Costs of living in Melbourne for a year - Transit Costs

I recently moved to Melbourne and decided to try and live without a car. Melbourne is a large city and surely if you live near the city you’d have access to public transport. Having been in Melbourne for 12 months and having to rely on Public transport, Ride sharing (Uber, Didi and Ola) and Car sharing (GoGet), I’ve now got a good estimate of how much it would cost to live in Melbourne (near and around the CBD) if you were going to try and survive without a car.

I’ve crunched the numbers and in 2019 I spent a total of $2,796 on Public transport, Ride-sharing and Car sharing. That’s about $233 per month on “Transit”

Here’s the breakdown:

Public Transport (trams, trains and buses) = $1,810;

Ride sharing (Uber, Didi, Ola) = $545;

Car sharing (GoGet) = $441 — I was going to say this was higher than it should be because I used GoGet a few times to move house. But then I realised, if I had a car I would probably be using my car to move…so this seems right.

That’s an average of:

Public Transport: $150 per month (this should be lower if I actually purchased the yearly pass from PTV. It seems I was going Month to Month).

Ride sharing: $46 per month

Car sharing: $37 per month

All together that’s like $233 per month on “transit — going places”. How does that compare to the cost of owning a car?

Obviously in these COVID times things have changed…but this is what it will be like when I start to take public transport again.