How many miles do you drive per year, living in DC?

[Anonymous]

So we are about to move to DC and I am considering a car lease for the first time. In the past I simply drove a mega-commute and would have burned through the leasing miles in months rather than years, but now that I'm planning to live and work in the city proper I'm kind of curious if I could do <10,000 miles per year.

The only long-distance stuff we would have would be travel soccer, which I understand might take us out and about a bit, even to a different state or two, but by and large we'd be staying in DC with an occasional trip to Tysons or some friends in VA or MD.

For those who live and work in DC, are you able to keep your mileage down? What sort of mileage are you doing per year?

[Anonymous]

I live in and work in the district. We don't need a car so we zipcar every few months and probably spend probably 20 hours in a car total per year, including one trip to visit family 3 hours away.

[Anonymous]

I know lots of people (myself included) who only use their cars on the weekends to run errands or to leave town.

Do you know where you'll be living and working? How will the kids get to school? (DC doesn't have school buses for the most part.)

DC has high car registration fees -- it cost me several hundred dollars to register a 13yo Honda, for example. I say that because if you're not going to use the car during the week, it may not be worth getting a new car. My budget is probably more frugal than yours though.

[Anonymous]

We live near Logan/U Street. Our 5 year old car has 33,000 miles on it. Probably 5-7K of that is for long trips out of state to visit family, and the rest is local stuff.

[Anonymous]

I drove 40k miles last year. I live in Boulder and commute north and sometimes south of Denver.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I drove 40k miles last year. I live in Boulder and commute north and sometimes south of Denver.

And? Totally irrelevant response

[Anonymous]

I think about 14000/year but that includes at least two big road trips a year - like to Michigan or the far NE, as well as a lot of 3 day weekend trips to places like Philly or NC. For normal driving I’d say about 125 miles a week. We do a lot of driving to suburbs or Annapolis, Baltimore etc on the weekends.

[Anonymous]

Depends on how much out of area driving to family, friends or sights you plan to do. My car lease started last fall. So far have been putting about 600 miles per month on it. I commute about 11 miles round trip per day and on weekends.

[Anonymous]

We put about 6-7,000 miles on our DC car per year - one car family, two kids, 6ish miles/day driving to/from school, and 2-3 1,000-ish mile roadtrips per year. Plus half a dozen 100 +/- mile road trips for weekends or whatever.

[Anonymous]

We’ve never put over 10,000 on a car in a year living here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I live in and work in the district. We don't need a car so we zipcar every few months and probably spend probably 20 hours in a car total per year, including one trip to visit family 3 hours away.

Just curious.... do you consider your own driving abilities to be sub-par? And do you ever feel that you might be a danger to others around you when operating a vehicle in heavy traffic with such little familiarity?

I'm not poking fun at you. I am however suggesting that maybe 20 hours a year is not enough time to keep the average person's skills "sharp". At anything.

Do you often seem to find yourself "surrounded by bad drivers" on the exceedingly rare occasions when you drive?

[Anonymous]

My family of four has one car. DH bikes to work and I use it to commute about 8 miles each way out of the city. We drive far less than 10,000 miles in a year, maybe about 6,000?

[Anonymous]

I have a 2006 car with only 80k miles on it. (approx. 6k a year).

I work from home. I just started driving me kids 33 miles (round trip 66 miles) 4 times a week for practices. This has been putting miles on my brand new car rapidly. But, I don't drive on a regular basis--just to take them to games/practices. It's all sports' driving--and a few vacations or out-of-state tournaments---but we almost always fly for vacations--uber to National or Dulles. We live in a very walkable urban neighborhood---walk to grocery, drycleaners, school, restaurants.

My husband's office is also only 5 miles away.

[Anonymous]

Like PP, I have an 06 with 82k miles. And it only has that many because we lived in VA for the first 7 years we owned it. Currently we drive it less than 3,000 miles per year and only that much because we take a road trip to visit family in New England.

We both commute via metro and our children go to school/daycare on the walk to the metro. We basically drive to the grocery store once a week, if that, and once in a blue moon make a run out to Home Depot or some other store in the suburbs.

[Anonymous]

For the past decade or so, about 5000 miles/year