% of time spent in a car
 

Okay so this is way out there, and doubt there’s any stats to assess this metric. But just for fun - something to consider.

My wife is from Orange County California (specifically Brea); and I was born and raised in NYC, where we both currently reside. We don’t own a car, but maybe take a taxi/Uber once or twice a week. Max time spent per week in a vehicle - possibly 1 hour?

Now when we go back to Cali, it’s often 2-3 hours per day when we are there, and that too just for everyday tasks (grocery, mall, picking/dropping nieces from
school, et al).

So on average, the time spent in a car, based on this very unscientific calculation, is 14 x higher in OC vs NYC. Which got me thinking. Depending on where you live, what do you guesstimate is the time spent weekly inside a car?

Commuting only, 50 minutes a day, 5 days a week so let's just say 4 hours total.

On average, right now (while I'm in SF), 30 minutes to an hour per month (usually to get to a restaurant too far to walk).

If I stay in the IE, an hour a day. If I have to commute to LA or SD, four hours those days.

Maybe an hour or two per month. Pretty much just ubers to/from airports or if I'm out late and don't want to take my chances on the CTA.

I commute by bike, so it's generally only in evenings or on weekends with the family. So...1-2 hours total per week on average?

Probably at least half my week since I have to drive all over Northern Arizona to meet with clients. At least I don't have to drive my own vehicle over some pretty rugged terrain.

I commute by bike in nice weather, by bus when the weather is bad. There are lots of weeks where I'm not in a car at all until the weekend. I did drive tonight to go pick up pizza, but I think it's the first time I was in a car since Sunday.

My commute to my office is 11 minutes or 5.5 miles via car. I work 3 days a week in the office and 2 days a week at home. I live in inner southwest Fort Worth (Ridglea/Camp Bowie area) and my office is sort of close to TCU and Zoo area of inner FW so I don't use any freeways, I take a mix of side roads and one big road (Vickery). So it's not too bad. I also live very close to the grocery store, all manner of big box chain retail stores, etc. I don't actually spend that much time in a car for suburban, sunbelt standards.

When I lived in Houston I had to drive on 59 from my apartment that was on the edges of Kingwood (by the hospital/college/northpark HEB area) into northeast Houston where my job was (the ghetto). My company was in the process of moving to another plant near Greenspoint and IAH (also the ghetto, but newer). I didn't spend that long in the car, honestly, because of all the major freeways in Houston, the Eastex is probably the least congested. But I put a lot of miles on my car, I replaced my tires twice, I hit fragments of an aluminum ladder, a brick, and a trailer hitch and drove through a puddle of paint at various points, and I had to finally say goodbye to my Honda CR-V after I got rear ended by a pickup. To summarize, Houston is a very hard place for cars. My insurance went up a ton when I was there. Between the mayhem on the roads and flooding potential* there's a strong case for owning a truck if you live there, IMO.

*During Tropical Storm Imelda my work flooded. I was sitting at my desk and water literally came gushing out under the freaking walls. Thankfully we raised up our server racks(I do IT stuff) for Harvey so they were already on cinder blocks. Later I had to walk through and inspect some things in our plant and was ankle deep in nasty brown water surrounded by a bunch of machinery that hadn't been powered off, looking back I am lucky I wasn't electrocuted. Also some stupid lady drove her 90s Ford Explorer into the water and had to wade through chest deep water. It was higher than our truck docks, to give some perspective.

Most weeks zero, but occasionally will rent a car for some reason or another. Very rarely take Lyft or Uber.

I only drive when I'm going outside of the city and I haven't done that in months. So maybe 1 or 2 Ubers per month? Roughly about 20-40 minutes/month?

Most cars spend the majority of their existence as expensive paper weights, since they mostly just sit idle for 90% of their useful life. Even in the most car oriented cities people will rarely spend more than a couple hours per day in their car.

Car lifespans are measured in mileage though. This is why the sharing economy is a flawed concept. A subscription based robot taxi would get hundreds of thousands of miles put on it and be worn out in a fraction of the life of a private car. The real advantage would be fleet management, a fixed repair schedule, replacement parts, etc.

I wfh 3 days week and commute by transit or bike the other 2. In the winter I’d drop my daughter off by car (5 minutes each way), but I do this by bike now. I’m thinking of selling our second car, which is just a glorified daycare shuttle, and buying an electric bike with fatter tires for the winter.

My only car runs are to the grocery store once/week plus miscellaneous stuff, so I’d say I spend just under 1 hour/week.

My wife commutes 25 miles to the outer suburbs with very poor transit access, so she spends 90 minutes a day, 3 days a week. So 4.5 hours/week for her. I’ve told her to look for a new job based on this alone, but she likes where she works enough to stick around despite their location.

Personal cars do get measured in mileage, but utility vehicles are usually measured in time and are commonly used for decades. The post office is still using vehicles that are over 30 years old. Cars for taxis also tend to be used far longer than private vehicles. That said, most personal cars spend the vast majority of their existence sitting idle.

I commute from my home in Northwest Philly to the office in Center City via the Regional Rail. I don't own a car but my fiancee does. If I had to guess, I probably average less than 30 minutes spent in a car during any given week. I just don't need a car to live in Philadelphia.

Easton to Allentown and back. Given my usual one-way trip time and back, about 7.5 hours Monday through Friday. Figure weekend travel, 1-3 hours on average.

So on any given week, closer to 10 hours. Some weeks where traffic is okay or if I don't go out on the weekend, 8-9 hours.

Although when I was living in NJ but working in PA, average in car 10-11 hours. I was able to do a 66 mile commute in under an hour but I also hauled driving too! Factor in weekend, 12-13 hours depending on where I went.

The morning commute is not the issue but the afternoon one is. That I-78 can be annoying on the PA side. Damn truckers blocking both lanes.

Now the weekend travel is pleasure driving. Every man should have one car for commute and one car for pleasure. So the extra hours are enjoyable (usually breaking many traffic laws).

maybe an hour a week. 20ish minutes MWF @5am going to a personal trainer about 6 miles away. maybe another 15m if i drive for errands or picking up food/groceries - we share an EV for all of that, i could just get rid of mine but manuals are getting rare.

a typical week for me might be one-hour?

but then, a lot of weeks aren't really "typical".

if we don't have some family thing to do out in the burbs (i have a lot of relatives here in the burbs) or no big far away errand to run, it could easily be zero hours.

conversely, if we head up to milwaukee to see my wife's family (as we frequently do), it could be as much as 5+ hours.

i've structured most of my day to day life to be car-free, but there is often "out of the blue" weekend stuff that is just much more easily accomplished by car.

we also have 4 big road trips around the midwest planned for this summer, so yet more driving.

does a bus count? an hour a day (25-35 mins one way). If I inadvertently catch the bus back that goes down a slightly different route (the dreaded number 345 rather than the smooth sailin 49) then I might get stuck for an extra half hour, due to the bottleneck on the bridge approach. But I always bring my trusty laptop so it's fine if it does happen.

That reminds me that in Romania, I've heard people say say "maşină" for both automobile and bus (I think, generally, to disambiguate a diesel bus from a tram or trolleybus).

Probably an hour a week in Ubers and taxis. Maybe a little more if I’m going out a lot. I spend more time on a bike by far.

Most of my driving is done over two days.
- In the middle of the week, drive my parents from Queens (they come by my office in south Astoria). Drive from my office to Chinatown for dinner & provisions, then drive to their condo in UES, then I drive back to Fresh Meadows. That's about 1.5 hrs.
- On Saturdays, pick up my parents from the UES. Often drive to Flushing to eat dinner, then drive back to Fresh Meadows. Along with a 10 minute drive to my other activity, that's another 1.5 hrs.

The other days, I either don't have access to a car, or barely drive for some local errands if I do. So figure around 3.5-4 hrs each week.

Between 1 hour 40 minutes and 2 hours by day (depending on the traffic).
4 days a weeks.
36 weeks a year.

That's for my commuting, then I also drive occasionally during my days off and my holydays.

Maybe a couple of hours a month. In the evenings I will get to where I'm going by rarely Uber, but on the way home I'll do Uber unless the train or bus station is right on top of me basically and the tracker shows it's arriving as I arrive within a few minutes.

I would say I spend about 30 minutes a month in the car. Grocery store trips and taking the dog to Ft Funston. The only other time I am in the car is to drive to Tahoe.

15-20 minutes to go from Burlingame to Mission District/SF. About 20-25 minutes SF to Burlingame including traffic. Helps that the clusterfk of cars hits at my exit right before San Mateo, with everyone trying to get onto the bridge or down south. For comparison, it takes 45min-1hr if you take the train/bus system.

You live in Nantes proper, right? I saw your videos about the harbor, that's in the urban area proper, isn't it? How comes you have to drive that much? You must actually work in a village in a distance from your home or something.

I have a cousin who lives around Nantes too, in a little town nearby. He drives a lot because that's his job. He's a truck driver. I doubt your job is the same... Your English is just far better than his.

I suspect we still have a problem with the transit policy in the country.
First, it is widely centralized on Paris while generously funded by the state as a whole, which may be unfair because all taxpayers in the country pay for it.
Second, we probably need more money allocated to urban mass transit nationwide.

Roads and cars are useful and even necessary in rural areas, but a majority of the people in the country must now live in urban or suburban areas somehow, whether they like it or not.
So, building more commuter rail lines should definitely be a priority in all urban areas whose population exceeds 500k.

Notice that centralization is not the fault of the liberals, eh. We are in favor of more regional powers and a more balanced distribution of public money.

We should enhance this thread with another question on how much time you spend in a plane, just to even things out a bit.

I live in Rezé (southern suburb of Nantes), but work in Saint-Nazaire, about 70 km from my home.

About 30 minutes per day on average. Everything I do (restaurants, gym, doctors) are all within a couple of miles of where I live.

Zero (other than rare taxis). Cycling > Train > Bus in that order.

I bike to work. Many days I spend 0% of my time in the car. Weekends, I probably spend 25% of my time in the car (which really sucks), driving my kids here and there, getting groceries, visiting family, day trips, etc.

Our car has been parked without being used for the past 1.5 weeks, so not that often! I mostly work from home, and when I go into the office I'll bike or take transit if weather is bad. When we do drive it's usually for a specific purpose, or to go to the place we bought in a small town 2.5 hrs away. The vast majority of the mileage on our car is highway driving.