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Lyft for Commuting?
Apr. 3rd, 2024 01:29 pmThis morning I got an email that struck me as strange right off the bat. Lyft was advertising to me that I should use their service for my commute. "WTF?" was my immediate thought. "Hiring a ride to/from work every day would be expensive!" ...Not that I actually have a commute right now. I've been 100% remote the past 5-6 years and partly remote another 5 years before that. But I've also had plenty of in-office jobs, and I've both driven and used transit for commuting, so I have a strong sense of how (un)realistic this is.
People who read my blog regularly should know that when it comes to a proposition like "Does it make sense to use ride share services for commuting!" I don't just say Yes or No and move on. If I think it's a plausible idea I'll do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to be sure. And even if I think the idea is absolutely nuts I'll still work out the math just to demonstrate how cracked it is. 😅 So here's some math— and some thinking about the situations where ride-sharing for a commute might make sense.
My company's office, the one I was officially de-assigned from back in, like, 2018 in a cost-cutting move— is 10 miles away. A quick check on ride-share apps shows the fare to get there right now is about $24. Let's call that $27 with a tip. But that's mid-day. I could imagine commute hours trips easily running $30-35 with traffic and demand pricing. That's $60-70/day.
Spending $60-70 per day on a commute is a lot. If you do that every day, let's say 20 working days (average) per month, that's around $1,300 per month or $15-16k per year.
This reminds me of the calculations I did when I was starting my first professional job. I worked out that the costs of taking transit (which really wasn't designed for the commute I had) were higher than the costs of owning a car. And yes, I considered not just the monthly cost of a car loan but also insurance, maintenance, and gas. My calculations showed that the transit costs I avoided paid for all my car costs— meaning I had the car for leisure use nights and weekends basically for just the cost of extra gas I needed to buy.
Indeed, "It's cheaper just to drive" has been the answer for most commutes I've had since then. And those have ranged anywhere from just over a mile each way to nearly 40 miles each way. The one thing that has swung the needle in favor of transit versus driving was when there was no free parking at the office. That would change up the calculation of driving vs. ride-sharing, too. For example, one of my customers says that parking near his downtown SF office is $20 even in the company-sponsored garage. Though rather than motivate him to use transit or ride-sharing it actually just motivates him to limit his in-office workdays to one a month.
Another thing that could swing the needle in favor of ride-sharing is if you don't go to the office every day. Suppose you need to be in-office 2 days a week. Then the example commute I described above averages $130/week, $520/month, and $6,200/year. That starts to compare favorably with the costs of owning a car.... Though if you don't own a car you've probably got to add on a lot of ride-share trips for other things such as grocery shopping, visiting friends, and occasional dining out. I don't see many ways ride-sharing to work makes sense for people living in areas that make driving a practical necessity.
People who read my blog regularly should know that when it comes to a proposition like "Does it make sense to use ride share services for commuting!" I don't just say Yes or No and move on. If I think it's a plausible idea I'll do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to be sure. And even if I think the idea is absolutely nuts I'll still work out the math just to demonstrate how cracked it is. 😅 So here's some math— and some thinking about the situations where ride-sharing for a commute might make sense.
My company's office, the one I was officially de-assigned from back in, like, 2018 in a cost-cutting move— is 10 miles away. A quick check on ride-share apps shows the fare to get there right now is about $24. Let's call that $27 with a tip. But that's mid-day. I could imagine commute hours trips easily running $30-35 with traffic and demand pricing. That's $60-70/day.
Spending $60-70 per day on a commute is a lot. If you do that every day, let's say 20 working days (average) per month, that's around $1,300 per month or $15-16k per year.
This reminds me of the calculations I did when I was starting my first professional job. I worked out that the costs of taking transit (which really wasn't designed for the commute I had) were higher than the costs of owning a car. And yes, I considered not just the monthly cost of a car loan but also insurance, maintenance, and gas. My calculations showed that the transit costs I avoided paid for all my car costs— meaning I had the car for leisure use nights and weekends basically for just the cost of extra gas I needed to buy.
Indeed, "It's cheaper just to drive" has been the answer for most commutes I've had since then. And those have ranged anywhere from just over a mile each way to nearly 40 miles each way. The one thing that has swung the needle in favor of transit versus driving was when there was no free parking at the office. That would change up the calculation of driving vs. ride-sharing, too. For example, one of my customers says that parking near his downtown SF office is $20 even in the company-sponsored garage. Though rather than motivate him to use transit or ride-sharing it actually just motivates him to limit his in-office workdays to one a month.
Another thing that could swing the needle in favor of ride-sharing is if you don't go to the office every day. Suppose you need to be in-office 2 days a week. Then the example commute I described above averages $130/week, $520/month, and $6,200/year. That starts to compare favorably with the costs of owning a car.... Though if you don't own a car you've probably got to add on a lot of ride-share trips for other things such as grocery shopping, visiting friends, and occasional dining out. I don't see many ways ride-sharing to work makes sense for people living in areas that make driving a practical necessity.
