How far will $5 take you?
Today is Dump the Pump Day (June 21, 2024). With that in mind, we wanted to look at alternatives to driving a gas powered car. We thought that it might be interesting to compare different modes of transportation based on their cost effectiveness.
We all know that there are lots of ways to get around, and not everyone commutes. We put this chart together that shows how far someone could get on $5 using different forms of transportation. For walking and biking we considered the cost of food to replace the calories burned, and for the horse we only considered the cost of feed.
Most commuters spend over $6 per day on gas.
For the CODA we used the average price of electricity in the US, but we do know that the price varies quite a bit from place to place. Here in LA you can get a discount on electricity if you have an electric car and charge it at night. Using that pricing you could go about 250 miles with $5.
As you look at the chart from the top down, you can see that a taxi will take you less than a mile for $5. We used the price and calories from a popular energy bar to determine how far you could go walking and biking. Different food choices could give you more “range” for your $5. The Hummer H3 is next in line, and with an overall rating of 16 mpg it is far more efficient than its predecessors which averaged about 11 mpg.
In LA you can buy a 24 hour bus pass for $5. If you rode the bus all day you could certainly go more than 75 miles, we used this number as an illustration of how far you might commute in a normal bus-riding day going about an hour each way.
We would like to hear your real world stories about how far you have traveled on $5. (https://www.facebook.com/Coda ; https://twitter.com/#!/codaautomotive) We are sure that there must some of you that are extremely frugal, we want to hear from you if you think you could go farther on a “fiver”.
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