Cars Are A Disaster For Society -- Here Are the Numbers

if you drive a car you already know it costs a lot to own and operate unfortunately that doesn't even begin to cover the true cost of our nation's car dependency infrastructure crashes pollution climate impacts there's a lot to account for so how much does driving really cost well that turns out to be a really complicated question but today I'm going to go out in search of the real answers sharing the best research I can find with some surprises along the way some of them kind of dark and some of them just straight up absurd and it's all coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always welcome and here's one I read in a news article that for each dollar spent by a car user Society paid $ 5.77 and for each dollar spent by a bus user Society paid 131 how do they come up with these numbers I think you are the only one nerdy enough to answer a smiley face okay I'm a little stuck on whether that last piece is a compliment or not but you do see this kind of thing all the time if you follow Transportation stuff on the apps and I really had to go find the one this person was talking about it's a study out of Laval University just outside Montreal so it's in French but I'll translate the money quote motorists always think that they are paying for other people's public transport and it's the opposite or there's this one which is based on a cost of commute calculator that was built for the Vancouver BC region the graphic takes the same approach of trying to capture the full cost and benefit of using different Transportation modes the calculator tries to account for not just what you personally pay out of pocket but all the other things that Society pays for not just directly like expensive infrastructure but also indirectly in the cost of climate mitigation from emissions and increased health care costs and loss of productivity from things like pollution physical inactivity and crashes even that's just scratching the surface but those are what we call externalities costs to society that aren't paid directly by the producer or the consumer I've already done a video on the private costs of owning and operating a motor vehicle which are significant but in today's video the story gets a lot worse I haven't really made a video about externalities before because they're extremely tricky to calculate they can be pretty subjective and sometimes it's even hard to differentiate between a non-monetary cost that's born by an individual versus one that's born by Society so when you see an infographic like this it's always a bit of a black box you don't know all the things they considered when they came up with the numbers so today I want to dig into resources that'll help us get to a more credible answer and you can find a lot of different studies that arrive at a lot of different numbers so today I want to give you the thing that I think is closest to the right answer out of everything I've found it's a paper from the academic Journal ecological economics and it's called The Social cost of automobility cycling and walking in the European Union so one thing you might have noticed already is that everything I've shown you so far is either from Canada or the EU where they apparently don't have the same cultural allergy to taking a holistic approach that we do in the US like the way Transportation Investments happen in America is a little more ad hoc I guess like we just don't think that deeply about it I'm not going to say it's a conspiracy but it is in the best interest of certain industries that you just don't think about this stuff too hard you can access this one for free so I'll link it down in the description and it's definitely an interesting read and so are some of the cited works because what the paper does basically is take the best of the methodology and analyses of previous studies that have tackled this question it reconciles a huge list of parameters and then it builds its own benefit cost analysis that's specific to the European Union but I will try to translate it to an American context as best I can so let's talk talk a bit about benefit cost analyses or I think in the EU they call them cost benefit analyses because those people are just so pessimistic it's basically accounting for all the benefits and all the costs of a particular project or course of action to figure out if there's a benefit to proceeding and what the magnitude of that benefit might be it's something that makes sense on the face of it and it's something that you would expect that any major infrastructure investment would require but in practice just in my professional experience they're almost never done in the infrastructure world and to be fair they are difficult a robust BCA on a mega project is extremely data intensive it requires tons of analysis and even then they're subject to all kinds of tough problems identifying and finding ways to measure every possible cost and benefit making sure you aren't omitting anything or double counting anything and those aren't even the most contentious issues in basically any Mega project the costs and benefits aren't distributed even so just trying to analyze everything in the aggregate has tons of limitations right off the bat and even more fundamentally it's worth asking whether it's even valid to try to reduce everything to a dollar value which is something you do in a BCA but I kind of think of it as the least bad of a lot of bad options okay that's kind of a lot of caveats for the paper I'm about to share which isn't perfect and I will critique it as we go through but one good thing is it does acknowledge basically all the limitations of the BCA approach and it discusses the difficulty of reconciling different parameters like one of the previous studies this paper looked at accounted for the cost of car ownership as a benefit of biking on the logic that car ownership becomes an avoided cost which makes some intuitive sense but doesn't work for the benefit cost framework this paper is using they also discarded some variables that might have some validity but were just too subjective to include which I kind of agree with so you could say this paper takes a bit of a conservative approach to the evaluation but I'm someone who prefers to air on that side because overstating benefits tends to be a lot faster way to lose credibility than understating them one more thing before we fully dive into this the paper does get a lot of mileage out of this report from Todd litman's Victoria transport policy Institute unsurprisingly based in Canada so if you aren't familiar with VPI ignore the fact that the website looks like it's from 1995 it's actually got tons of great resources that still get updated pretty frequently including their guide book on doing Transportation bcas also linked down the description okay the paper does arrive at a final Topline number for what driving walking and biking cost but I feel like none of that really matters unless you understand what the components are they identified 14 different parameters to include and I won't go into detail on all of them because some of them just don't have that much effect but what I'll do is walk through the interesting stuff and total things up as we go let's start with vehicle operating costs so maintenance and depreciation Insurance fuel basically all the stuff I talked about in my earlier video on this topic the paper analyzes everything in terms of Euros per kilometer so I've translated all of that into dollars per mile they're showing 37 cents a mile for driving and I don't know the IRS mileage reimbursement rate is like 65 cents a mile this year the paper is from 2019 and also maybe European cars are just more fuel efficient on average but it does strike me as a somewhat conservative number the biking and walking operating costs are just kind of funny like I looked into it in the appendices and this is literally supposed to be the cost of Footwear and I have to admit I've never actually thought of amortising my shoes across the number of miles I walk and I probably still won't travel time this is a bit of a weird one value of time varies a lot from Human to human and from situation to situation but it is something we attemp attempt to put a value on in transportation analysis and I guess you could say that this is where driving really has its moment with significantly lower cost per mile than for people walking and biking and I don't doubt that it's literally true when you measure it that way but I think it's also true that people who replace driving trips with walking and biking trips have much shorter average trip lengths this detail about travel times from the paper is interesting though cyclists are known to engage in detours to avoid negative externalities of the car at a considerable time cost this also applies to walking so the paper calculates all of that as quote unquote free flow travel time and splits out congestion as a separate component and this is an externality that drivers impose on each other and on Goods movement and it actually ends up being the biggest line item on this whole thing which wasn't intuitive to me but when you really think about how our transportation system is set up it just starts to make sense like our roadway system really is a freefor all where an Uber Eats driver delivering a fried chicken sandwich gets to impose delay on a delivery truck carrying like a million worth of semiconductors it's just wild stuff this particular component is not considered to be an externality of biking or walking okay those are big ones but that's just the beginning and there's way more interesting stuff still to come including the Topline numbers and what happens when you multiply these numbers by the number of miles that Americans actually drop yikes but first brief reminder to click on all the stuff if you want to spread Insidious ideas about the true costs of American Car dependency and following the apps if the weekly frequency just isn't enough I honestly can't imagine and direct support on patreon really does help keep the content spigot turned on okay let's move on to a really interesting one land use and infrastructure 12 cents a mile which just seems low to me intuitively the number is mostly based on an estimate of the additional land area you'd need to acquire each year just to keep up with the annual growth in driving and parking demand times an estimated average land value so the framework doesn't really account for the massive proportion of our cities that's already dedicated to traffic and parking infrastructure and the paper acknowledges that related impacts like compromising animal habitats and ecosystems isn't included which seems kind of important but may be difficult to quantify for biking and walking the paper concludes that this cost is inconsequential climate change just 2 cents a mile which is a bit surprising the calculation is basically CO2 emissions per mile with the value based on what it would cost to reduce emissions to a level that's in line with the Paris agreement where the goal is to hold the increase in global average temperature to below 2° C above pre-industrial levels this one also includes a lot of assumptions about what the fleet is going to look like in terms of electric and internal combustion m and I do talk more about how the EU addresses CO2 and its fuel taxes in this video the next five air pollution noise pollution Soil and Water Quality infrastructure maintenance and resource requirements each rounds to about a penny per mile for driving and are basically non-existent for biking and walking and a penny per mile probably doesn't seem like much but just keep in mind for all this consider multiplying by the number of miles driven in the US every year because then the cost starts to seem a little more significant crashes I got to admit I don't like the way they handled this they basically said the insurance paid under vehicle operating costs covers the cost of crashes for drivers so they didn't want to double count and the cost for people biking and walking is 10 cents a mile so they consider people walking and biking getting hit by cars a personal cost of walking and biking not an externality of driving which I just don't agree with perceived safety and discomfort they did manage to put a dollar value on but but again they account for it as a private cost of biking and walking when it really seems like an externality of driving okay let's get to the positive part of this which is health benefits the study estimates a 67 Cent per mile private benefit for biking and a whopping $134 per mile for walking and this accounts for both prolonged life and increased quality of life or call it increased productivity although it feels a little weird then there's additional external benefit for reduced burden on the health care system but note that the net external benefit gets reduced a bit because they do account for the cost of extended pension payments because the people biking and walking have higher life expectancy I'll take it also it's weird to me that they don't frame this as negative health benefits for the drivers who are basically sedentary when traveling the same distance but H this is really all about the Deltas between the different modes so the bottom line the cost of walking Nets out at 19 cents a mile basically because because of the high cost of the travel time which feels weird to me like what was the Baseline expectation that people were just going to teleport everywhere biking though actually Nets out as a negative cost of 5 cents a mile so even given the ridiculous travel time cost estimate and even given that people on bikes getting run over by cars is considered a cost of biking it's still a net benefit to society cars though the total cost is a47 a mile and hang on let me do some math yeah that's like $5 trillion a year which to be honest still feels like lowballing it but you really could build a lot of trains with A5 trillion dollar annual budget let's see how the report wraps it up a central conclusion is that transport investment projects in the European Union systematically underestimate the cost of automobility I'm going to go ahead and say that this is almost certainly doubly true in the US and given everything we just looked at it's fair to say that those of us who walk bike and take transit subsid I driving not only with our money but with our time our health and our lives okay those are all the Cheery factoids I have to report today thanks for joining in thanks as always to the patrons for your direct support which really does allow me to do this as a full-time job keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you [Music] then [Music]

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 352,137

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban talk, urbanism sociology, urban exploration, urbanism as a way of life, urbanism architecture, urbanist exploring cities, urbanist session, urban planning problems, urban planning, city planning, urban design, public transit cities skylines, american cities, strong towns, electric vehicles, electric car

Id: qp75-46PnMY

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2023