Can you afford a car in your city?

By Editor1SYS | January 6, 2020 0 Comments

The beauty of living in a city is the public transport options – having lived in Leeds, London and Edinburgh I found that I never really needed a car.  Getting around and into the city is far easier when someone else does it and you don’t have the worry of leaving your car on a street to be damaged or getting home after a night out!  Everything is easily accessed and there’s a Deliveroo or Uber Eats driver to drop in anything you might choose to eat.

However if you have kids or commitments out of the city, it can be very handy indeed to have access to your own vehicle and despite living in all 3 cities, I have owned a car in all three as well.  In addition to the horrendous parking availability, damages to your vehicle, adding to the pollution in the city and sitting in endless traffic lights – there is the expense.  It’s different for every city but would you be surprised to know that Birmingham is in fact the most expensive city to own a car in!

Kwik Fit did a recent research project and discovered that expenses such as filling your tank, residential parking fees, insurance and things like MOT and servicing can mount up.   In the case of Birmingham they worked it out to be £2170.19 per year!  That’s a lot of Ubers you could get for that!
Or you could look into being a part of a car club that use electric vehicles and they pay for the servicing and insurance costs.

Is your city on the list?  If you click on the link it will show you a break down per city and an analysis of the expenses incurred when owning a car.  It’s a really useful resource when considering getting a vehicle in a city, or researching for relocation purposes.
https://www.kwik-fit.com/most-expensive-cities-to-own-a-car/detail

Manchester – £2031.55

London – £1868.35

Liverpool – £1388.69

Edinburgh – £1361.84

Sheffield – £1347.84

Glasgow – £1266.36

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Methodology: All costs are annual unless stated otherwise. The cost to fill a car petrol tank was based on the average size of a tank being 55 litres. We used this as well as the average cost of petrol by region to calculate the cost of filling it up.

On street parking cost as a vistor, and parking cost as a resident was found through each council website through the cost of a permit and street parking.

Average insurance costs was found through research previously conducted by Go Compare.

Car Servicing & MOT prices were based local quotes received for a 2016 Ford Fiesta with a mileage of 7,134.

Each of these costs were added together to find which city was the most expensive.