| > This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike I refuelled the smaller of our two cars this morning and paid around €1.80/litre - there's our price spike. I certainly had a "Oh my $deity, this is expensive!" moment while standing at the pump. On the other hand, my wife is taking our eldest child into town for a hospital appointment today. It's not as though we can choose not to make that journey (I dearly wish it weren't necessary, but that's another story). So, they have to travel. In round figures she can expect to use 5 litres of fuel in the car for the return trip, so that's €9 of fuel. I'm absolutely aware that the car doesn't just have costs associated with fuel, but it's the cheapest smallest model that that manufacturer makes, it was around €10,000 on the road, all taxes included, and it's already several years old. Fuel economy figures are 4.5 l/100 km aka 52 US mpg aka 63 UK mpg "combined". To make the journey by public transport would take pretty much the same time from our home to the hospital but the connection only works twice per hour, so that means she should expect additional waiting time at least on the return trip, which the car doesn't have. The kicker? The train ticket for my wife would be €30 for the round-trip. My son would travel free but only because I paid for an annual railcard for him already, covering his journey to school. So even with Europe at war, it's still apparently significantly cheaper for us to travel by (ICE) car. Which feels wrong :( |
Choices, ordered by price ascending were:
1 person - train, backroads, highway
2 people - backroads, train, highway
3 people - backroads, highway, train
Also train was faster than backroads, but slower than highway.
Nevertheless with 2 people on board I often opted for the backroads, because then we could leave at e.g. 10pm after a long supper.