For those of us who work for a living, we have to commute to and from work (unless you work from home). Travel costs can be expensive but sometimes we have options.

For me, I have three practical options. I can drive to and from work (which is my usual practice), I can take public transportation (which I do occasionally), or I can ride my bike (which I do infrequently).

In this three-part series, I'll review each of these options, including the advantages and disadvantages, both financial and otherwise.

Driving

My primary means of transportation to and from work is driving my 10 year old vehicle. The main costs of driving are fuel, insurance, parking, maintenance, repairs and of course depreciation. I've never worked out the cost per kilometer (or mile) to drive my vehicle so this is probably as good an excuse as any to start. Over the next few days I'll compute it based on last year's expenses as I've saved all my receipts for 2004.

My vehicle doesn't get great mileage (why is it that even though Canada has been on the metric system for almost 30 years that nobody refers to it as "kilometerage"?). On the highway I clocked it recently and it was about 23 mpg (Canadian gallons). In the city if I just drive back and forth to work and a few errands on the weekends a tank of fuel lasts about 7 or 8 working days. I suspect that that works out to somewhere in the mid to high teens for fuel "economy".

Insurance is not cheap, but I've really upped my deductibles to try and minimize the costs. I carry $5 million in third party liability as I absolutely do not want to be caught short if I ever have a disastrous accident. To go from $2M to $5M in coverage is a negligible amount. I'm usually not a big fan of insurance but this is one area where I think it really makes sense.

My insurance deductible for any "fender bender" type of accident where it's my fault is $2,500. I did that for a couple of reasons. First of all, I consider myself a pretty good driver. Secondly, I can afford to pay $2,500 if I absolutely have to. Also, I don't think it makes sense to make an insurance claim if there's only a few hundred dollars in damage because premiums rise for a few years following a claim and the insurance company ends up ahead. Finally, the premiums are substantially cheaper for higher deductibles.

I don't pay for parking so that is one cost I don't have to worry about.

Next up is maintenance and repairs. These are higher with an older vehicle and every time something major goes wrong I swear I'm going to sell and buy something newer. But then I get it fixed and it ticks along OK for quite a while.

The good news about an older vehicle is that it's pretty much already depreciated by the time it hits the ten year mark. My vehicle is probably worth about $8,000 now, which isn't much compared to a new car these days.

Driving to work for me takes, realistically, 30 to 45 minutes depending on the traffic. It's usually the fastest of my three choices for commuting, but on those bad traffic days I wonder why I drive at all.

And of course, there's the environmental cost to driving. But that's a topic for another day.