People who advocate public transport like to throw around the fixed costs of motoring because they know that public transport has zero chance of competing with the private car on an individual journey tangible cost basis, so they try to claim the fixed costs matter in an attempt to make a public transport journey compare favourably.
It's particularly annoying when officialdom comes out with it after fares have increased in an attempt to make out that they're not really eye-wateringly expensive, they just look that way.
The other people who do it are accountancy nerds, who tend to be people with a lot of money anyway so it doesn't actually matter to them, but they don't think like normal people and do it because they enjoy it.
Since this forum is (a) about a form of public transport and (b) has many people who clock up tremendous mileages and so must have a lot of money to pay the fares, it is not surprising to find that viewpoint over-represented in threads like this.
Because if it comes to a financial decision over which mode of transport to use, it it the tangible costs that matter and the tangible cost of driving is the cost of fuel. Servicing/MOT/VED/insurance are (mostly) fixed costs associated with owning a car and are only relevant for comparison with public transport if the financial decision is do I go car free and use public transport for moderate to long journeys, or do I own a car and use it for those journeys.
Exactly. The cost of the fuel
is the
only thing that counts. If a bunch of mates are sharing the cost of a car trip somewhere, they work it out by dividing the cost of the
fuel by the number of people.
Nobody uses the accountancy-nerd method. It's the sort of thing that is likely to cause arguments even if all the mates concerned
are accountants.
It's one of those situations where it doesn't actually matter whether you think this is a correct or an incorrect way of doing it, because whether it's correct or not, it is what people do, and they're not going to stop doing it. Therefore any attempt at consideration of whether or not public transport fares are "expensive"
must accept that it is the price of car fuel that people will be comparing them against. To dismiss that because you think it is incorrect is to move the discussion out of the realm of the reality that it is supposed to be discussing, and renders the whole attempt pointless.