In mid-February, Nathan Mackie and his wife sold their car. It had become too expensive to keep.
“We just had this hole in our budget,” Mackie says. “We were spending $1,400 on insurance a year, and before we got a concession it was $850 for rego. Plus the cost of diesel.”
And that was assuming nothing broke.
They are not the only Australians trying to give up on car ownership as cost-of-living pressures bite. A survey of 1,150 people by the Climate Council last year found that 71% of respondents were looking for ways to cut their driving expenses.
Car ownership has become significantly more expensive in the past year. While the consumer price index rose 4.1% in 2023, a typical Australian household’s expenditure on transport rose by more than three times that, according to the Australian Automobile Association’s most recent transport affordability index. Its analysis suggests households in capital cities are now spending 17% of their income on transport – an average of $434.77 a week – while regional households are spending 15.4%.
It took a while for Mackie and his wife to work up to the decision to sell. He lost his job before the pandemic and has not been able to get back into the workforce. He has been volunteering a few days a week at a community bookshop and a local food bank in the northern Melbourne suburb of Reservoir, and while the latter helps the couple reduce grocery costs, the household subsists on Mackie’s wife’s moderate income. She used to be a teacher; now she works for an ebike company.
The car they sold was a 2010 diesel-fuelled Hyundai i30, which they bought secondhand in 2014. They were modest car users: their records show they were filling it up with fuel every 18 days on average, and driving an average of 33km a day – much of it commuting to work.
Incorporating alternatives to car use into their daily life took a long time, Mackie says. Starting to use ebikes was a crucial part of that transition, as was his wife changing to a job that didn’t require commuting by car – a perk of which was that she had access to a free ebike.
But Mackie says they still have difficulties getting to some areas, noting recent public transport slogs from Reservoir to the outer-southern suburb of Frankston.
“It was made better by the fact that I had previously bought a folding [push] bike, and so I could use that to ride from the train station to where I needed to go,” Mackie says. “But my folding bike cost three grand when I bought it. That’s not the most accessible thing if people are struggling to get by.”
Quality ebikes cost upwards of $1,500, but the industry has grown substantially during and after Covid. Sales were slower in 2023 than the previous year, when some 200,000 ebikes were sold nationally.
“But where we have seen massive growth is in leasing of ebikes,” says Peter Bourke from Bicycle Industry Australia. “When people are considering replacing their second car, it’s a big step if you haven’t used an ebike before, but once people have leased it or tested it they find it a great investment.”
The industry would like to see the federal government’s electric vehicle strategy include incentives to help people transition from cars to active forms of transport, such as bikes or public transport. But the gaps between public transport services are a critical obstacle for many people in the outer suburbs giving up their cars.
Claire Harvey is a local councillor in Frankston. She is also a single parent with two children, and her councillor’s stipend is her only income. She has also tried to reduce her car use and expenses, and would like to give the car away altogether, but says that’s impossible given the lack of services in her area.
Car share services such as GoGet or Flexicar, in which cars are parked around the city for members to hire for as little as half an hour at a time, have been growing since their introduction in the early 2000s. GoGet says it now has 220,000 members and they have made more than 8m trips. But the availability of services thins out the further into the suburbs you go, and public transport can be patchy.
“We do have trains which help you get to the city but … it’s actually faster for my son to walk to school, which is 50 minutes, than it is for him to get public transport,” Harvey says.
“And even if I managed to hack that, it’s things like his basketball games on Saturday, which could be at any time in the afternoon at any one of maybe seven different locations.”
In order to keep her costs down and to minimise her use of the car, Harvey changed her insurance policy. “I opted for a policy where I limit my kilometres. I thought, that will a) save me money … b) make me more aware, and c) I guess, it’s one step towards having no car. To say, well, how would I go if I limit my kms to 1,000 every month? Is it doable?”
As a councillor, she says, she tries to work on the issue at a local level, such as fixing bike paths that “just suddenly stop and don’t connect you safely to the next leg of your journey”, because she knows that prevents families from using more active forms of transport such as bikes and scooters.
She says she would like to see more subsidies or incentives for people to use cargo ebikes, other forms of active transport or public transport, partly because those are more environmentally sustainable but also because of the intersecting barriers associated with not having a car.
“It impacts where you choose to live, in that you choose to live somewhere closer to transport connections,” Harvey says. “I’m aware that if I changed jobs and I suddenly needed to commute every day, it would be a completely different story.
“So there’s actually economic impacts in terms of access to work … The frustration [I feel] at how easy it is to do the things that are less good and how hard it is to choose the better thing!”
