Despite gas costs, car often cheapest travel option in Europe

[unhappycamper]

Despite gas costs, car often cheapest travel option in Europe
By Matt Millham, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Thursday, November 22, 2007

Don’t give up the car just yet: Most of the time, it’s just about the cheapest way to get where you want to go.

Even at almost $3.28 a gallon for regular gas at AAFES, it costs more to fly a family to many major European destinations than it does to drive.

The main reason for this has to do, in a way, with butts.

In a car, the cost of driving from one place to another is about the same regardless of how many butts are inside. In a plane each butt is charged to take a seat. The same goes for trains — when they are running. German rail workers have threatened open-ended strikes if they don’t get a pay raise.

Take, for example, a round trip to Amsterdam from Kaiserslautern, Germany. That trip is about 305 miles one way, according to MapQuest.com. The average U.S. auto gets about 20 miles to the gallon, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, so it would take 30½ gallons of gas to get there and back, on average. At the current price of regular gas — $3.278 per gallon at Army and Air Force Exchange Service in Germany — that works out to about $100.

And it’s $100 pretty much regardless of how many people are in the car or how much baggage they have.


Rest of article at: http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=50452