https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtm...
And I spend way more of my time on bicycle maintenance than on car maintenance. So if my time is part of it, then that's got to be 10X the cost. But only because I earn more than a car mechanic per hour.
Calories are cheap: Cycling for one hour you burn maybe 500 calories. That's four table spoons of butter.
Bicycle maintenance is cheap: I pay about 20 Euros a month because I ride a lot and don't do any repairs myself. You can easily save half of that if you're willing to get your hands dirty.
Cycling is not much slower than driving: Average driving speed in Berlin is 25km/h. During rush hour it's 9km/h. It's not hard to average 15km/h on a bike, even during rush hour. 20km/h is doable if you're fit.
But the daily cost is not insignificant. And if you can't afford a car, you pay the daily cost forever.
Cycling for an hour you burn maybe 2000 calories. That's a whole day's food. It can be your 2nd largest expense if you're poor. And the time spent on bicycle maintenance (tires, chain, wheels, adjustment etc) is 'easy to do yourself' for well-paid middle-class folks. After 12 hours in the factory or on your feet in a big box store, the time may not seem so cheap.
Then add in job risk when you get a flat on the way to work. Not insignificant if you're on a clock at a minimum-wage job. Could lose that job.
Its easy to enjoy bikes when well-employed and your time is your own. But for many they are part of being poor, part of the reason they stay poor.
Getting a flat is insignificant. You can change a tube in less than 5 minutes. New tubes and patch kits are very cheap. And cars also get flat tires.
And again, 'very cheap' is relative. In a minimum-wage job it can be your entire discretionary income for you shift. And when I commuted by bicycle I got several flats over a year. I've driven a car for decades without a single flat that interrupted my trip (slow leaks).
And actually not many folks can change a bicycle tire, certainly not in 5 minutes, not at the side of a busy street.
All this glib dismissal of the cost of bicycling seems to stem from a fairly comfortable viewpoint.
https://caloriesburnedhq.com/calories-burned-biking/
Every cyclist I know can change a tube. Most people learned how to do this as children. For those who never learned, ParkTool has a great series of videos showing how to do basic maintenance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqR6nlZNeU8
The real reasons that people don't commute by bike include safety, comfort, time, security, and cargo capacity. It's not a cost issue. (I totally understand that bike commuting isn't practical for most people.)
Cars can break down as well, frequently if you drive a pile of junk because you can't afford a good car. Flat tires are of course annoying, but they don't happen very frequently if you have for example Schwalbe Marathon tires and changing an inner tube is not terribly hard. Certainly easier than fixing a car, and at least an order of magnitude cheaper than a trip to a car mechanic.
A more realistic problem with bikes for poor people is that you can't do terribly long commutes on a bike, so it limits the number of job offers you can accept without moving.
https://amerityre.com/our-flat-free-products/flat-free-bicyc...
They aren't cheap, but they also aren't your standard airless, flat-free tire, either. They don't feel like "mush" when you ride on them, making you have to pedal harder - they feel identical to a regular air-filled bicycle tire. You can drill a hole through them, and they still feel and work perfectly fine.
If you ride a bike and tend to get a lot of flats, take a look into their products - you won't be disappointed.
For some areas of the US (notably the southwest), the summer months are brutal. Air conditioning is virtually a requirement, not a luxury. Unless we mandate that all businesses install showers for employees (and we change as a society and not mind people being sweaty and smelly otherwise).
The majority of power used in a car during the summer months - beyond moving itself and passengers - comes from the AC system. These systems can sometimes exceed the BTU output of a house AC unit, mainly because they are fighting the heat input from the outside constantly, due to the lack of insulation in an automobile passenger cabin. So they have to be more powerful to offset that. Which means they need a power system to keep up, and historically that has been an IC engine. I'm not sure how an electric vehicle's AC system fares during a hot summer day, or how it effects the battery charge, but I'd expect it to be fairly heavy on that front.
Could we do as you suggest? Certainly we could; we did something similar (more or less) for hundreds of years before automotive AC was a standard item (in fact, the automobile was around a long time before AC became a readily available option). At the same time, though, certain social standards were different, plus there's the argument that cities weren't as built up or as dense (heat island effect), making them (marginally) cooler than today.
Here in Phoenix, though - it starts to become a furnace around the end of May, and continues until about the end of October. There are nights where it never falls below 100F at times; most of the time it never falls below 90F at night. There isn't an easy solution for comfortable personal transportation in such conditions, except for the automobile as we currently know it.
I almost wonder whether we shouldn’t have two overlapping road systems, one for residential streets and one for transport routes.
You could have a class of cars that only run on the residential streets which would be half way between a moped and a car, with 1-4 seats, a range of 30-50 miles, and a cost of $5-8k.
It's not unrealistic at all, some cities already limit access to city center for some vehicles.
IMHO it shouldn't be an outright ban, just a big financial disincentive, so that people with big cars happen in the city center rarely enough not to matter, but they can still afford to drive there a few times a year when they really need to. Maybe on the order of 1 USD per minute?
The main point is that standards have to be adopted by multiple cities otherwise the market won’t be large enough for manufacturers.
If your car has an interference engine, that timing belt change could get even more expensive really quick, should it fail...