The £5k commuter club

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Tin Pot

Guru
Totally agree. I could probably do at least 60% of my job remotely. But my client likes bums on seats unfortunately (as do many others in my line of work) and it seems that the pace of change is somewhat glacial!

Some of the big firms are getting the message - certain old clients of mine had people WFH three days a week mandatory.

Why?

Ultimately...property prices.

Ironically, I'm convinced that the sky high London/other city prices will drive remote working.
 

Bollo

Failed Tech Bro
Location
Winch
Mrs Dr B commutes from Winchester to Oxford and back, with the odd home working day. I think her season ticket for the train is easily north of £5k. We've never fancied moving to Oxford as it's even more expensive than Winch and, fancypants North Oxford aside, isn't generally as pleasant a place. Driving is a no no as you have to be one down from god to get a parking space and, for the moment at least, she's only two down. :smile:
 
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Brains

Legendary Member
Location
Greenwich
I have two colleagues in my department at work in London, once comes in from Cork and the other from Stockholm, they share a flat in London 4 nights a week.
I've no idea of the cost, but it will be over the £5K mark, in addition they have both lost 10% of their salary due to the fall of the pound in the last year
 

NorthernDave

Never used Über Member
Just worked out that I "spend" £3,700 a year on the commute, if I include parking at work - I could, in theory, park on street for nothing but contract parking gives me a guaranteed space for the days when I get held up or go in late.
I've included depreciation in that figure, along with diesel, insurance and a service. I've not discounted any of that for leisure use, as most weekends the car doesn't move - 95%+ of the mileage is on the commute.
Sounds a lot doesn't it?
But consider that I drop Mrs ND off at her work and pick her up again on an evening, without a significant diversion out of the way, so car-sharing means we're both covered for the commute in that cost

An annual bus / rail pass would cost me approx £1240 (with corporate discount applied though a deal my employer has with the local PTE) and I can split that over 12 interest free loan payments from my salary. But with Mrs ND's travel costs to consider as well (remember we car share) that would be an additional £600 for an annual Worst bus ticket - although she doesn't get a loan option from her employer so we've have to stump that up in one go. Which would give a cost of around £1840. However, we would need to hire a car a few times a year for holidays, or to visit family who live too far from a station to make the train a sensible option, so lets round that up to £2100.

So, in theory we could potentially be £1,600 a year better off.

However, having tired using public transport as a trial it's important to factor the additional time in too.

In the car I can do the 24 mile trip (each way) in around 50 minutes. Depending what time I finish, and where that puts me in the evening rush hour, it can take anything from 90 minutes to 2 hours. On one memorable occasion it took over 4 hours, but lets not mention that again :rolleyes:
The absolute fastest I can do the commute (bus, train, 15 minute walk) is just under two hours each way. If the outbound bus on a morning is even 5 minutes late, I miss the train connection and adding 20 minutes while I wait for the next one. This almost certainly happens on a Monday as in addition to driving the bus, the driver has to go through a convoluted process of selling weekly tickets to an awful lot of passengers, which includes sticking them in a little plastic wallet thing.

And there is the convenience factor - if I fancy another 5 minutes snooze on a morning, that makes me 5 minutes later at the office using the car. By public transport it makes means I have to wait 30 minutes for the next bus. Same story on a night - 5 minutes later finishing something off, means a 20 minute wait at the station for the next train. Plus as anyone who commutes in Leeds will tell you, we have some of the least reliable buses in the country, along with a council / PTE who've spent millions on not finding a solution.

Not having to go through all that palaver and having that extra hour plus every day to do other stuff is worth that £1,600 (£30/week) and more.

Sadly, the bike isn't an option for me either - 26 miles (avoiding the motorway) would take me around 2 hours each way on some roads that are frankly horrible for cycling.So although my employer provides good cycling facilities (C2W, secure bike shed, showers, lockers, etc), it just doesn't work for me.

A final thought - last year I had to go down to that there Laarndaan quite a bit with work, averaging a couple of times a month. There are a surprising amount of people who seem to do that commute most days...
 

srw

It's a bit more complicated than that...
Aylesbury to London
In which case the chances are we've shared a train.

My first commute was Bicester North to Marylebone - then over 2 hours each way. The ticket cost about £3,600 a year, and it was only affordable by buying a Brompton to make the final link to the City rather than taking the tube. It was only tolerable because I had a day of study leave a week. That journey is now £4,780 a year, or £5,580 if you include the tube. Even 20 years ago I had colleagues at the same level as me commuting from Stevenage and Peterborough - even longer journeys. One of my old college friends was commuting between London and Leicestershire.

Then we moved to Amersham in 2000, when house prices here were just about affordable for a pair of newly qualified professionals. That's not the case any more. If I bought a season ticket now it would be £3,428 a year - but that would cover the entirety of TFL's network.

7 years ago I started working half my time in Guildford, so for a while I had the dubious pleasures of driving round the worst bit of the M25 several times a week. Compared with that, a long train ride is absolute heaven - apart from anything else the train is pretty predictable most of the time. When I went into London I did it on PAYG Oyster fares, and if I worked late and got the train after 7pm the fare is an absolute bargain, as it is at the weekend - £4.10 one-way.

And within a month I won't have a commute at all, at least for the moment until I decide what I do next. We think of commuting as normal, but one of the privileges of having colleagues overseas is that you see your life through their eyes. My Munich (and almost all of the rest of the world) colleagues think we're mad. They mostly live within an easy walk or bike ride of the office, and the handful who insist on living in a nearby town with a 20-minute train ride are viewed as eccentrics.
 

Drago

Legendary Member
I thought people in the UK would pay to stay away from London? ;)

I've made a deliberate point of not ever living in a city or town. I'm a carrot cruncher at heart. Ooooaaarr.
yokel.jpg
 
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Shut Up Legs

Down Under Member
Why? It's the greatest city in the world.. half the young people from your dusty bowl of a bitey thing infested country tend to agree as they come over in ever increasing numbers.
Fair enough. I'm not a fan of big cities. Give me isolated mountain peaks any day.
 

si_c

Guru
Location
Wirral
I'm horrified at the prospect of having to pay £5k a year for commuting. Mrs C sometimes wonder why I refuse to get the train to work when the weather is less than stellar and prefer to bike in, as I live 15mi from work, which is a 20minute train ride and 5 to 10 mins walk at each end. A season ticket costs around £1300 a year, and I refuse to pay that when I can just ride in, especially since if I ride in once a month the season ticket works out more expensive than just daily tickets.

So I bike in, net cost this year, £800 in C2W scheme, bike maintenance and extra calories - often in the form of buttered toasted teacakes from the staff canteen.
 

AndyRM

XOXO
Location
North Shields
Used to commute to Teesside and Carlisle by train from Newcastle 4 days a week.

Mostly horrendous in old draughty carriages. The job was crap and poorly paid, but the people were (mostly) good craic so I kept at it for a year.
 

Effyb4

Veteran
I pay £88 a month on bus travel. It takes about the same amount of time as cycling to work, but health problems mean it isn't possible to cycle every day. I think this is considerably cheaper than running a car.
 
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