Cars are more expensive than you think, and we're all paying the price.
What does it cost to drive to dinner downtown?
- Narrowly, a 20 mile round-trip drive downtown in a 30 mpg compact SUV costs $2.40 if gas costs $3.60 per gallon.
- Add around $2 for street parking, or more for garage parking, if you're lucky enough to live in a city that charges for parking.
- The IRS, an organization not known for its generosity, allows deducting $0.56 per mile on taxes, much more than the $0.12 per mile gas costs as calculated above. That's because depreciation, maintenance, and insurance are also substantial costs of vehicle ownership. At that rate, you'd need to spend $11.20 plus parking for that 20-mile trip, a price point that might encourage you to take the train instead.
- Of course, it's possible to achieve lower per-mile costs, for example with a fuel-efficient, cheap car, though the true cost is still much higher than the cost of fuel. However, depreciation, maintenance, and insurance are invisible, and they are somewhat fixed costs. In other words, once you own a car, you have strong incentives to use it because you're already paying for some insurance and depreciation regardless.
Fuel is only a fraction of the true cost of car ownership. Costs like depreciation and financing are invisible. source: fhwa.dot.gov
Unfortunately, the above doesn't include external costs of car ownership and usage. In America, we've designed our entire country around cars to the extent it's almost impossible to imagine any other way of doing things. Societal costs of car supremacy include negative impacts to our local community, and to the global environment.
Once you start interpreting the built environment as horrible hacks to facilitate the omnipresence of cars, it's impossible to unsee.
- Manhattan, one of the least car-oriented places in the United States, devotes 36% of its area to streets, the vast majority of which is dedicated to private cars, despite the fact that only 5% of its commutes are by car (and only 7% are by bus).
- In San Francisco, Golden Gate Park has cars allowed on 92% of its streets, yet advocates are having to fight to keep the remaining 8% open for people and bikes.
- Ever wonder why you enjoyed your vacation to Disneyworld, or a dense European city? In part, it's because they were walkable places. In the United States, parking requirements are ubiqitous. Cities like my hometown of Cupertino even require bars to provide parking! Required parking is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When your streets are strip malls littered with parking lagoons, it's miserable to get around any other way than a car.
Our car culture is dangerous to to all of us, and particularly harms underrepresented groups and vulnerable demographics.
- The most expensive public works project in world history was the $530 billion (in current dollars) Interstate Highway System. It had some good outcomes, but also facilitated white flight from cities and soul-crushing suburban sprawl. At the time, Black communities had even less political power than they do now, so highways tore through Black communities. Even today, LA is planning to demolish hundreds of homes for a freeway widening project.
- There were 36,000 car crash deaths in America in 2019, up from 33,000 a decade ago. The number of injuries is far higher, and even cities with Vision Zero plans aren't making progress (see SF for example).
- Americans associate cars with independence, but privileging the convenience of drivers comes at a huge cost to the freedom of everyone else. Kids under the age of 16 and others who cannot drive, like folks who can't afford it, or those with some medical conditions, are treated like second class citizens. Many parents won't let their kids walk half a mile to school, whether in a busy urban area or a sleepy suburb, for fear of traffic violence.
- Hopefully, you're aware of the environmental costs of carbon emissions from gasoline-powered cars. I'll add that your Tesla is not exempt! Manufacturing a midsize electric vehicle produces 15% more emissions than its gasoline-powered equivalent, and that gap grows with battery size. Once that electric car is released to our roads, it produces many of the same particulate emissions (like tire erosion) that are responsible for 30,000 premature American deaths per year.
- In the past, we put lead in gasoline, which poisoned a generation of Americans (lead exposure in children is associated with lower IQ and higher aggression) and arguably contributed to the crime surge in the 1970s and 80s.
- The more we learn, the worse the health statistics: in 2010, Japanese scientists found that living near a major road was associated with a 50% increase in premature birth. In 2019, Berkeley research found living downwind of a highway increased mortality by 5% among seniors.
