I work downtown and tried the Coaster for a few weeks as a cost v time experiment. I live about 8 miles from the Sorrento Valley station and 9 from Solana Beach. Since SB has better parking, I drove the extra mile.

Here’s the results:

Cost Savings – at 45 mi RT, driving costs me about $25.75 per day which includes parking at my building. Taking the train costs about $ 14.80 including driving miles to the station.

Time Savings – driving door to door is about 30 minutes w/o traffic. Door to door via train is about 2 hours.

So on a normal day, I would spend an extra 3 hours commuting to save $10.95. In other words, I am paying myself an extra $3.65/hr for those three hours to ride the train. This is not quite the incentive I was looking for.