Live as if

Living as if is a simple but necessary philosophy. Living as if is a way to effect personal change, it kind of ties in a guess with the 'law of attraction' as pushed by 'the Secret' although instead of focusing on selfish material goals of average people who want to unlock alladin's cave it's more a philosophy for an altruistic lifestyle.
The way I live as if is that I live as if riding 15km to work each way is the most practical way to cover said distance. And it is, it probably takes double the time it would to drive but it costs me roughly the price of my bike given how long it last:

$450 for the bike plus $130 maintenance a year divided by 25 years.
Or

130
x 25
+450
/ 25
/ 52

Which breaks down to roughly $2.85 a week to cover 75km so even if the onroad costs were to double and adjust for 4% inflation I'm still looking at $5 or so a week or less than 1% of my earnings.
Now that's affordable.
So everybody talks about cars being practical. Now I'm not sure if petrol is still in the basket of goods used to calculate the CPI for inflation, I imagine the ABS would have been instructed to remove it like credit card debt as these things tend to drive up inflation which in turn drives up interest rates which cause recessions.
But anyway about 3 years ago I read the average cost of a car is $100 per week, in insurance, depreciation, fuel etc. and I assume that doesn't include parking tickets (and fines) and that petrol by the sounds of it has been outperforming inflation.
Thankfully true cost economics aren't really applied to petrol so we pay indirectly for the repairs to the environment necessary.
But anyway I'd put the weekly cost of doing the same thing that I do now on a bike at $115 a week. Now you get the added benifit of it only taking half the time.

Car 30 minutes each way at $115 per week
Bike 65 minutes each way at $2.85 per week
Car = $57.50 for same benifit (distance travelled)

Presumably the hour a day you save can be spent, sleeping watching tv or working out at the gym.
Now I already slagged off cars a couple of weeks ago, what is the real travesty is what I recently discovered since I stopped taking the oft promoted viable alternative Public transport.

Unfortunately my 15km each way is not a winding path through Metropolitan Melbourne but a straight line out of town. Said straightline follows the train line from my station onwards and thus presents the train as a viable alternative.
But a straight line of 15km takes you just out into the zone known as zone 2. (1 & a half stations deep no less, which is to say almost too little zone 2 to bother with)
Now let it not be said that metcard doesn't give ticketing options to it's commuters you can choose between:

Full fare 5 x daily Zone 1 + 2 @ $45.20
Full fare weekly zone 1 + 2 @ $45.20

the advantage is that with a weekly ticket you get to use the ticket for your travel on a weekend.
But with 5 x daily presumably the ability to commute one of the daily tickets outside of a 7 day time frame makes up for the fact that you pay the exact same amount for 5 days of travel as you do for 7 consecutive days travel.
Which would lead one to conclude that you don't pay for the weekend travel anyway.
so $45.20/5 = $9.04
A grand saving of 70c per day.
Plus as I said you either lose part of that value any time you have a sick day, day off or offsite day. or if you've done the 5 x daily you have to buy a daily ticket on the weekend to cover that travel (or use one of your 5 x daily in which case why charge as much as a weekly?).
Even if you were to try and amplify the benifit of a weekly zone 1 + 2 it gets complicated:
45.20 / 7 = $6.46 but any weekly ticket gets zone 2 free on weekends so the benifit is half on the weekend because adding zone 2 doubles the price.
So really it's:

45.20 / 6 = $7.50 a day except that on a sunday you can get a sunday saver for $2.50

anyway the point is rather than giving us full value, all the convoluted ways to save money in an overly complicated ticketing situation the discounts frustrate connexs most loyal users.
And the fact remains that connex trains on peak are unreliable (around 3-4 cancelled services a day) over crowded (you never know if you are getting two carriages or one) and as such you lose all the convenience of a car, they are as much as I hate to admit it, not in the same ballpark as far as transpot goes which is why price wise the $12 difference between driving your own car with air conditioning, flexibility and personal space.
I'm sorry but the heirarchy currently ranks:

bike = $2.85
car = $57.50
train = $45.20

right now connex is everybody's dog to kick I know. But they deserve it, add some real incentive.
The Sunday saver is the greatest thing in the world, it should be the daily lynchpin.