What a Rawalpindi to Islamabad commute actually costs
The twin-cities run is short. Done twice a day, twenty-two days a month, it is not cheap. Here is the arithmetic, with nothing hidden in it.
Fifteen kilometres does not sound like a commute worth worrying about. Saddar to Blue Area is a short run by any standard, and most people who make it every morning have never sat down and worked out the number.
So here it is.
The arithmetic
Fifteen kilometres each way is thirty kilometres a day. Over twenty-two working days that is 660 kilometres a month — roughly Islamabad to Karachi and most of the way back, without ever leaving the twin cities.
A 1300cc sedan in stop-start traffic returns somewhere around eleven kilometres to the litre. Six hundred and sixty kilometres therefore burns sixty litres. At Rs 360 a litre, that is Rs 21,600 a month, on petrol alone.
Nothing in that figure is unusual, and nothing in it is padded. It is not counting tyres, oil, the Faizabad crawl, or what your car is worth after another year of it.
Where the number goes
The interesting part is not the total. It is what happens when the car is not empty.
The petrol cost of a journey does not change with the number of people in the car. A sedan carrying four people burns very slightly more fuel than the same sedan carrying one, and the difference is small enough to disappear inside the variation between two commutes on the same road. What changes is how many people the bill is divided among.
- Alone: Rs 21,600 a month
- Two people: Rs 10,800 each
- Three people: Rs 7,200 each
- Four people: Rs 5,400 each
That last figure is the whole point. The road is the same, the traffic is the same, and the car is the same. Four people who were each going to make that trip anyway have between them spent Rs 21,600 instead of Rs 86,400.
The part that is harder than the arithmetic
The maths has never been the obstacle. Anybody who has shared a car to work knows it saves money. What stops it is coordination: finding somebody who leaves at the same time, from near enough your house, going near enough your office, on the days you actually go in.
That is the problem the app exists to solve. Not the division — you can do the division. Finding the other three people.
Run your own numbers
The figures above use a 1300cc sedan and Rs 360 a litre. Both are starting points. If you drive an 800cc hatchback, if your commute is longer, if your pump charges something different, the answer changes.
Work out your own cost with your distance and your petrol price. Every figure updates as you type.