I am in Switzerland, public transport ticket is $3500 a year for one person. We are 2 and a dog.

It's kinda sad, but a car is the WAY cheaper option for us.

Which ticket do you mean? If you're thinking of an adult GA it's actually now ~$4,700/yr :(

But, an adult GA is a premium ticket. That buys you unlimited travel on the entire network for a year. Not many travel patterns need that. If you just buy tickets as you need them and especially combined with a Halbtax it's not so bad. Where the crossover between car ownership and using public transport for everything occurs is going to depend a lot on your specific travel patterns and what kind of car you compare to.

That's a lot more than I remember, but doesn't surprise :)

You are right tho. If I would live near a bus station that has more than 3 rides a day (which 98% of all Swiss do, rough estimate) I would probably just use a halbtax and a Region specific subscription.

But if I use regular SBB tickets for like 10-15 short trips a year you are already getting closer to the GA. Depends on your patterns :)

Hmm what do you define as a short trip? 10 trips/yr at $4700/yr would be $470 per trip, I don't even know how to spend that much by crossing the country: Zurich to Geneva Airport without a halbtax is $114 CHF.

€6k/year is a crazy price for a car. For me insurance, tax, servicing and depreciation are about £1k/year. And also that's an extremely cheap train ticket. In the UK it would be 10x that easily.

That depreciation number is extremely suspicious, unless your car is very old/cheap in which case your service number is suspicious (or you value your time at close to 0 GBP per hour).

Also, your car has to park somewhere presumably, which uses land, and I assume your car uses fuel (or electricity, but unlikely if your car is that cheap)

I bought it for £12k when it was 3 years old (Skoda Octavia) and I'm hoping it will last 20 years at least. Service is like £200, insurance £230, MOT £50, tax £130 or something. Ok maybe more like £1.3k. Still waaaay less than €6k.

Park it on the drive. Yeah I wasn't including fuel costs because they depend on how much you drive. I'm probably about at about £500/year at most (I work from home).

When I commuted by car it would have been maybe £1k/year (£10/day but I lift shared).

Ah, okay, so the deprecation is more "this is what I imagine the deprecation to be" than anything else. You may expect maintenance costs to... increase as it gets older.

Yeah that is true, but even extremely pessimistically there's no way I'd get near €6k/year. My last car only cost £4.2k (in today's money) and that lasted for 10 years.

… Do you get free petrol?

Fuel, mandatory insurance, yearly service (also mandatory here), highway tolls, parking fees, usually even the parking space at home, in apartments,...

Just goes on and on

It's absolutely not crazy, and I don't know how a car could only cost you 1k/year. This is just an example but has the average cost of motoring in Ireland in 2019 at almost 11k€/year : https://www.theaa.ie/motoring-advice/cost-of-motoring/.

One of the issues with trains is that people often severely underestimate the true total cost of car trips.

£5k/yr would be fairly typical for lease of an average family car in the UK I think. Quite low, even.

Maybe you can get it down to £1k/year by driving an old car that you’ve fully paid off (in which case you’re ignoring the amorted cost), never needs maintenance, has a low value to minimise depreciation and insurance etc., but even then 2-3x that wouldn’t be uncommon.

But what about fuel?

> EU country is quite a bit smaller than the average US state

You don't need to drive cross the whole state for your daily commute, do you?

> along with the EU being more densely populated

Reversing cause-and-effect, here. Suburban sprawl happens because of the car-centric development, not the other way around.

>You don't need to drive cross the whole state for your daily commute, do you?

I've done this before in America. It's over twice as cheap to drive than take a train.

It must depend on the cities and how far in advance you can book.

I just checked on Amtrak and you can get a train from Seattle to Spokane for $37 in July. This website suggests a comparable cost for driving: https://www.travelmath.com/cost-of-driving/from/Seattle,+WA/... . That seems to be based purely on fuel costs, not counting the marginal costs of insurance and maintenance.

Using the same method, I can get Amtrak from Seattle to Chicago at $169, vs $300 drivings costs.

For your commute?

Yeah, I can also take a plane from Germany to England and pay less than what it costs me for the taxi that I will need to get to the airport. Does that mean that flying EasyJet should be considered the most efficient means of transportation?

What exactly are you trying to argue, here?

- That the cost of one train ticket is higher than the cost of a car trip?

- For one single passenger or for a family?

- In the US or overall?

- Are externalities factored in?

>What exactly are you trying to argue, here?

I'm arguing that in America the only reason to take a train for me is for the novelty factor. Novelty isn't enough to garner a ton of investment to get rail built.

> The only reason to take a train for me is for the novelty factor.

Sure, if you are willing to disregard all of the environmental and health costs associated with car-centric development, then there is no reason to invest in rail.

If you are willing to ignore the more than 40 thousand people that die on car crashes per year in the US, then there is no reason to invest in rail.

If you are willing to ignore the fact that all cities are going bankrupt because they don't get enough in property taxes to maintain the roads and basic infrastructure in the suburbs, then there is no reason to invest in rail.

If you don't care about the fact that your kids are growing completely isolated because they can't go anywhere unless they have someone driving them around, then there is no reason to invest in rail.

There are so many examples in the US where this isn’t true. Examples of where lines make economic sense but have not been built: Ohio (Cleveland/Columbus/Cincinnati possible extension to Detroit ), Texas (Dallas/Houston), Cross-state lines like Detroit/Chicago and Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago. There are others. The problem is a lack of will to do it, a century of demonization by the auto industry, and seventy years of deep pocketed sponsorship of the interstate freeways by the federal government to the exclusion of railways.

Country size is irrelevant for two reasons:

- most travel is within the local polity, e.g. suburbs to work & back, social activities, etc. The radius for these is not hugely different between the US and the EU.

- it's the European train network at this point, not one country's, and it needs to be one US system too, not one state's.

Yes, trains are hard in the US Midwest. But not on the west coast, and not in the larger east coast area either.

Even so, at least in France, only major cities have an OK-ish public transit network (when it actually runs). But if you live on the outskirts 'cause you can't afford an apartment in the center? You're SoL. You maybe get a couple buses around rush hour.

Hell, even in the Paris region, outside the closest suburbs, there are only a few train lines going into Paris. At best you'll need to ride a bus or two to grab one, but most often you'll take your car.

Yeah. Public transport works in major metropolitan cities. It doesn’t work outside that.

> the average EU country is quite a bit smaller than the average US state

I ran some rough calculations and this is true but the distinction is perhaps not as great as you imagine.

USA has land mass 9.1 million km2 50 states => 182000 km2 per state

EU has land mass 4.2 million km2 and 27 countries => 156000 km2 per country

The average EU country is 87% the size of the average US state.