I do not know who Sam Cookney is, but it is clear he does not know a thing about transport. I am talking about this article: ”London rents are so high it is now cheaper to live in BARCELONA and commute in”, published last Saturday in the Daily Mail.
He assures it is cheaper to live in Barcelona and commute in than to live in London. My first thought was: “What a waste of time, dear!”. But I would like to explain it with some numbers, just as he did.
As I am a transport engineer, I will base my argument on the commuting issue, and assume the renting cost as correct, although I think the Barcelona one is not very accurate at all.
So, we have a flat in London for £1,505, plus council tax (£75) and travel card (£116.60); and a flat in Barcelona for £580 (seriously, that’s incredibly cheap for a 3B flat in BCN), plus transport cost (£778, he says). Let us take a deeper look into this last item.
First of
all, a flight between Barcelona and London costs 39.98€. That’s £34, not £29, according to today’s official exchange rate at the ECB. Also, Mr Cookney has not included airport taxes in his ticket price. By the way, that is the cheapest flight I have found with Ryanair, but it is for the 20th of January, almost three months from today. All flights before this date were more expensive, especially around Christmas (but those are working days, too!). So, with this way of life, he needs to know what he is going to do three months from today. That’s a big challenge, even for me.
Regarding transport to the airport, the correct fare is £45 (with a monthly travel card). OK, you are stupid enough to live in Barcelona and work in London, but at least you bought the cheapest transport card. For London I have chosen a monthly travel card with National Rail, the recommendation at the Transport for London website: £361.
So transport costs are as follows, considering 18 days per month (22 working days in a month minus 4 days working at home):
- Flights Barcelona – London and back: £34 * 18 days = £612
- BCN Travel Card: £45
- London Travel Card: £361
- Total transport cost: £1,018
At this stage of the analysis, the cost of living in Barcelona and commuting to London 4 days a week is £1,598. Oh, almost the same as living in London.
But we should go a little bit deeper still. He needs to get the first train in the morning in order to be in El Prat (Barcelona’s airport) at 5:45am. So, he needs to be at 5:13 in Sants train station. The complete travel time for this is 47 minutes:
So now we need to add:
- waiting time at the airport (45min),
- flight itself (2 hours 30 minutes), and
- time to arrive to Liverpool Street (54min according to Google Maps).
The total commuting time is 5 hours, plus another 5 hours in the evening to return to Barcelona.
And now, the great deal. How much does it cost to commute 10 hours a day, in hours of your time? I am not considering the tiredness of someone that has to do that every day. Just the cost.
In this website I have found this wage for an online community manager in London: £28,442 per annum. Working 1,800 hours per year (that’s the general amount in Spain by law), the hourly cost is £15.80.
Multiply that for 10 hours lost per day, and we have a total amount per day of £158. And 18 days a month: £2,844 per month.
The cost for living in London is £1,697 per month.
The cost for living in Barcelona and commute is £4,442 per month.
And for me, my private time is more valuable than my working time, so just £15.80 per hour seems really cheap. You have to be absolutely in love with whatever you are going to do in Barcelona from 11pm to 5am to commute 5 hours to it and back every single fucking day. But that is subjective and I am not taking it into account.
Are you still willing to live in Barcelona and work in London? To me, it looks like a really bad idea.
Thanks to Álex Méndez, Begoña Martínez and María Barrios for helping me with this article.
Transmovilidad 