Montreal City Weblog

Kate 15:51 on 2023-01-08 Permalink Reply  

• DeWolf 19:55 on 2023-01-08 Permalink

  Drivers like to conveniently forget about the totality of expenses involved with owning a car. Loan or lease payments, gas, insurance, registration, maintenance. It’s a lot.

  At the same time, public transit feels like bad value for anyone who doesn’t have a monthly pass. This week I’ve made a number of short Communauto trips — equivalent to a three-stop metro trip — recently that have ended up being $2 or $3. That’s cheaper than if I had taken the bus or metro, which doesn’t really make sense to me.

  The ARTM has just spent a lot of time and money overhauling its fare structure without doing anything to accommodate the new reality of hybrid work and part-time transit users. The STM is slowly implementing a contactless tap system, meaning people can just use their credit cards instead of loading tickets onto an Opus card, but what would really help is if this was combined with a daily cap like they have in London, so you know you can use the bus or metro as much as you like without exceeding a certain amount of money every day.

• Em 10:41 on 2023-01-09 Permalink

  Over 10 years ago my father said he calculated the cost of keeping his car going at about $100 a week. No payments, just gas, maintenance, insurance, tires and tire changes, oil changes, registration.

  I thought he was nuts but I did the calculation on my own (old but very reliable) car, and he was right. It’s probably more than that now, for someone who uses their car regularly. Our climate and roads are hard on cars.

  But taking transit can feel high on a per-trip cost, especially if you’re a family.

• Kevin 10:54 on 2023-01-09 Permalink

  It’s like calculating the cost of a house by assuming it’s just the mortgage, while ignoring the down payment, utilities, and the maintenance and repairs.

  I learned last year that flat roofs cost a lot more than shingles on a sloped house.

• Blork 11:34 on 2023-01-09 Permalink

  Generally speaking, these analyses can be fun and in some cases informative, but there are so many factors involved that they’re rarely conclusive.

  In this particular case it’s fairly easy, because the person said they bought a SECOND car specifically for driving to work, so that’s a pretty easy and direct calculation. But it’s misleading if the person only has one car and they use it for other things (vs. a car dedicated to one job — commuting).

  There’s a lot to be said about utility and not just cost, in terms of what is more practical overall. The answer depends on where the person lives and what goes on in their lives. For example, a person who lives on the Plateau and doesn’t venture out of the city very often wouldn’t get much utility out of a car, and the annoyances would quickly outweigh the benefits, so the extra expense doesn’t make sense.

  On the other hand, someone who lives on the south shore and has one car, and who goes skiing in Bromont every weekend in winter, and who brings the kids for dinner at Grandma’s place in Valleyfield every Thursday, and frequently takes the whole family over to Wellington for an afternoon of shopping and hanging out on the riverside, etc. etc. would get a lot of extra utility out of that car that isn’t just a matter of comparing direct financial costs.

  Or as Kevin, says, when looking at the cost of a house, there are all sorts of things to consider. He mentions financial things that you might not think of before buying, but there are also other forms of “value.” For example if you compare buying a condo to living in cheap motels for five years where you have to move every week then obviously the money difference isn’t the only consideration.

  Blah blah blah, there are no clear-cut easy answers.

• Spi 12:35 on 2023-01-09 Permalink

  It’s always a pointless exercise in lazy back of the envelope math, you can construct your examples in an endless amount of ways to make whichever position you want come out ahead. All these articles ever do is show the built in preference and biases of the people commenting. Even when the analysis and comparison is done objectively and with care all you end up with is a comparative that’s only applicable to a single situation.

  That wasn’t the case here, first Bérubé characterized the person as a woman from Longueuil purchasing a second car solely to commute. That’s not the case, if you go back to the original QMI article she’s clearly quoted as saying “On a acheté une deuxième voiture avec la pandémie, à cause de ça,”. On as in us the household. So already it’s not nearly as unusual a case, so the assumption that a new car is purchased doesn’t hold. A person that admittedly says they don’t need the second car is going to go out and purchase a brand new one just for commuting 3 days a week when the increase fare is one of the stated reasons for the switch? Really that makes sense to Bérubé?

  I won’t even get into the bullshit about bringing in potential returns had the money been put into a TFSA. One doesn’t preclude the other, and there are some assumption made to get to the his headline figure that aren’t sound especially if you’re going to tout your columns being about “making money work for you”

  https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2022/10/30/moins-cher-de-prendre-la-voiture-que-le-metro-selon-une-longueuilloise

• Blork 14:53 on 2023-01-09 Permalink

  Spi, you’re right that with the thing abut potential returns, one option does not exclude the other (i.e., you can buy a car/house and STILL invest money in a TFSA or whatever) but the thinking is usually presented as if the more expensive option is your upper limit for spending. As in, let’s say you have $400 a month to spend on transport. Do you spend $200 on a transit pass and taxis and invest the other $200 or do you spend the whole $400 on a car? The problem with that thinking is that even if people take the cheaper option, most WON’T put the extra on an investment because we are all flawed humans.

  That doesn’t mean people don’t save money, but we rarely do it by that formula. While the transit scenario is not great because the car option really is money out the window, where it gets interesting is in the “buy vs. rent” argument, where (for example) you can rent a place for $1500 a month and invest $500 every month, or you can buy and pay $2000 a month in mortgage and other costs. Which is better? Calculations on that are all over the place, but most of them ignore the fact that most people who choose the rent option probably won’t put that $500 a month aside every month for 25 years. The “buy” option in that case is sort of a forced savings.

  Side note for anyone in their 30s reading this: SAVE THAT MONEY. You will not regret putting aside as much as you comfortably can every month. Trust me on this. No one has ever regretted hitting the end of middle age and seeing the results of 20+ years of savings put aside. I wish that lesson had been clearer to me when I was in my 30s.

• jeather 15:17 on 2023-01-09 Permalink

  I do want to point out that there is a time cost to public transit. If you have limited time, you can spend the 200 on public transit — but then maybe you’re going to have to spend that other 200/month on premade food.

  As I keep banging on about, the STM is not really very friendly — or reasonably priced — for occasional users.