Quote:
Originally Posted by Daox
He does address this and evaluates an inexpensive vehicle and it still comes out to 34 cents per mile. It is with this figure that he calculates the $800/year per mile farther away from work. It would be even more if he used the 51 cent number.
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Of course, the whole thing becomes ridiculous when you consider that your time has no intrinsic value. Your time only has monetary value if you could be getting paid to use it otherwise. In many professions, a work week is strictly 40 hours, so for a lot of people, a shorter commute means that fuel and wear on the vehicle are the only monetary costs.
That being said, there is surely some value to free time. Several on this thread have noted that they count their commute as free time because they make it enjoyable. It's a sort of meditative time for some, and a time for entertainment for others. Personally, I rarely get a chance to listen to music outside of the car. I don't know how long I could survive with a stock Metro XFi with no options. I have, on more than one occasion, resorted to listening to music on my phone when driving a car with a broken/no stereo.
Economists will always try to assign a monetary value to time, but the truth is it's not inherently worth anything. It's an easy way to measure and make things predictable in the workplace. In an ideal employment situation, the employer would pay an hourly rate based on how productive you are in an average hour. The net result would be that you get paid more to produce more, in total. Workers are supposed to be paid for work done, not time served. Otherwise, why would you work hard? This is easier to see in all of the jobs where workers earn a commission or tips, though personal experience has taught me that the correlation between income and work in those jobs is far from linear.
Taking all of this into account, I think that it's fair to say there is no cost for your time on a commute as long as you enjoy it. If it were time that you didn't have to be driving, would you still be doing the same thing? For those of us who love driving our cars, the answer is usually yes. Doubly so if you think hypermiling is fun.
With those assumptions in place, the lifehacker estimate for travel cost becomes a whopping $1.10/mi, even if you commute every day.