Transport
From ACT GreenGuide
The information on this page has not been verified or updated since the 2003 hardcopy version of the GreenGuide. Its accuracy is therefore uncertain. Please help to verify this page and update it if necessary.
Let’s say you are a student living in Gunghalin, commuting into your university each day, and back again. How should you travel? There’re a few things to consider. Firstly, the cost to you. There are up-front costs for travelling to uni - say fuel for the car, or a bus ticket, and ongoing costs, like bike repairs, or car registration. The upfront costs are the ones that you pay just for travel on a given day, and the ongoing ones are the costs to you over the course of time. Then there’s the planet to think about. The more fossil fuels you burn, the more greenhouse gasses are released into the atmosphere, and the worse global warming becomes, and the less pleasant it gets to travel in to university!
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Bike
Bikes are free to ride each day. There are no upfront costs. And there are no greenhouse gas emissions. But a bike costs money to repair and oil and so on, and you have to replace the odd tire. That might cost you $100 per year. You can get an expensive bike from the bike shop, or you can pick one up for as little as 50 cents from a college bike auction, or with a few minutes work from a waste reuse centre like REVOLVE. (section 4) In any case, you won’t have to take out a loan to pay for a bike, or pay registration, or speeding tickets unless you are a very fast rider indeed. So that comes to about $0.27 a day.
Bus
If you are a student, you are eligible for a ‘School Faresaver 10’ ticket, which will get you your bus rides anywhere in Canberra for $0.75 per hour. Obviously you don’t just go to uni every day - let’s say you catch the bus 4 times, once to uni and back and once to the shops and back. That will still only cost you $3. There are no ongoing costs- the ACT government pays all of them for you.
Greenhouse gasses - there are a few of them. About 2.5kg for that much bus travel.
Car
Most students own fairly small cars, say around 1.5 litres. And most car owners end up driving around 41km per day (We’re slightly above the average in the ACT, but let’s ignore that for now.) For a well-maintained new car of that size, your fuel economy is about 7.4 L/ 100km. At $0.95/L, you are going to have to pay $2.85 for that much fuel, just under the cost of your four bus tickets. The killer with cars is of course the ongoing costs. The NRMA publishes handy books of the estimated costs of running a car for a year, including all costs - repairs, registration, fuel, maintenance, insurance and so on. For your little car, it’s an estimated $86.62/mth or about $12.37 total cost. Those 41 km will release about 7.5 kg of greenhouse gases - three times more than catching the bus. This doesn’t include the $120/year parking cost at ANU, parking fines, speeding fines and random other traffic violations!
Car pool
The problem with cars is that most of the costs are ongoing ones. So if you own a car, it’s pretty much worth your while financially to drive it everywhere. So if you own one, how about offsetting some of the cost and pollution by sharing it around? Why not carpool your way in to Uni? ANU has special free parking for cars with three or more passengers, and you can all split the fuel costs - and maybe even a few of those pesky speeding fines?
