If saved both ways that's $2/day. Assuming you worked 40 hours a week and got two weeks vacation (which most minimum wage people don't, and part timers don't get any paid vacation), you'd save $702 a year, or about 4% of the post-tax income for a minimum wage worker in San Francisco.
Not everyone gets to work 40 hours a week. A recent study showed as many as 39,000 San Franciscans could be getting paid below minimum wage (which is the highest in the nation) [1]. Even if you did, this map[2] shows how many minimum wage jobs you'd need to rent in San Francisco (hint: more than 3)
Still think it's not worth saving a couple bucks a day?
Waaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too many points in this argument to address so I'll try to keep it on point to my assertion its now worth the effort:
So you save $2/day for a week = $14 (I was generous and gave you all 7 days even though most people I know work 5 days and even minimum wage workers don't work 7 days a week, every week, for a full year)
$14 x 3 remaining weeks in a month = $42
$42 x 11 remaining months of the year (this means they're doing this every day without fail, both ways, for a full year and successfully finding some to trade with everyday. Not sure those odds are in your favor, but whatever.) = $462
Considering you pointed out the high cost of living in San Francisco (I'm going to skip over the fact of why minimum wage workers would live in such a high rent area, but that's a different argument), I would expect $14 wouldn't go very far.
As such, having to hustle every single day, without fail for a full year to save what I consider a minimal amount of money that could be saved either by sharing a BART pass, biking, using a hybrid car, or a myriad other means that don't require a constant effort on my part. I would simply look to other ways to save money. Like someone once told me, "Work smarter, not harder, fool."
Sorry, I miscalculated. I counted whole weeks instead of work days, which is 250 days, so really it should be $520 for $2 a day for 260 days with 2 (full) weeks vacation.
Your logic is strange, though. You mention that considering the high cost of living, $14 won't go very far. The insinuation, I guess, is that because it doesn't go very far, it isn't worth much? When really the fact is that since goods and services in SF have much higher value, each dollar you save is that much more important to being able to afford even the basic necessities (like rent, much less food and transportation!)
"What you consider" to be a minimal amount of money is what some people consider %3 of their annual income. For you that's probably what, $3,000? You can probably afford to lose that and it doesn't really affect your life much, which is why you have such a skewed view on what is minimal or worthwhile and what isn't. For a lot of people, $56 a month is the difference between having to borrow money from family to pay the rent or not, or having to decide between feeding everyone in their family for the week or not.
Hybrid car? Okay, I get it, either this is a troll or you seriously just don't consider anyone other than yourself to matter, and thus this idea of saving money is nonimportant to you. But it could be life-saving to other people. Like someone once told me, "Hey fool, this ain't no football game!"
>>>> The insinuation, I guess, is that because it doesn't go very far, it isn't worth much?
Not at all. The point is in a high rent area, everything is more expensive. Simply put, $14 won't go very far. It doesn't mean that $14 is worthless.
>>>> You can probably afford to lose that and it doesn't really affect your life much, which is why you have such a skewed view on what is minimal or worthwhile and what isn't.
Whoa! Pump yo brakes there playah. First of all, you don't know me from a hole in the wall. You shouldn't start swinging wildly like that when you don't even know where I came from or where I've been. I have a crystal clear view on what's worthwhile, but at the same time, it's relative to your own life. I've been in a gutter, I know what its like to live on food stamps and have to bootstrap yourself to get somewhere in life. Nobody needs to tell me I don't know the value of money. I've been there, and I know.
>>>> Hybrid car? Okay, I get it, either this is a troll or you seriously just don't consider anyone other than yourself to matter, and thus this idea of saving money is nonimportant to you.
Quite the opposite actually. My whole point in the first place is there are better, less arduous ways of saving $56 a month than trying to find someone to trade a train ticket with every day for a full year. Hell, you could probably skip the $6 Starbucks every day for a few weeks and save that. You could bike to work two days out of five and save it in gas. You could start a side business and MAKE an additional $56 per month. That was my point to begin with. I'd rather be doing something that's enjoyable to save or earn that money instead of hounding some stranger to swap tickets with me so I can save some money.
> Hell, you could probably skip the $6 Starbucks every day for a few weeks and save that. You could bike to work two days out of five and save it in gas. You could start a side business and MAKE an additional $56 per month.
Aside from biking to work (which is sometimes feasible but sometimes not, such as with people with disabilities, the elderly, people who live far away, people who don't own a bike, people who don't have a shower at work, people who work long hours at manual-labor jobs and are constantly tired, and you know, all the other ways this might not work) I don't think those are options that most minimum-wage workers have. Buying Starbucks every morning is not something minimum-wage workers typically do. Being able to start a business is a privilege usually of the middle class, or businesses passed down through families, or require certain education or other resources, not to mention the barriers of being either non-white, non-male or not a native english speaker... Not to say it can't be done. But most minimum wage workers can't do these things.
There's a lot of people who don't have a better way to save money because they're already saving everything they can. This technique provides a new way to save.
Two things.
First, that's an awfully low number of people who could take advantage of this hack.
Second, You're going to save $1??? Not sure the savings to effort ratio on this one really makes sense.