14 ms·

We use our car almost every day (groceries, errands), it would cost dramatically more and take more time to rent vehicles. These sorts of posts always seem over

We use our car almost every day (groceries, errands), it would cost dramatically more and take more time to rent vehicles. These sorts of posts always seem over-fitted to highly walkable areas. And maybe that's the intended audience but they rarely qualify the advice.

enriquto 6y ago
Considering that most of the human population lives in highly walkable areas, I find this "over-fitting" perfectly appropriate.
- pier25 6y ago
  Most people do live in cities but not all areas of all cities are highly walkable. In many suburbs for example it's common to need the car to do basically anything.
  - Ma8ee 6y ago
    In America.
    - davidw 6y ago
      I'd refine that some to "places where most development occurred post WWII, and they didn't maintain a tradition of mixed use development", so a lot of the US, especially in the west, Australia and Canada too, most likely, although I'm less familiar with them. The US used to have corner stores and fairly walkable places, but it's something you find in the older parts of towns and cities, and it may have decayed since it wasn't prioritized much for many years.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      When I went to a business trip to Germany my German coworkers told me to rent a car. The city I was going to didn't have good public transport. Sure if you go to one of the cities in Europe (or Asia) at anyone can name there is good transport. However even in Europe (or Asia) there are a lot of tiny cities and towns either without good transport, or limited transport. (There are of course some tiny towns with good transport) Notice above I qualified it with Europe or Asia. If you go to South America, or Africa odds are even the city you are going to doesn't have good transit for most people. (A handful are building, but there are lot of cities that could have good transit that don't have it)
    - pier25 6y ago
      In Europe too. I was born in a small city in Spain where most people still need a car to go to work, do groceries, go to a restaurant, etc.
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      And in Europe, too. Sure, America is huge and there are a lot of cars, but in Germany (as an example) there are still over 500 cars for every 1000 people.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  I don't think this is true at all. Most of the world population lives in third world conditions. They may not have a car, because they can't afford it, but that doesn't mean their neighborhoods are "walkable". Visit the slums of Mumbai, or the shanty towns of Lagos, or the favelas of Lima. These may be high density, but they're certainly not "walkable". Either in the sense of being pedestrian friendly or having many services easily accessible by walking/public transport. There's a reason that the motorbike is one of the most popular consumer products for middle income countries. In the vast majority of the third world, the populace is desperate for any sort of personal motor transportation.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    A lot of people seem to think that the choice is between modern US cities (where indeed it's often hard to get around by foot or decent public transit) or the core of Amsterdam (or a number of at least parts of European cities). And that all of Asia in like Tokyo. I assure them that Jakarta and KL are not Tokyo.
CamelCaseName 6y ago
The domain name, 5kids1condo, basically qualifies the advice on its own!
- asdff 6y ago
  Tangential, but my god why'd they have to name it that. All I can think of is that dirty viral video from a decade and a half ago. Damn my millennial early internet upbringing.
ghaff 6y ago
Yeah. To his condo point, fine. But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom? (And if you own a house, you may well have a spare room that can be used as a guest bedroom but you also use for other things.) As for vehicles, I have a mid-sized or so SUV and sometimes I transport people but I often transport stuff from the home improvement store, etc. I have no interest in owning a small vehicle and then have to rent on a semi-regular basis. And, yes, I own tons of stuff that doesn't get used much. But most of that stuff can't be easily rented or borrowed for the times I need it. Should I rent an electric drill or a weed whacker every time I need one? There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  > There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs. There's monetary and temporal costs. Instead of having to spend minutes to an hour to arrange and get a rental, you could have the item waiting in another room, ready to be used.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom? I think this one is not quite like the others. if you only need a car for one week each year, you don't lose much by renting. but putting your friends in a hotel is not really a substitute for having them stay at your place imo. if I only get to see a close friend once a year, I want to make the most of the time that they're in town, cooking breakfast together, staying up talking until we can't keep our eyes open, etc. it's really not the same if a day of hanging out starts and ends with transit to/from a hotel.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Honestly, if they're a close friend, buy an air mattress or let them crash on the couch. I've done it plenty of times when visiting someone who didn't have a guest bedroom or there were a bunch of us. I agree on the car if you're really only using it for a trip or two a year. (Indeed, I wouldn't even consider owning a car in that case. I probably would if I were going away a couple weekends a month though.)
rzwitserloot 6y ago
You're over-fitting to a specific example in this post. It's not about that; it's about the principle. If you either determine that you use that car a ton, or you do the math, work out exactly how often you'd need that car, and what the costs are for the nearest viable alternative solution, and the car's TCO is cheaper - great. You did what this post is trying to tell you to do: Stop thinking about an unattainable hypothetical 'I shall be using this at maximum usage all the time', and start thinking about what you actually need, and how often you'd need it.
- smilekzs 6y ago
  On a higher order, not everyone can predict their future usage patterns to a confidence interval unambigious for a clear-cut rent-or-buy decision.
  - asdff 6y ago
    At which point in the would be future you could peform the calculation again based on present use cases and weigh whether or not you should buy the car. "Don't throw away that extra axe, you might be a lumberjack one day" isn't great advice.
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  Aren't both arguments just overfitting then? The article is an overfit of a situation unique to them (great walkability and on-time, frequent public transit is not commonplace) and the OP you're replying to sees a high need of independent travel on their own unique schedule outside of their local public transit time frames and rideshare availabilities. Perhaps the lesson to learn is simply judge and balance your own unique situation to your needs, and drink a large cup of stfu when it comes to judging others for what their needs are rather than push your own choices/agenda upon others?
whoisburbansky 6y ago
Perhaps the 95% in your situation would be more like getting a smaller car instead of, e.g. a minivan? I'm not saying you own a minivan, just that his general advice is not "don't get a car," it's don't get a car that based on some vision of what you want to do with it that only ends up actually happening 5% of the time. The insight is that it's usually cheaper to rent for the long tail use cases than to buy outright and leave idle for the vast majority of the time.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  Many minivans are less expensive than many small cars. I do think there's a good life hack here of "don't spend a lot of money on a car" but I'm not sure it says much about the type of car.
  - whoisburbansky 6y ago
    Right, you have to pick the dimension of comparison to matter to you. Maybe the extreme case is getting a sports car that you only get to drive on the track once every couple months instead of a cheaper workhorse vehicle you'd use every day.
madsbuch 6y ago
I am quite sure he is not talking about your situation. If you saturate the capacity of that car, then it seems warranted to buy it. It could also be buying that DSLR camera for going photographing twice a year instead of renting for these occasions, or buying that 3000$ workstation to play games that require that power once a month instead of going to a net cafe (or using Stadia or whatever).
phoe-krk 6y ago
Your car doesn't stay idle 95% of the time, then. While the general principle might still apply in your case, the original examples don't, because your situation is different.
- closeparen 6y ago
  There are 168 hours in a week, 5% is 8.4 hours/week. You could drive somewhere 15 minutes away and back, twice per day, and still be under 5%.
  - whoisburbansky 6y ago
    Agreed, but maybe it's best to think of the 95% as a convenient placeholder to remind you to account for extreme cases rather than a hard and fast rule.
    - drdec 6y ago
      I think it might be even more useful to think about the time you saved - i.e. without a car, will you be spending more than 5% of your time on transportation?
  - phoe-krk 6y ago
    Data point: as someone who grew up in villages and small cities in eastern Europe, I've seen cars being used for whole hours a day in total. Driving somewhere for thirty minutes a day is still a short total commute time relative to what I have experienced in rural and little-urbanized regions.
eikenberry 6y ago
The author doesn't even say not to get a car. He says don't optimize your car purchase for something ("schlep a bunch of kids far away") you almost never need it for. Optimize for the common use case. So buy a small car for day to day and rent the mini-van for those occasions.
- echelon 6y ago
  This doesn't work for rural and suburban America. What are you going to do, drive half an hour to pick up your other car? And spend another half hour waiting? That's incredibly inconvenient and costly. The car-agnostic ideal won't work outside of major cities. The backbone of America is car travel. People outside cities have more space and more stuff. They expect hauling and utility function in their vehicles. This isn't changing. Maybe if you can convince suburbanites to downsize, you might have a point. But that's also a city-centric viewpoint imposed by limited space and desire to move easily. Neither of those things are desired in the suburbs. City dwellers don't get it because they don't live that life.
  - shard 6y ago
    Just so I can get an idea of the magnitude of the number, I am making an estimation. Please point out any egregiously incorrect numbers. Price difference between smaller car and larger car: $15000 Lifetime of car: 8 years Frequency the larger car is needed: once per month Additional time to pick up and drop off rental: 3 hours Money saved per hour: $52 So it seems that if someone values their time more than ~$50/hour, they should buy the larger vehicle. Edit: Forgot to take into account the rental fee: $150 Money saved per hour: $2 It looks like it doesn't make sense to rent, as buying would allow the convenience of using the larger vehicle any time, especially if it is more than once a month.
    - mikelward 6y ago
      Assuming all else is equal. But what if you need to move further from work to get a house with parking space for your extra vehicle? Then you should also account for your extra commute time.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
acolumb 6y ago
I also think that leasing or buying used negates the car-rental argument. The costs of owning a used sedan are very low, and the on-demand convenience imho beats renting a car for $8/hr. Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit. Own what appreciates, rent what depreciates.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  > Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit. That's not accurate. With a lease you're just paying for the depreciation directly, at a predetermined rate. It can definitely make sense, though. I leased a Bolt for my wife for $6K for three years. Even if she only drove it once every week or so it would be hard to do on-demand rental for less.

enriquto 6y ago

Considering that most of the human population lives in highly walkable areas, I find this "over-fitting" perfectly appropriate.

pier25 6y ago
Most people do live in cities but not all areas of all cities are highly walkable. In many suburbs for example it's common to need the car to do basically anything.
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  In America.
  - davidw 6y ago
    I'd refine that some to "places where most development occurred post WWII, and they didn't maintain a tradition of mixed use development", so a lot of the US, especially in the west, Australia and Canada too, most likely, although I'm less familiar with them. The US used to have corner stores and fairly walkable places, but it's something you find in the older parts of towns and cities, and it may have decayed since it wasn't prioritized much for many years.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    When I went to a business trip to Germany my German coworkers told me to rent a car. The city I was going to didn't have good public transport. Sure if you go to one of the cities in Europe (or Asia) at anyone can name there is good transport. However even in Europe (or Asia) there are a lot of tiny cities and towns either without good transport, or limited transport. (There are of course some tiny towns with good transport) Notice above I qualified it with Europe or Asia. If you go to South America, or Africa odds are even the city you are going to doesn't have good transit for most people. (A handful are building, but there are lot of cities that could have good transit that don't have it)
  - pier25 6y ago
    In Europe too. I was born in a small city in Spain where most people still need a car to go to work, do groceries, go to a restaurant, etc.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    And in Europe, too. Sure, America is huge and there are a lot of cars, but in Germany (as an example) there are still over 500 cars for every 1000 people.
dcolkitt 6y ago
I don't think this is true at all. Most of the world population lives in third world conditions. They may not have a car, because they can't afford it, but that doesn't mean their neighborhoods are "walkable". Visit the slums of Mumbai, or the shanty towns of Lagos, or the favelas of Lima. These may be high density, but they're certainly not "walkable". Either in the sense of being pedestrian friendly or having many services easily accessible by walking/public transport. There's a reason that the motorbike is one of the most popular consumer products for middle income countries. In the vast majority of the third world, the populace is desperate for any sort of personal motor transportation.
- ghaff 6y ago
  A lot of people seem to think that the choice is between modern US cities (where indeed it's often hard to get around by foot or decent public transit) or the core of Amsterdam (or a number of at least parts of European cities). And that all of Asia in like Tokyo. I assure them that Jakarta and KL are not Tokyo.

CamelCaseName 6y ago

The domain name, 5kids1condo, basically qualifies the advice on its own!

asdff 6y ago
Tangential, but my god why'd they have to name it that. All I can think of is that dirty viral video from a decade and a half ago. Damn my millennial early internet upbringing.

ghaff 6y ago

Yeah. To his condo point, fine. But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom? (And if you own a house, you may well have a spare room that can be used as a guest bedroom but you also use for other things.) As for vehicles, I have a mid-sized or so SUV and sometimes I transport people but I often transport stuff from the home improvement store, etc. I have no interest in owning a small vehicle and then have to rent on a semi-regular basis. And, yes, I own tons of stuff that doesn't get used much. But most of that stuff can't be easily rented or borrowed for the times I need it. Should I rent an electric drill or a weed whacker every time I need one? There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.

theandrewbailey 6y ago
> There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs. There's monetary and temporal costs. Instead of having to spend minutes to an hour to arrange and get a rental, you could have the item waiting in another room, ready to be used.
leetcrew 6y ago
> But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom? I think this one is not quite like the others. if you only need a car for one week each year, you don't lose much by renting. but putting your friends in a hotel is not really a substitute for having them stay at your place imo. if I only get to see a close friend once a year, I want to make the most of the time that they're in town, cooking breakfast together, staying up talking until we can't keep our eyes open, etc. it's really not the same if a day of hanging out starts and ends with transit to/from a hotel.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Honestly, if they're a close friend, buy an air mattress or let them crash on the couch. I've done it plenty of times when visiting someone who didn't have a guest bedroom or there were a bunch of us. I agree on the car if you're really only using it for a trip or two a year. (Indeed, I wouldn't even consider owning a car in that case. I probably would if I were going away a couple weekends a month though.)

rzwitserloot 6y ago

You're over-fitting to a specific example in this post. It's not about that; it's about the principle. If you either determine that you use that car a ton, or you do the math, work out exactly how often you'd need that car, and what the costs are for the nearest viable alternative solution, and the car's TCO is cheaper - great. You did what this post is trying to tell you to do: Stop thinking about an unattainable hypothetical 'I shall be using this at maximum usage all the time', and start thinking about what you actually need, and how often you'd need it.

smilekzs 6y ago
On a higher order, not everyone can predict their future usage patterns to a confidence interval unambigious for a clear-cut rent-or-buy decision.
- asdff 6y ago
  At which point in the would be future you could peform the calculation again based on present use cases and weigh whether or not you should buy the car. "Don't throw away that extra axe, you might be a lumberjack one day" isn't great advice.
NoOneNew 6y ago
Aren't both arguments just overfitting then? The article is an overfit of a situation unique to them (great walkability and on-time, frequent public transit is not commonplace) and the OP you're replying to sees a high need of independent travel on their own unique schedule outside of their local public transit time frames and rideshare availabilities. Perhaps the lesson to learn is simply judge and balance your own unique situation to your needs, and drink a large cup of stfu when it comes to judging others for what their needs are rather than push your own choices/agenda upon others?

whoisburbansky 6y ago

Perhaps the 95% in your situation would be more like getting a smaller car instead of, e.g. a minivan? I'm not saying you own a minivan, just that his general advice is not "don't get a car," it's don't get a car that based on some vision of what you want to do with it that only ends up actually happening 5% of the time. The insight is that it's usually cheaper to rent for the long tail use cases than to buy outright and leave idle for the vast majority of the time.

stickfigure 6y ago
Many minivans are less expensive than many small cars. I do think there's a good life hack here of "don't spend a lot of money on a car" but I'm not sure it says much about the type of car.
- whoisburbansky 6y ago
  Right, you have to pick the dimension of comparison to matter to you. Maybe the extreme case is getting a sports car that you only get to drive on the track once every couple months instead of a cheaper workhorse vehicle you'd use every day.

madsbuch 6y ago

I am quite sure he is not talking about your situation. If you saturate the capacity of that car, then it seems warranted to buy it. It could also be buying that DSLR camera for going photographing twice a year instead of renting for these occasions, or buying that 3000$ workstation to play games that require that power once a month instead of going to a net cafe (or using Stadia or whatever).

phoe-krk 6y ago

Your car doesn't stay idle 95% of the time, then. While the general principle might still apply in your case, the original examples don't, because your situation is different.

closeparen 6y ago
There are 168 hours in a week, 5% is 8.4 hours/week. You could drive somewhere 15 minutes away and back, twice per day, and still be under 5%.
- whoisburbansky 6y ago
  Agreed, but maybe it's best to think of the 95% as a convenient placeholder to remind you to account for extreme cases rather than a hard and fast rule.
  - drdec 6y ago
    I think it might be even more useful to think about the time you saved - i.e. without a car, will you be spending more than 5% of your time on transportation?
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  Data point: as someone who grew up in villages and small cities in eastern Europe, I've seen cars being used for whole hours a day in total. Driving somewhere for thirty minutes a day is still a short total commute time relative to what I have experienced in rural and little-urbanized regions.

eikenberry 6y ago

The author doesn't even say not to get a car. He says don't optimize your car purchase for something ("schlep a bunch of kids far away") you almost never need it for. Optimize for the common use case. So buy a small car for day to day and rent the mini-van for those occasions.

echelon 6y ago
This doesn't work for rural and suburban America. What are you going to do, drive half an hour to pick up your other car? And spend another half hour waiting? That's incredibly inconvenient and costly. The car-agnostic ideal won't work outside of major cities. The backbone of America is car travel. People outside cities have more space and more stuff. They expect hauling and utility function in their vehicles. This isn't changing. Maybe if you can convince suburbanites to downsize, you might have a point. But that's also a city-centric viewpoint imposed by limited space and desire to move easily. Neither of those things are desired in the suburbs. City dwellers don't get it because they don't live that life.
- shard 6y ago
  Just so I can get an idea of the magnitude of the number, I am making an estimation. Please point out any egregiously incorrect numbers. Price difference between smaller car and larger car: $15000 Lifetime of car: 8 years Frequency the larger car is needed: once per month Additional time to pick up and drop off rental: 3 hours Money saved per hour: $52 So it seems that if someone values their time more than ~$50/hour, they should buy the larger vehicle. Edit: Forgot to take into account the rental fee: $150 Money saved per hour: $2 It looks like it doesn't make sense to rent, as buying would allow the convenience of using the larger vehicle any time, especially if it is more than once a month.
  - mikelward 6y ago
    Assuming all else is equal. But what if you need to move further from work to get a house with parking space for your extra vehicle? Then you should also account for your extra commute time.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

acolumb 6y ago

I also think that leasing or buying used negates the car-rental argument. The costs of owning a used sedan are very low, and the on-demand convenience imho beats renting a car for $8/hr. Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit. Own what appreciates, rent what depreciates.

rootusrootus 6y ago
> Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit. That's not accurate. With a lease you're just paying for the depreciation directly, at a predetermined rate. It can definitely make sense, though. I leased a Bolt for my wife for $6K for three years. Even if she only drove it once every week or so it would be hard to do on-demand rental for less.