My Iowa Commute

[BigV]

Rode the bus to work today. It was a pretty successful trip. Carpooling, it takes about 25 minutes, minimum, to get to work. Today's trip took 95 minutes. To be fair, about 15 minutes on the front end was wasted waiting for the next bus. We live only a minute from the bus stop, so I could easily reduce this idle waiting time to close to zero. On the destination end, the (second) bus dropped me off about 20 minutes walk from the office. Perhaps there is a bus that would stop closer to the office; I haven't found it yet. But if it's waiting 20 minutes for the bus to relieve me from the burden of walking 20 minutes, then I'd rather walk.

So, minus the waiting time and walking time, the travel and transfer time on the bus is about 60 minutes, 35 minutes longer than the best case drive time of 25 minutes.

The cost of the ride was $1.75 for the city zone and another $1.00 to cross the lake, $2.75. That's about a dollar less than the gas cost, each way. So, conceivably, I could trade $2.00 per day savings for about an hour (minimum) extra commute time.

For me, this simplified view of the economics of my commute reveals that it's still a better deal to carpool than to ride the bus. I value my time more highly than $2.00 per hour. Other factors that could raise that value are the maintenance costs of driving, reduced hassle factor of riding (but when Tink's driving, I'm already a rider), and other real but difficult to quantify factors like saving the planet.