More than 20 years!

Brisbane's Little Stanley Street hosts a series of restaurants with outdoor dining overlooking Southbank Parklands. One is the Eastern European restaurant Torba.

While our meal was prepared, a pretentiously expensive looking car arrived nearby. This prompted my girlfriend to share a recent realisation:

You know, my public transport costs me about $30 a week, tops. For the same price as a $30,000 car, I could catch public transport for 1,000 weeks. That's 20 years! And that doesn't even include petrol, registration etc.

She's right of course. And I've written about how expensive driving is. But her thought is a great way of expressing just how much sacrifice is involved in owning a car.

PS. I recently did a course on behavioural economics, where one example was car buying. We compare one car with another, but struggle to compare across categories. We rarely ask a question like "Is this car worth more than two vacations a year?" to work out if there are better things we could do with our money.

PPS. We then caught the bus home - on free travel.