The average modern person, by one calculation, spends more than 1,600 hours a year to pay for their cars, their insurance, fuel and repairs. We go to jobs partly to pay for the cars, and we need the cars mostly to get to jobs. We spend four of our sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering the resources for the car.
Since the average modern American, by one estimate, travels 7,500 miles a year, and put in 1,600 hours a year to do that, they are travelling five miles per hour. Before people had cars, however, people managed to do the same – by walking.
By contrast, a person on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than a pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process.
Not having or needing a car is one major reason I feel I have a lot of financial freedom at the moment.
Seriously. Not needing a car to get to work has been amazing.
That 1,600 hour number seems weird to me.
Looks like they took AAA’s annual estimate of the “true” cost of a new car $12,182 (https://newsroom.aaa.com/2023/08/annual-new-car-ownership-costs-boil-over-12k/) and divided by the federal minimum wage of 7.25 to get ~$1,680 or "more than 1,600)
Median weekly income in the US is $1139 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf), which at 40 hours would be $28.47 per hour. or, 428 hours a year to pay for the car. Granted that is taking a broad median stat and assuming it equates to 40 hours of work, but that’s sort my problem. The whole exercise is just one assumption piled on another from the original AAA number to my own math…
It’s some napkin math but I don’t think it changes the outcome. If we go by 428 hours per year, that’s still 17.8 days which is a lot.
The true cost of car ownership you cited was from 2023 and since then insurance premiums and car costs have continued to increase. AAA which could be considered biased, doesn’t include the medical expenses and legal fees involved in car crashes either.
This a great read on the topic, which I pulled a quote from:
According to a study published last year by the NHTSA, America’s highway-safety regulator, the direct economic costs of car crashes in 2019 was $340bn, or about 1.6% of GDP
AAA appears to include insurance and that would cover some of those medical and legal fees. But that’s sort of my problem we can pull all sorts of numbers into this and push the stats around. Just the infrastructure costs of highways and bridges alone would extremely favor bicycles, but that would also require ignoring all the other use cases for roads (shipping, ambulances, etc.)
I don’t doubt that bicycles are much cheaper and much better (overall) economically compared to cars. I just doubted the numbers and methodology of the source.
You say that as if car-dependent zoning doesn’t force even minimum-wage workers to own a car. Maybe it’s a worst-case instead of an average, but that doesn’t make it unrealistic.
https://earlyretirementextreme.com/speeding-and-transportatio.html
Another post basically doing the same concept.
Hey, I’m all for more bicycles. I’m a big fan. But this article seems to imply that it’s either fossil fuels or foot power. We have access to cheap renewables, why can’t we use that? Electric vehicles exist as well, as when we can power the whole grid on renewables, using electricity will be fine. Pedal power is obviously better than no machine at all, but it’s not the only option in existence after we get rid of fossil fuels. And it’s exactly this kind of shit that the fossil fuel companies and right wing asshats will use—exactly like the eating insects thing—to fuel fear of what a climate friendly future has to look like.
Electric catrs still pollute massively. Mainly tire and break dust (more than ICE cats because they are heavier). Nevermind that cars dependency is terrible and unsustainable (both economically and environmentally). Make cities for people not cars.
Plus show me one example of where car dependency has worked. It’s always “just add more lanes”. Yeah just ask Texas how their 26 lane highway is going.
Plus we don’t need to be paving over airable farmland for people cosplaying as rural folk. We have about 5 parking spots for every single car in the United States. Seems like a great use of land.
Yeah, as I explain elsewhere, I wasn’t pushing EVs over bikes. I was just saying the framing of “pro-pedal power” in this article is the exact type of shit right wingers latch onto and never shut up about. I can hear them now: “LIBRUL ANARCHIST COMMUNISTS’ ideal world is one where you eat crickets, can never travel more than 15 minutes from your house, can’t eat hamburgers, never get a vacation, never have children, and you have to pedal-power your home appliances!”
They will always find a way to make a stupid argument like that, of course. The 15 minute cities thing is a great example. How much did they shout about how “you’ll never get to see your sweet old grandmother! The LEFT wants your grandma to die alone!” in regards to the concept of 15 minute cities? But regardless, we as the pro-not-boiling-alive group need to be smarter about the type of solutions we pose. They will take this type of sloppy idealism and talk about how you’ll be powering your tv with pedals or whatever.
The way we present the solution matters. It’s literally the biggest hurdle we face, because we need support. Wistfully discussing the glory of pedal power for everything just serves up the propaganda on a silver platter.
That was my point. Not that everyone should drive.
But this article seems to imply that it’s either fossil fuels or foot power. We have access to cheap renewables, why can’t we use that?
I didn’t interpret the article as presenting bicycling as the only transportation option.
Although trains and public transport can fill in the gap for longer distances, EVs will be necessary in limited cases. The point is that our dependence on all types of cars and the infrastructure that comes with it is excessive and a massive contributor to the destruction of our climate. They are also literally killing us, hence auto insurance being mandated in most states/provinces.
EVs are better than ICE cars and should be used as one of the replacements - but not nearly enough to solve our climate crisis by buying an electric car. That’s why there is also a push to designing cities for active transportation and public transportation. The emmissions from walking and cycling are incomparable to those of an EV.
If the narrative that electric cars and renewable energy are all that’s needed to solve our climate crisis continues, then our planet will continue to warm.
when we can power the whole grid on renewables
Hooo boy, theres a massive leap behind that statement. Don’t forget the production and decommissioning of that infrastructure, and the vehicles.
Electric cars are slightly less bad that ICEs. They’re still utterly unsustainable and part of the problem, not the solution.
Exactly, cars are an atrocity, slightly less when electric but not by much, they’re still the same killing machines clogging up our world, polluting everything with noise and microplastics.
Of course. I don’t drive and don’t plan on ever having to again. I was just saying this type of framing in an article doesn’t help the cause. It is fodder for the people peddling misinformation about why we shouldn’t do anything about climate change. The pro-climate change groups will always latch onto this type of shit when they can find it. Like the whole “no more hamburgers” thing or the “crickets as food” thing or the “no more vacations” thing or whatever the fuck they’re always spouting on fox. It’s a strawman, of course. But we shouldn’t be serving it up that way.
That’s what I was saying. Not that we need to be pushing EVs. Just that this type of article saying, “maybe we can live in a world where one day we move back to pedal power” is the exact sort of PR problem the pro-climate movement keeps falling into.
Münecat did a great video on the PR pitfalls of the crunchy spokespeople these movements always seem to put forward. We all understand a solarpunk utopia would be great. But picking out the least desirable aspect of it for the largely lazy population doesn’t help the cause.
That’s all I was saying.
Because the fuel used by cars is the least of the problems with them. The real issue is the sheer about of space they take up, which ruins cities, destroys housing affordability, destroys the population’s health because people can’t feasibly walk places, etc. Oh, and by the way, the huge amounts of extra concrete they need for wider roads/parking lots/parking decks is a major contribution to climate change too.
Electrification will not fix this. Only ceasing to bulldoze our cities in a futile effort to accommodate will fix this.
I definitely agree. I mentioned this in multiple other replies to this comment, but I meant that how we present the climate friendly future matters. Modern people are desperately addicted to modern conveniences. Painting the solution as “wouldn’t it be great if the future was pedal-powered” is the next thing the right will latch onto like, “he left wants to take your car freedom away, make you eat crickets, sterilize you so you can’t have more children, and never be able to travel more than 15 minutes from your house.” It’s fucking stupid, but we have to stop falling into their idiotic traps. That was my point.
Yeah, how we present it does matter: in particular, characterizing walkability as some sort of deprivation instead of what it is – a straight-up improvement over car-dependent “modern convenience” – is ass-backwards. If your city is designed right (or in my case, if the part of it you live in is old enough that it mostly pre-dates the Suburban Experiment fuckery and has only been moderately damaged since), getting to places by bike is superior to doing so in a car: not just more fun and healthier, but literally faster too (because you don’t have to struggle to find parking or wait in long lines of cars). For example, taking my daughter to school on my cargo bike is maybe a 10-minute round trip, but takes at least double the amount of time in a car because the car drop-off queue wraps around the building and out into the street.
What we need are more people conveying the proper perspective and tone, like this guy and this guy. When the right tries to spin that bullshit, they need to be ridiculed as the pathetic invalids they are. They’re not being made to eat crickets; they’re just too squeamish to try and are projecting that cowardice on the rest of us. They balk at the prospect of walking for 15 minutes in a city because they’re so weak and flabby they’d fucking collapse and die within 5 and they know it. They think cars are “freedom” because they’re so used to the yoke of licensing/insurance/maintenance/being limited to roads and parking lots/etc. around their neck that they don’t even feel it anymore and don’t understand what true freedom – to ride anywhere, roads or not, for free – really is. (As for the sterilization part, that’s just a straight-up lie they made up from whole cloth, so the only proper response there is “fuck you; quit lying.”)
To frame it even more in their terms: what they need to be made to understand is that cars are for whiny girly-men and obese losers with no self-discipline, and that real men ride bikes!
Well, to show how ridiculous their shit actually is, the whole “the left wants to sterilize you” thing came from a study talking about how having kids is the biggest contributor to climate change, ahead of eating meat.
and all the articles from NYT, WP, The Guardian, etc (the “lIbRUl MeEdIa!”) probably all citing this study that looked at the effect of having children.
Yknow, studies. By scientists. To learn about the world around us. Lefty shit like that.
It’s unfortunate because this one doesn’t fall into the trap of right wing propaganda fodder, it’s literally just a study discussing what having children means in a time where everyone is worried about having kids because, yknow, the world might not be very hospitable by the time they grow up.
The climate solutions that we all agree are great personal choices you can make are easy pickings for them. But it’s funny, because all this talk about what we can do and most outlets just won’t even bring up large scale change that targets the biggest polluters, massive companies. Because that’s “anti-business” which is basically sacrilege these days.
sigh
…it’s a sad state of affairs. But I’ll keep riding my bike and taking the subway and buying local and all that. But it’s a drop in the ocean.
5 word summary:
Aside from mass transit, the future is e-bikes and electric vélomobiles.
As a dutch person. I salute you. May your roads accomodate safe travels by bike, and your health.
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The author elaborates on this if you read the full article:
The average modern person, by one calculation, spends more than 1,600 hours a year to pay for their cars, their insurance, fuel and repairs. We go to jobs partly to pay for the cars, and we need the cars mostly to get to jobs. We spend four of our sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering the resources for the car.
