I managed for about 12 years in Edinburgh without a car and since we got one I've found it's an excellent way to haemorrhage money
I've often thought that owning a car is the best reason for not owning one ever again. I generally figured on about £500 per year to cover insurance and VED. Servicing was generally something you did when the MOT tester came out sucking his* teeth, and was often in the £250 ballpark for an older vehicle that needed tyres or brakes or a fan belt or welding or some other black hole of money. With a motorbike the money I saved on VED basically went towards servicing each year instead, resulting in a happier MOT man*.
* In my experience, they're all men, they're invariably grumpy, and they're all a little bit scary.
Since fuel is proportional to use, and with car and then bike averaging 35mpg between them, I realised that it was more fun to spend that money on bicycles and accessories, and keep my brain working at the processing speed it preferred. In amongst cycling most weeks of the year I rarely exceeded 2000 miles a year in any vehicle—say 60 gallons, or somewhat over 250 litres. That's £350 a year or so on fuel at today's prices, so it becomes quite easy to be spending the best part of £1000 a year maintaining and driving a vehicle, and that's not even for a regime of driving most days. I once had a colleague who commuted about 100 miles a day, five days a week, but car shared; the cost of fuel on even 8000 miles a year would've been horrendous; imagine the cost without car sharing.
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