![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/holoz0r/23tbKPVHa37JaqhjpNgaiqMG71mqQdpJXMdbxsJ7QLLoka2WBDhpY4hTZskewky71cR2K.png)



I am thinking a lot about money lately. Unemployment tends to do that to a person. I was going to say it does it to a man, but I'm trying to be as appealing as possible to a broad audience here with my rambling. I'm a person. 

Anyway, I recently got a new car, a 2.5L Mazda 6 Wagon, and I love it. But when I look at what job I might end up doing in the future, travel times, distances etc, I need a good way to work out the economics of travel, particularly so if public transport isn't a viable option to arrive at my location in a reasonable amount of time. 

I purchased my car outright, and it is fully paid off, so I don't have any loan repayments, interest or the like to worry about. 

Having owned my new car for about eight months now, I've settled in to about 7.8L/100 KM, which is one of the baselines for my calculations. With an average fuel price of around $2.2 a litre my fuel comes to...

Fuel costs about 17.2 cents per kilometre. 

I have calculated the annual servicing (over ten years) to cost an average of $858. Not all of these expenses are incurred each year, but rather, if I have the car for 100,000 KM (with a 10,000 KM service interval) - each of the services would cost this on average, based on Mazda's calculator on their website. 

So for each 10,000 kilometres I drive, I pay 8.6 cents per kilometre to keep the car serviced.

Then, there's the cost of tyres. They're around $1500 for the ones I like to get - and they should last a minimum of 25000KM (though, in theory would last much longer) - this is a conservative calculation to allow for the provisions of spares, punctures, or repairs. 

This means then, for every 25,000 kilometres I drive , I pay 6 cents per kilometre for tyres. 

Then, there's insurance and registration. This are annual costs, and with the assumption that I drive 15,000 kilometres each year, with insurance costing around $1300 and registration being $690, the equation is a bit more nebulous, but still easy: 15,000 kilometres a year is 42 kilometres a day, and thus: 

$1990 / 365 = $5.45 a day. 5.45 divided by 42 is 13 cents a day. 

To drive, I need to renew my licence every year. Currently, that costs $55 a year if I pay for ten years at once. Again, with the assumption that I do 15,000 KM a year, that ends up costing less than a cent per kilometre. So let's call that cost a cent a kilometre. 

I pay a cent per kilometre to keep my licence up to date and legal. (Which is a massive over-compensation) 

So, I can then come down to adding these normalised costs together to get my final running costs for my car:

| Expense                  | Cost Per KM (cents) |
|--------------------------|---------------------|
| Tyres                    | 6                   |
| Licence                  | 1                   |
| Fuel                     | 17.2                |
| Registration & Insurance | 13                  |
| Servicing                | 8.6                 |

So my total costs per kilometre are 45.8 cents. 

This doesn't include parking if I need to pay for it, so any assumptions I'll make about that are that parking is free. 

As a simple example to analyse my expense, If I drive from my home to the city, it would be 48KM. The means it would cost, on aggregate, $21.98 one way. By contrast, a train ticket costs $4.4 in peak periods for a one way trip of the same distance. 

**Therefore, by taking the train, I'd be saving a whopping $17.58! ONE WAY.**

But what about the time difference? 

Driving takes about 45 minutes. The train takes an hour and twenty minutes door to door.

Therefore, driving costs 49 cents per minute. For a journey to the city, the train costs about 9c a minute. 

That means that the train journey is 40cents a minute , or $24 an hour cheaper.

If I get a job in the city, I don't think I'll be driving. 

I want to use this logic in the future for other calculations, So I got gemini to create a HTML / JS calculator for the logic I've outlined in this post. 

You can use it [here](https://holoz0r.github.io/TravelCompare/).


![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/holoz0r/23tSzChULoLwiviFC6uTcKReAWYpf5hGyoHS5GV77BGi7JaWwr4P4YD8UkwxzmRHekfpr.png)