10 Cities Where Driving Consumes the Most of Your Life

in a recent video I quoted a source that said Americans spend a full one quarter of their waking lives either driving or working the hours they need just to be able to afford a car well I'm not good at taking things at face value so today I'm going to investigate that claim and what I found was more disturbing than I expected so today we're going to talk about the cities where car dependency steals the most hours of your life and the ones that do the opposite and both lists are super interesting so how much of your life does your car cost well we're going to investigate that question every which way and it's all coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation if your suggested topics always welcome but this is just another one of these topics that once I started thinking about it it just nod at me and it was this Ivan illich quote that I came across when I was putting together my video on the paper car harm the typical American male devotes more than ,600 hours a year to his car he spends four of his 16 waking hours on the road or gathering its resources for it now it is a little weird that the quote references males exclusively but I'm going to chalk it up to the fact that this comes from a book that was published 50 years ago anyway I became kind of obsessed with this idea it's one of those things that sounds like it could be an understatement or an overstatement and 50 years have passed so it seems like someone somewhere should be analyzing some data to see whether it actually holds true in 2024 so it should go without saying that that person is me but also this one's just personal as someone who doesn't own a car I spend precisely 0% of my Waking Life driving one or quote unquote Gathering resources to pay for one sure my day in day out existence has travel time in it but I'm mostly bike places and for the most part that's time I literally don't have to spend at the gym I went to the doctor last week just normal stuff don't freak out and when I told her I don't have a car and I just bike and walk everywhere she had no further questions about my exercise habits okay so let's talk about the analysis piece of this and to do this I'm going to walk through how I crunch the numbers on a national level which will give you some context for everything else in this video I used the census API to grab results from the American Community survey subject tables s801 commuting characteristics and s201 earnings in the past 12 months for every city available which is mostly the 500ish Ci's over 75,000 population or so the variables I'm using are percent who drove alone and mean travel time to work from s801 and median earnings for full-time yearound workers from s2001 so there really are two components one how much of your time do you spend driving every day and I took what I think is a conservative approach to this I multiplied the mean travel time to work by the percent who drove alone to get the average drive time for a worker so I'm cutting car pooling people a break I doubled that number to get the total time to and from work and then I multiplied that number by three since the most recent National household travel survey says that only 30% of vehicle miles traveled is commute related the second part is how much of the income from a full-time job do you need to pay for a car so the Bureau of Transportation statistics pegs the average annual cost of car ownership in the US in 2023 at 12,100 $82 of which they're saying $831 is fixed costs and $3,864 is variable costs like Fuel and maintenance they actually include depreciation in fixed costs which I honestly don't agree with your car depreciates faster if you drive it more although it is nonlinear but this is the government so I'm not going to question it so what you're going to see when we go City by city is I will scale the variable cost component up or down depending on whether the city in question has more or less average driving and by how much so for the national number I've got an hour 49 a day spent driving and 21% of your 40-hour work week going to pay for car ownership so spread over 7 Days that's an average of 73 minutes a day for a grand total of 3 hours 2 minutes a day either driving or working in the service of being able to drive not quite the 4 hours a day I'd been led to believe but still a solid 19% of your Waking Life if we assume eight hours of sleep a night and keep in mind I did take a somewhat conservative approach and yeah males do drive more than females so there's that but they also make more money guess we still haven't fixed that yet okay and for this list I'm just going to highlight one city in each metro area otherwise this video would just be I'll talk about it later in the video so let's get into it number 10 Cape Coral Florida which I'm not sure I've ever talked about on this channel which is an absolute disgrace since it's so photogenic I mean probably the Pinnacle of an inefficient Transportation environment mean commute time to work is about half an hour and incomes aren't as high as you might think so you need the income from about a quarter of your working hours to pay for the privilege of doing all that driving number nine let's go to the US's most confusing metropolitan area Hampton Roads Virginia this is Suffolk another city never discussed in the history of this channel you guys there's going to be so much Y in this video hard to characterize Suffolk I feel like it's one of those ex herbs that really has the feel of being its own independent city but has been swallowed up by a larger adjacent metro area over time over 80% of commuters here drive alone to work with an average one-way commute time of 31 minutes over a full 7-Day week this is 3 hours and 47 minutes a day that the average person is either driving or working to pay for their car which is getting perilously close to 25% of Waking Life territory number eight let's visit Chicago land and I mean greater greater Chicago land because we're going to Juliet never discussed in the history of this channel similar Geographic context to Suffolk Virginia Julet is another city that been subsumed into a much larger conurbation similar numbers to suffle too just incomes are a bit lower so you need to work more hours to pay for your car and this is something you'll notice about this list these are mostly cities located on the distant periphery of a metro area where you have to drive longer distances and these aren't going to be higher inome suburbs or exurbs because in cities with higher median incomes it simply isn't going to take as many hours to pay for your car number seven a bit different it's Garland Texas just outside of Dallas so it's an inner ring suburb and not on the periphery and it does have the vestages of an original town but a modern built form that's much more recognizably Suburban I don't know what else to say but but all of Texas's major Metro areas are really designed for driving just Garland alone has access to three different freeways a wide selection of amazingly Scenic seven Lane arterials it would just be a very tough place to live carlay or carfree number six let's go to South Florida and the culprit here is Deerfield Beach North of Fort Lauderdale by the way there's a whole cluster of cities in the Miami Metro area that score worse than number seven Garland Miramar Miami Miami Gardens and hia all have terrible bottom line numbers but what puts Deerfield Beach over the top is about 33 minutes of driving to work one way these South Florida cities are always so interesting and possibly maddening geographically the quote unquote Beach part of Deerfield Beach only consists of about a mile of Coastline the vast majority of the actual water Frontage is in land keep in mind I'm just talking about the time cost of driving here if you're interested in knowing how South Florida pencils out on Transportation plus housing or what we call location efficiency I have videos for that number five Stockton California feels like a very different Dynamic from the other cities on this list it has a very super commuting vibe to it long drive times relatively High Drive Al and mode share pretty modest incomes for California 3 hours and 53 minutes a day devoted to either driving or making enough money to be able to afford to drive which gets to what's really the whole Phil opical question at the heart of this video does your car exist to serve you or is it really the other way around earthlings rise up while there's still time number four a census designated place I wasn't even aware of and I actually lived in the Vegas Valley for a year it's Sunrise Manor Nevada the lowest median full-time worker income of any City on this list but still tons of driving which is just an absolutely crushing combination interesting because there is a lot of employment Nellis Air Force basee is right here and several of the quality gaming establishments on the boulder strip but you know Vegas is the newest most modern fastest growing us metro area of the last few decades so a built environment like this I don't know what else you can say but that it is the state-of-the-art given everything we've learned as a nation This truly is what we've collectively decided is the best way to build Urban environments A+ work sorry but in case you haven't know noticed I have a LoveHate relationship with videos like this I love to research and produce them the stuff I discover along the way is fascinating but man do they put me in the mood because I sort of joked about it already but there really is a philosophical question at the heart of this which is is not owning a car freeing or is it imprisoning when I ask this question it's actually pretty divisive there are people who agree with me on 99% of everything who will say yes not owning a car is absolutely limit your Mobility is restricted full stop but then I look at the fact that the decision to organize your life around car travel it costs you up to 25% of your Waking Life and sometimes more as we'll see in a minute and I have to ask who is it that's really being limited there is a lot of nuance to this but I just think it's worth pondering so I've still got the bottom three and I'm actually going to give you the 10 cities where you spend the least amount of time driving or paying for the privilege and I'm going to do it in Rapid Fire fashion and usual reminder to click on all the things and connect on all the apps let's hit one dishonorable mention I didn't include PTO Rico in this because the disparity in median incomes between Puerto Rico and any of the 50 states is just massive and that factor alone would throw everything way off but Bayamon outside of San Juan very car dependent unless you lived near the trainer Bono line and the math says adult full-time workers spend about 300 minutes a day either driving or working to be able to afford to absolutely shameful and I really need to get to Puerto Rico to make videos just for contrast let's speedrun the 10 cities where people spend the least proportion of time dealing with cars 10 Mountain View California very high median incomes and relatively little driving for a US suburb N9 Seattle only 37% of people drive all into work 8 across Lake Washington bellw only an hour and a half a day on driving or paying for it seven Washington DC relatively High incomes and only 27% of people drive all into work six poo Alto you know I told you about some of these Silicon Valley cities in my most improved suburbs video check it out if you haven't already five San Francisco High median incomes not much driving and it almost seems too obvious to point out but cities where you have the freedom to spend more of your Waking Life on something other than your car are not cheap places to live would land value tax solve this many people are saying for Boulder Colorado not that many people drive alone and the average commute duration of 18 minutes is the lowest on this list three Redmond Washington mentioned in my recent video on reverse commuting it really helps a lot when you have an affluent City that's actually home to a huge employer with a highly paid Workforce who knew to Berkeley California only 25% of people drive alone and incomes are high and number one Cambridge m Massachusetts a city that absolutely deserves its own video only 22% of full-time workers Drive alone and the average person spends just over an hour a day on car ownership I have to address New York it comes in at number 23 out of the 500 odd qualifying cities and super interesting median personal income significantly lower than say DC the Bay Area or Seattle 22% of people drive alone Which is higher than you might think remember this is all of new New York City when they do drive it's over 40 minutes one away to their jobs you know it'd be so cool if there's a solution to the problem of people wasting so much of their lives sitting in traffic okay back to the list and ironically after the Bay Area placing four cities in the honorable mentions I have to give you Antioch out at the end of the BART yellow line so I don't know that I'd call it an excer but 66% of people drive alone and the average commute is over 40 minutes median income for an individual ual working full-time is okay but this all just ends up being a lot 242 minutes a day in the service of your car so now we're officially in 25% of Waking Life territory dishonorable mention Pittsburgh right next door and also on the BART yellow line just slightly less bad number two a very weird one it's Waldorf Maryland outside of DC and no other DC suburb or xerb shows up anywhere near the list 71% of commuters Drive alone and the average oneway commute is about 44 minutes median incomes are okay but man all that driving eats up a lot of your wages and FYI it is really easy to just grab loads of census data and Wrangle it in your analysis tool of choice so I did all us counties and Charles County Maryland where Waldorf is located is the worst rated County in the entire us and actually worse than Waldorf itself food for thought and maybe f for a future video and number one now you're going to understand why I did this by Metro Area because the top five non- Puerto Rican cities on this list and 11 of the top 12 are all in the greater La SL Inland Empire area if you watched my Long Beach video from a couple weeks back I joked that living in SoCal means not only spending a quarter of your non-sleeping life either driving or working to pay for the privilege of driving all over what should be the most beautiful land in our Fair na but spending an additional quarter of your life making small talk with people about how much driving sucks well these are all cities where you spend darn close to 30% of your Waking Life dealing with your car Palmdale where the average oneway commute is over 45 minutes isn't even the worst one that honor is reserved for Paris in Riverside County so yes the Inland umpire strikes again lots of driving long commutes very very modest incomes all told 4 Hour hours and 36 minutes of your Waking Life every day devoted to the privilege of driving ungodly amounts oh well at least the housing is super affordable man someone has got to get these people some better commuting options like a train or may it's time to start going with hot air balloons not only are hot air balloons cool it turns out they're extremely useful under the right circumstances and on that note I have a very strong content recommendation it's the balloon escape from the channel Neo and is the story of Peter and gter two men living in East Germany in 1979 who hatch a pretty audacious plot to escaped to West Germany with their families I won't give you the whole plot obviously but the basic setup is they get a hold of a western magazine that has an article about the Albuquerque Balloon Festival which is a highly recommended event by the way and they decide to just you know build a hot air balloon seems like a solid plan and guess what turns out that such were economic conditions in East Germany that you could trade cases of beer for hot air balloon materials and they were often running the video gets into all kinds of interesting stuff like how you actually construct a hot air balloon just from what you saw in photos in a magazine the level of desperation to escape East Germany that required to even undertake something like this at all it's got interviews with one of the actual perpetrators and the story of how all this plays out the incredible number of technical challenges they face not just building a hot air balloon sufficient to carry two families but figuring out how to control it once airborne and how it all turned out in the end well I won't spoil it but the whole thing is pretty mindblowing and the video is incredibly well done the balloon escape from Neo's underexposure series which covers stories from history that are criminally underexposed is a nebal original and exclusive to the platform and it's a fantastic example of how nebula supports creators in tackling ambitious ideas and bring them to life with in the case of the balloon Escape research historical footage and Incredibly well done Recreations of key moments in the story being part of the nebula Community Learning from these kinds of creators and being able to access support for my own production process has been incredibly important for the growth of my channel and I am so proud to be a nebula Creator nebula after all is a streaming service that's owned by all of us on the platform so when you sign up you're helping us grow a service that that by its very nature supports all of us in a long-term structural way financially professionally and creatively so if you want to support this Channel's ability to continue to improve and to grow and continue to reach more people signing up for nebula is a great way to do that and nebula continues to invest in making the streaming experience better including a new look and layout that makes it easier not only to find what you're looking for but discover new content and new creators that you're really going to enjoy this includes categories that function as their own kind of mini services like news which is run by the great team at tldr news to ensure the journalistic and editorial Integrity of what you're seeing on the platform pretty important these days also this year my videos are going up early on nebula a full week early in most cases so if you want to move your viewing schedule up and avoid spoilers a nebula membership is a pretty coste effective way to do that because if you use my custom link down the description you really do get an amazing value all the nebula content for just 250 a month which is 40% off the usual price and the lifetime offer is still available $300 you pay once and you get nebula for as long as both you and nebula exist as always whether that's a good deal or not is a personal decision between you and your preferred Actuarial Table no matter which way you go though a nebula membership is a fantastic way to demonstrate your support for a creator-owned platform and this channel in particular and fund the continued production of amazing Originals like the balloon escape and nebula has recently announced a slate of cool new Originals that I'm really looking forward to and for all of you who are already nebula members just a massive thanks from me although I feel obligated to say that you should probably be watching this video on nebula where it appears adree and without this nebula promo in it I totally respect your choice though and that's all I've got thanks for joining today and thanks always the patrons for your direct support which frees me up to just do whatever it is I feel like doing every week within reason of course I'm not a crazy person keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you then and thanks for watching on nebula

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 99,510

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, fuel economy, gas mileage, fuel consumption, how to, car hacks

Id: mUJFptzkdh8

Length: 20min 47sec (1247 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024