Travel costs in relation to your income?

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.

RobBain

New Member
Mod note: Originally posted as part of this thread: https://www.cyclechat.net/threads/the-£5k-commuter-club.222513/

Hi all

Excuse me gate-crashing your list but I'm very interested in this thread.

I'm a part-time researcher at the University of Leeds (https://engineering.leeds.ac.uk/staff/527/Dr_Robert_Bain). I'm interested in people's travel costs in relation to their income. I have two main questions. 1. What % of your post-tax (ie. 'take-home') pay do you spend on commuting? And 2. At what % would you consider (or be forced to) look for alternative employment ie. at what % of your take-home pay does commuting just become too expensive.

Would be really interested to hear any views - especially if they relate to 'real world' examples. I don't need to know anybody's income - just costs expressed in percentage terms (even if approximate).

Many thanks to all.

Happy and safe cycling!

Kind regards,

Rob
 

Milkfloat

An Peanut
Location
Midlands
My actual commute costs compared to my income are minuscule - less than 0.5% as I live close by and usually cycle. However for me it is not financial cost that would stop a long commute it is my time. That is far more precious than anything else. Quite frankly, I would not commute for any job or any pay more than 30 minutes each way per day.
 
Tube or bike is next to negligible to my income. Only cost to me is time. My bikes and gubbins associates probably cost as much if not more than the tube but then I like expensive bikes.
 

KneesUp

Guru
How would you like us to look at costs - e.g. I sometimes come by car. Do I count the cost of petrol and an appropriate proportion of my parking permit, or do I also include a proportion of the servicing costs of the car? I suppose that seems fair. But what about insurance and tax? I'd have the car even if I didn't use it to commute, so do I proportion these costs too?
 

Drago

Legendary Member
I don't work!

Before retirement I'd cycle to work almost exclusively. 'Take home' pay after tax, pension contributions, etc, was about £2700, a couple of hundred more with the inevitable late home overtime.

Annual cost of commuting by bicycle - £50 in tyres, the odd chain etc.

I never did see the point in spending a mint just to get to work, or working hard for a salary only to pith away a chunk of it paying to get to work next month.
 
Last edited:

Julia9054

Guru
Location
Knaresborough
My actual commute costs compared to my income are minuscule - less than 0.5% as I live close by and usually cycle. However for me it is not financial cost that would stop a long commute it is my time. That is far more precious than anything else. Quite frankly, I would not commute for any job or any pay more than 30 minutes each way per day.
This for me too. Word for word!
 

JtB

Prepare a way for the Lord
Location
North Hampshire
I work from home and on the odd occasion when I travel into the London office it's "Expensed" so I spend exactly 0% of my income on commuting.
 

steverob

Guru
Location
Buckinghamshire
Currently just a tad under 15%. Estimating that this was about 12.5% when I started commuting in 2008 and that it maybe went as low as 10% at one point (ah, the days when I used to get pay rises!) but it certainly has been rising steadily since 2012.

What would it have to get to for me to stop commuting? Trouble is, any job more local to me in my field of expertise is going to involve at least a 10K pay cut, more than cancelling out any savings I'd make from not having to use the train. But at say 18%, I'd at least start to think about my other options.
 

slowmotion

Quite dreadful
Location
lost somewhere
I've been riding to work for the last seven years. I did a rather "sad git" calculation a few years ago which put my cycling at about 8p per mile, excluding the capital cost of the bikes. That's about 90p per day out of my taxed income. Prior to discovering cycling, I would drive the company van to work. My company picked up every single penny of the cost.
 

MikeG

Guru
Location
Suffolk
I work from home and on the odd occasion when I travel into the London office it's "Expensed" so I spend exactly 0% of my income on commuting.

Same with me. It costs me nothing to walk across the landing to my office.
 

smutchin

Cat 6 Racer
Location
The Red Enclave
Currently just a tad under 15%.

Ouch!

Mine never got that high. However, I stopped commuting at the start of 2016, by which point my annual season ticket was over 10% of my salary. Not only have fares continued to rise since then, my income has reduced, so it would probably by now be racing on towards 15%. That would certainly be pushing the limits of affordability.

When we moved out of London some years ago, it was considerably cheaper to live in the sticks and commute, but since then, train prices have gone up way above inflation.
 

steveindenmark

Legendary Member
My commute costs are also tiny compared to my income.

I dont see the point in getting a job 70 miles away from my house, because having the job 70 miles away gives me a larger income to buy a bigger house. Someone obviously didnt work that one out correctly.
 

smutchin

Cat 6 Racer
Location
The Red Enclave
I dont see the point in getting a job 70 miles away from my house, because having the job 70 miles away gives me a larger income to buy a bigger house. Someone obviously didnt work that one out correctly.

If you're in my line of work, all the good jobs are in London - or were until fairly recently - so the choice was either to live in London or commute from the sticks. When we moved out of London, we did the sums and it was definitely financially worthwhile to commute - like @steverob, I could have got similar work elsewhere but for considerably less money (salary difference would have been greater than the season ticket cost). That was some years ago though. The rise in travel costs since then make it less worthwhile now.

It's not just the distance you have to consider though. Where we lived in London, it took me nearly an hour to do the eight mile journey on public transport (yes, I do recognise that cycling to work would have been a much better option, but I didn't consider it at the time for some reason - wish I had). When we first moved, it was about 90 minutes for the 60 miles from home to work, and I could always get a seat on the train, so the extra time wasn't that much of a hardship. Of course, as well as putting the prices up, Southeastern have downgraded the service since then, so it now takes closer to two hours - and that's when the trains are running on time...

There were also other reasons to move out of London, though, not just financial.

And before you suggest it, yes, I have considered changing to a different line of work. Many times.
 
Last edited:

rivers

How far can I go?
Location
Bristol
My commuting costs are negligible to my income, but as someone above me says, what matters more to me is time. I try not to drive the car to work, as it can take anything from 25 minutes (on a good day), to over 90 minutes to get to work, depending on Bristol and Bath traffic. The motorbike is a bit better, usually taking around 30 minutes or so. The traffic has to be hideous in order for it to be much longer than that. So I cycle most days. It takes me about an hour (going the long way around), and is generally quite pleasant.
 
Top Bottom