This is the question posed on CityNerd video titled “Walkable Cities But They Keep Getting More Affordable”
If you ditched your car, could you afford to leave the suburbs for a great urban neighborhood?
Ray Delahanty answers the question in the 26 biggest US cities.
The analysis assumes the all-in cost of owning and operating a car is $1,000 per month, including purchase, insurance, fuel, and maintenance.
In the city, transportation costs might total about $250 per month for transit passes, biking, ride-hailing, and other small expenses.
This results in an effective $750 per month increase in the housing budget for city center residents who do not own a car.
The results of the video are quite interesting, as you can get more m² in walkable areas in most cities
$1k/month for a car isn’t normal. That has to be substantially rounded up from the average. I just got a new EV. $450 payment, $110 insurance. Electricity costs me about $35 more. Even accounting for maintenance I couldn’t fudge the number to $675mo. To reach $1k you’d need a rather expensive vehicle.
But I do agree with the principle here. It would be nice to live in a walkable area where I don’t need a car.
Averages can mess this with this kind of statistics, where small group of people can bring up the average cost significantly.
Gas is also expensive, my wife spends about $130 a month a gas alone. They are also likely factoring in all costs too, including personal property taxes (which where I live gets much more costly if the vehicle is worth over 20k), and all maintenance. So things like tire changes, replacement batteries, oil changes, and everything else, averaged over the lifetime of the car.
You won’t see most of these with an electric car at nearly the same cost. Electric cars see much lower operating costs, but only if you can afford it, and can charge it cheaply. Many people I know can’t as they live in apartments and would have no way to charge an electric car.
For us personally, looking at buying a new electric over my wife’s paid off car, increases in personal property taxes and insurance negate much if the financial savings of having a lower operating expenses. Combined with a high initial cost of the vehicles it doesn’t save anything financially.
Average cost of a new car is $50k. A 5-year loan at a very modest 3% interest is $898/month
Plug in the numbers yourself: https://www.bankrate.com/loans/loan-calculator/
How common is it to acyually buy a new car though? Like surely most people get something used right?
That’s part of my thinking. New cars aren’t average.
Edit:
With some research I found that car sales total market is about 70/30 used vs new. Taking that into account the new average is just over $32k, rather than $49k.