The True Costs of Driving

Source: Home from Nowhere: Remaking our everyday world for the 21st century, by James Howard Kunstler, published by Simon & Schuster, 1996. His sources

Americans log two trillion miles a year behind the wheel.
Growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) far exceeds the growth of the population or jobs in the United States.
With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States consumes a quarter of the world's oil. Half of this is burned in motor vehicles.
The average American drives twice as much as the average driver in Europe and Japan.
Americans use cars for 82 percent of their trips compared to 48 percent for Germans, 47 for the French, and 45 percent for the British.
More than 60,000 square miles of U.S. land is paved over, amounting to 2 percent of the total surface area, and possibly 10 percent of arable land.
U.S. military presence in the Middle East currently costs $50 billion annually.
All told, the costs of driving that motorists and truckers don't bear themselves amounted to about $300 billion a year in the early 1990s. User fees such as tolls and gas taxes are estimated to cover from 9 to 18 of the cost of using cars the way we do.
The United States spends nearly $200 million a day constructing, improving, and rehabilitating streets and roads.
In a year $20 billion is spent on routine maintenance like snowplowing and pothole filling.
In a year $48 billion is spent nationally for traffic management and parking enforcement by police, on accident response teams, and on the administration of driving by federal, state, and city departments of transportation (DOTs) and state motor vehicle bureaus.
A total of $6.3 billion goes to interest and debt retirement on highway bonds and the like.
The costs of air pollution that result in illness, hospitalization, an premature death is calculated to be somewhere between $10 billion to $200 billion a year.
Roughly 50,000 people are killed every year in auto accidents--equal to the total deaths in the Vietnam War.
A study by the Urban Institute for the Federal Highway Administration monetizes the cost of all accidents at $358 billion annually, including 5,000,000 injuries a year, 1,800,000 of them disabling. The same study quantifies the cost of pain, suffering, and reduced quality of life at $228 billion a year. Property damage is estimated at roughly $40 billion a year--mostly in wrecked vehicles. Damage to buildings by noise is calculated at $9 billion; by vibration, $6.6 billion.
The National Transportation Board predicts that the annual delays in travel time (gridlock) will increase by 5.6 billion hours in the next twenty years, wasting another 7.3 billion gallons of fuel, adding 73 million tons of carbon dioxide to the current emission levels, and costing $41 billion more per year.
The U.S. General Accounting Office cites estimates of national productivity losses caused by highway congestion at $100 billion a year.
Eighty-six percent of the workforce (about 85 million people) commute by card, and of these, 90 percent park "free". The average dollar value of a parking space is estimated at $1,000 per year, a subsidy amounting to $85 billion, supposedly paid by American businesses. Except business is able to write off the cost of supplying employee parking on their taxes. If commuters had to pay for their parking spaces, it is estimated that the number of solo commuters would drop between 18 and 81 percent.
If you commute 45 minutes twice a day for 49 weeks, you are spending 2.18 weeks sitting in your car going to work and back.
The average car costs approximately $6,100 a year to keep on the road in out-of-pocket payments, including installment loans, insurance premiums, maintenance, and gas.
Home Ownership vs. Car Ownership:
- A typical house costs $125,000. Over the thirty years of home ownership, one would spend about $250,000 on principal and mortgage payments for such a house, and--assuming lower annual real estate inflation rates looking ahead than we've experienced during the past thirty years--one would end up with equity in the form of a house with a market value of $250,000--that is, a sum equal to the amount invested over time.
- Over the lifetime of that home mortgage, you may consume eight cars, assuming that you have two cars in the household (which is average), and that each car has a working life of about seven years. The average car now costs $20,000, not including finance charges. Figuring an average annual price inflation of 5 percent per car over the lifetime of your home mortgage, plus finance charges of 10 percent per car (but not including regular maintenance, gas, accidents, or insurance), you will spend $440,000 on cars during that thirty-year period (assuming you never graduate to better-than-average cars) and your total equity in cars after all that time (figuring the value of two more-than-seven-year-old cars, which is what you'll be left with at the end), will be little better than zip.