The Cost of Commuting (Infographic)
Every time you travel you put money into the system, but you also cost the system. Your contribution to and burden on the system differs depending on how you travel.
For example, when you ride the bus you pay a fare – money into the system. Your burden on the system includes the cost of operating the bus, and also less obvious impacts like emissions and noise pollution.
By looking at the ratio of what we put in versus what we cost the system, we see that different ways of travelling are more subsidized than others.
The practice of taking these less tangible costs and benefits into consideration and assigning them a dollar value is known as “full-cost accounting.” While there are many ways of doing this, this infographic shows one example of how those costs and charges can be calculated.
- If walking costs you $1, society pays $0.01
- If biking costs you $1, society pays $0.08
- If bussing costs you $1, society pays $1.50
- If driving costs you $1, society pays $9.20.
Creative Commons (CC BY) – Infographic and text by Discourse Media/George Poulos. Source (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/20200905014538/https://thediscourse.ca/scarborough/full-cost-commute
Applicable to this page only, this content is available for use under Creative Commons (CC BY). Users may distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator (Discourse Media). The license allows for commercial use.
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