Your Driving Costs (PDF) is an annual study conducted by AAA that includes the price of fuel, maintenance, tires, insurance, license, registration, taxes, depreciation and financing in determining the true cost of owning a car. The 2007 edition of Your Driving Costs estimates that the average price per month to own a small sedan (comparable to the vehicles available with a CityWheels membership) is $5,047, around $420 per month for a car used 10,000 miles per year. This amount does not even include the price of parking, which can easily add $50 to $100 to the monthly car ownership total in large urban environments.

This is exactly where CityWheels comes in. Even if you were to use a CityWheels vehicle 30 hours per month (a fairly large amount of use), your total expenditure comes to $222, almost two hundred dollars cheaper! And the cost decreases as you become less reliant on a car for getting around. For 20 hours of use per month, your cost is $153, and only $84 per month at 10 hours. And, again, parking is free with CityWheels, so the savings are even more dramatic!

Granted, a CityWheels membership will not get you the 10,000 miles of use included in the AAA estimate, but do you really need to drive that much? The idea is that if you own a car, you use a car. And even if you start using the car you own less often, you really don’t save a significant amount of money since so much of the cost of car ownership is tied up in fixed costs such as insurance, licensing, registration, taxes and financing. With a CityWheels membership, you only pay for car use that you need when you need it. And by using CityWheels as a supplement to public transportation, biking, and good old fashioned walking around, your cost of transportation can plummet as you become more accustomed to finding transportation alternatives.

Click here to view local public transit options which can further reduce your savings.