Quote Originally Posted by David75
For the company car, it depends on the contry where you live and if puclic transportation is of good quality or not. I tend to think that the company car is more an annoyance than it is a good thing. In France for example, you pay more taxes if you have one and it's not always worth it. Plus you tend to loose great amount of time for parking, risk fines and so on. Unless a car is absolutely needed for work, I would not have it. But then I remarked that in France jobs that absolutely need a car are not interresting and/or do not pay enough...
I utterly prefer to take taxis, sometimes it's more than enough, falls in good positions for accounting for the society, isn't a burden tax wise for the employee and in most cases the total amount each month is well below the one of a company car total costs...
So i'd rather have a better salary and taxis freedom... and personal car to commute if it's really more convenient than public transportation.
It indeed does depend on the country you live in. In Australia, the only people who can get around comfortably in public transport are the elderly and students. That is, people who have time to spend waiting for public transport. It's not as convenient as we'd like it to be (public transport), but that's to be expected given our sparsely populated country. Actually though, we're all concentrated in coastline cities, so it's quite crowded in places like Sydney. In general though, when you move out into the suburbs, a car is almost a necessity. We have the same problem with internet. Low profitability due to sparse population and lack of competition due to Government Owned Enterprise late last century has really taken it's toll in the form of backward infrastructure.