Do you sit in traffic on your commute, day in and day out, wondering, “Is my time really worth all this?” Now researchers say they can put a figure to that irksome feeling, based on the value of the time you lose commuting.
If you live in Belvedere your commute over the course of a year is worth nearly as much as a brand new Tesla Model 3, priced at around $35,000. Folks in Portola Valley and Hillsborough are not far behind, where the time residents spend commuting each year is valued, on average, at just over $30,000 and $29,000, respectively.
That’s according to new data from Sky Blue Credit, an app platform that aims to help consumers with their credit reports. Commuting not only has direct costs, like fuel for your car, the daily wear and tear on the vehicle, maintenance, insurance, parking and repairs or alternatively, the price of a bus, train or ferry ticket, said Maddi Salmon, who authored the study for Sky Blue Credit. But driving back and forth also has an opportunity cost, the value of your time spent commuting depending on your hourly earnings, Salmon said.
CLICK HERE if you are having trouble using the map on your mobile device.
Since she and her coworkers spend their time thinking about how to reform personal finance habits, Salmon starting wondering just how much our commutes are actually worth because, she said, it’s time you can’t get back.
“It’s something that almost everyone has to deal with,” Salmon said, “and you’re just sort of stuck there.”
To find out how much Bay Area commutes are worth, Salmon looked at looked at 2017 Census data, which includes self-reported estimates from residents in each city, based on how long it takes them to get to work and back, on average, each year. She then looked at the average hourly wage for residents in each Bay Area city to figure out the value of residents’ time.
On average, Salmon found, Bay Area residents lose just over 11 days of their lives each year — nearly twice the national average — on their commute, and that time adds up to big bucks, or about $13,800 each year for the average Bay Area resident. Over ten years, commuting time amounts to 111 days, or just shy of four months out of your life, valued at $138,350.
Those figures vary significantly across the Bay Area though, ranging from a low of $4,300 annually in Calistoga, where commutes average just 17.7 minutes each way, for a total of 6.4 days lost each year, to Belvedere, where commuters’ time is valued at $33,900 annually and commutes average about 38 minutes each way, for a total of nearly 14 days a year. The higher value of the commute is partly based on higher wages in Belvedere, where median annual incomes are $213,500 per year, compared to Calistoga’s $58,533, and partly due to the longer commute.
While all of us in the Bay Area suffer from increasingly lengthening commutes, residents in the eastern outreaches of the East Bay have it the worst. Antioch workers spend the most time getting to and from work, with average commutes of more than 45 minutes each way, followed by residents in Brentwood, Pittsburg, Clayton and Hercules.
But the value of your own commute will depend on your hourly income and how long you spend in the car, train, bus or ferry, Salmon said.
No matter the cost, Salmon said, it’s important to remember that the time is not necessarily lost. Although she cautions against turning your commute into extra working hours, she said it could be an opportunity to read or listen to a book, catch up on a podcast or learn a new language.
“We should definitely think of it as time to be taken up by something,” Salmon said, “and that something could be anything that really fulfills your life or makes for more enjoyable downtime.”
