There are times when it's useful to engage one's inner accountant...

[jducoeur]

So it's time for something new this weekend. We had decided that this was the best chance for me to go visit my mother, and see what her house now looks like. She's selling it, so has finally done 20 years' work of backlogged work on it, and she'd like to show it off before it's sold. (The fact that it's Mother's Day doesn't hurt.) But driving 300 miles each way doesn't fill me with joy. So I'm going to do something I haven't done in decades: I'm taking the train.

The only problem is that it's kind of pricey. I'm taking the Acela down because everyone tells me that it's quite pleasant. It's not available on Saturday, sadly, so I'm taking the less-expensive but less-pleasant Regional train; in order to make that suck less, I blew the extra $30 to upgrade to business class, so hopefully it'll be decent. But all told, it's going to run $225, which feels like Real Money.

At this point, it's useful to run the numbers. Driving myself doesn't *feel* expensive, but it's not as cheap as I think. Even assuming an optimistic 30 miles per gallon, that's 20 gallons of gas at $3, so $60. And figuring that the depreciation on the car is about $.20/mile, that's another $120, bringing the actual total cost of driving myself to $180.

So from that perspective, I'm only spending an extra $45, for the privilege of letting someone else do the driving for 10 hours and relieving myself of a bit of Liberal Environmental Guilt. That's not too bad a deal...

Comments

[keshwyn]

Not to mention you can read on the train. And get up and walk around. And there are restrooms that you can use whenever you feel like it. And a cafe car that isn't horrible.

(I love trains.)

[johno.livejournal.com]

I call it the convenience fee.

How much is it worth to me for the convenience of paying someone else to do the work.

[mindways]

Personally, I find the ordinary Regional to be substantially more comfortable than a plane, and marginally more comfortable than a car (assuming I'm a passenger - the train automatically wins over driving myself because "spend 8+ hours of my life reading" is immeasurably more appealing than "spend 8+ hours of my life driving".)

The one time I was on a bona fide Acela (it got substituted in for a Regional for some reason), I didn't find it notably more comfy than the regular train, though. *shrug* I hadn't done much train travel at that point, though, so perhaps it was simply lack of comparison data. :)

(Oh - and in money comparisons, don't forget tolls, if any. Some trips, those can be non-trivial.)

[jducoeur]

Tolls: true, although it's a fairly minor consideration in this case. Certainly under $10, anyway.

As for the driving vs. reading: I rather enjoy driving, truth to tell, so long as it's a car I like. (And I like my current car quite a lot.) But 5 hours on two successive days is a pretty serious haul even for me. So if the trains are comfortable (we'll see), it will hopefully be a good tradeoff.

Acela vs. Regional: that's mainly based on the word of my boss, who has done both and assured me that the Acela was considerably better. But I'm hoping that comparison was Acela (which appears to be all business-class) vs. coach-class Regional, and the business-class Regional will be more comparable...

[new-man.livejournal.com]

It makes me crazy. Boston to New York is 420 miles round trip. Even at 20 m.p.g., and $3.00 per gallon, that's $63 in gas. I don't pay tolls, because from here it's faster and easier to just drop south on 93 to 95. With the depreciation of $84 and parking at around $20 per day, it's $197 to drive down for the weekend.

If I'm going down by myself, I can sort of squint and make the train and driving come out about equal.

If there are two or three of us? Forget about it. The car wins every time¹. It makes me so angry. I wrote almost this exact letter to Amtrak about two years ago. I got no response.

1 - The car, in fact, does win almost every time, because 99% of the time I only pay for parking for one day — at the most.

[jducoeur]

Yeah -- one reason I've never done this before is that it's usually both of us, and it's much harder to justify the cost for two. But with just me going south, the price makes at least *some* sense...

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

To make matters worse, if you want to stop in New Haven to have lunch with a friend, the price of the train trip nearly doubles.

My understanding is that the excess profit from fares on the northeast corridor are justified as making up for losses in the Amtrak system elsewhere. The phone company used to do something similar, but they lost that anti-trust suit.

Power outlets

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Laptop note: The Acela has power outlets at every seat. (The regular business class has them, too, at some seats, but they're not so reliable.)

Re: Power outlets

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Good to know, but unless they have Internet connections, it's probably not all that useful to me. (About 75% of what I do with the laptop is net-based.) Actually haven't decided whether I'm even bringing the laptop: it's not clear whether it's worth it just for the couple of hours I'll have at the hotel this evening.

In practice, I suspect I'm just going to work on my comics backlog, and mellow out. The timing is pretty much perfect: our big demo was this week, so things are a smidgeon more relaxed at work for a short time. Indeed, they gave us today off, for folks to get their heads together and get ready for the next push...