the eyes. It said the regional average is $826 though, which still is a lot of money.
The site takes into consideration factors such as car ownership, car use, and transit use. The site draws on nine data sets, mostly from the U.S. census, that include density, average commute time, commuters per household, and a transit connectivity index. It also calculates greenhouse-gas emissions from transportation.
All you have to do is get on the site and type in your address and the magic number pops up. Here's the site again. Check it out and let me know how much it says you're paying for transportation.
7 comments:
Well mine is $753 a MONTH, not per year, glad I live in a low income neighborhood. :)
Oops, mine was per month too. I fixed that in the post. Seems like a ridiculous amount of money per month. Of course, they're not taking into consideration that I don't have a monthly car payment or that I ride the bus most of the time. Even so, it's disturbing.
It is the cost per family also, and it seems like a lot for transportation, but what we pay out of pocket for transportation is not the only costs for transportation. We pay sales tax to STA, gas tax to build roads, property taxes to maintain the roads and snow removal, etc.
Your second link is broken.
My number is $685.
Of course, I actually pay more like $200, and even if you add all the taxes, it's still way less.
A lot of people in my neighborhood don't even own a car, so this number seems high. Sure, they ride STA everywhere rather than bike (but do walk mor than car owners), but that's only something like $50 a month and is cheaper than paying insurance plus gas. Heck, I bet a good portion of my neighborhood residents with cars don't pay for insurance either, just gas and MAYBE repairs (but not maintenance).
So, I'm not sure where this number is coming from but it must be a lot of hidden expenses.
Thanks Rachel, I fixed the link. I thought the numbers were pretty steep too because there's no way I pay over $1000 a month for transportation, but I guess they throw the high numbers in with the low and come out with an average.
I dug a little deeper into the website and here's what it says:
'We use two kinds of variables to determine transportation costs: household and neighborhood. We use regional averages for the household variables. The neighborhood variables use averages from the immediately surrounding area.'
Some of the numbers they crunch to come up with this average is number of houses per acre, average block size, transit connectivity, job density, average commute time, median household income, average household size, workers per household, average number of car owners per region, car usage data per region and transit usage per region.
$921 a month. I don't see how this can be right. I have never driven new vehicles, though. If I can get into a job that is not 25 miles away, though, I'll be back to biking to work.
A lot of people in the office who have done this also say it's high, so I think there's a concensus.
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