You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs
cityobservatory.org
cityobservatory.org
It seems like most people don't account for vehicle costs when accounting for cost of living. Why I'm not positive, though it seems to just be the general abstractness of the cost spread out over time, and the assumption in America that you're going to drive everywhere anyway so it doesn't matter.
Even worse we see this with numerous Uber/Lyft/delivery "contractors" who are putting endless miles on their personal vehicles without accounting for the inevitable cost of replacing them.
The IRS numbers assume a newish car (more expensive) that gets poor fuel mileage. It is probably correct for the average car, but there is no reason you need to be average - unless you want to.
You have to account everything, not just fuel, from car depreciation, servicing (oil changes,...), normal wear (brakes, tires,...), occasional replacements (batteries, wipers, ...), etc. If you drive 20.000kms per year, and a yearly service (oil, filters,...) costs 200eur, just that adds aditional 0.01eur/km. Two sets of tires (winter/summer) are ~2300eur + 8 changes (8~40eur) adds an additional (almost) ~1k eur in four years, 1 more cent. Insurance, registration.. 3, 4 cents. etc.
*that's the untaxed amount you get reimbursed for if you use your own car for a business trip.
The other is, given I'm going to own a car already, what's the difference between a shorter commute and a longer one? That's going to be a lower number per mile. A big chunk of the vehicle's depreciation is a result of years rather than miles, insurance doesn't generally track how many miles you drive and charge extra if you drive more, the registration and tax isn't any different etc.
The second one is how a lot of people end up all the way out in the suburbs. They can't afford to live in the part of the city that makes it viable to not have a car at all, but once you have a car as a sunk cost, another ten or twenty (or thirty or ...) miles in exchange for saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on housing starts to look like a good deal.
Though the huge factor people commonly forget is their own time. If your time is worth $25/hour then a half hour each way on your commute is $6500/year. And that's assuming you're only further away from work and not also further away from whatever you do on weekends.
Ehhhh, I'd say that it's not that skewed towards age of the vechile beyond common correlations:
- usually more years = more miles
- cars < 5 years are usually in warranty and fetch a premium
Mine does: in 5000km increments. (Australia)
But the warranty period is a huge amount of value, and there are others, e.g. newer cars are safer and have whatever other improvements so older cars aren't worth as much regardless of milage. Then many repairs are age related rather than mileage related, e.g. a car exposed to the elements will rust or experience day/night thermal stress even if you don't drive it.
> Mine does: in 5000km increments. (Australia)
Let me rephrase this. The insurance cost does not scale linearly with miles driven.
Insurance has interesting edge cases, like 3rd party can be more expensive than comprehensive, as risky drivers go for the former.
I've had insurance before, where putting in a higher mileage lowers the premium. I assume there's a lower bound where you start getting into Sunday driver territory where risks start increasing?
On a marginal basis ("what does it cost me to drive one extra mile?"), I think my cost is about 7-9 US cents on my electric and about 12-15 US cents on my wife's CR-V. On an overall basis ("what does it cost me in total for the cars divided by how many miles I drove?"), the figures are more like $1/mile for the electric (still have a car payment, full insurance, and only drive 4500 miles/year) and $0.30-$0.40/mile for the Honda (paid off, so just carrying insurance, registration, taxes, and some timed maintenance items)
If we moved farther away, our fixed costs stay about the same, and it's only the variable costs that go up.
Note that I do my own maintenance on Saturdays, so I don't put a monetary value on my time. However before you say I should account for my time, do you account for your time taking the car to the shop - I started doing that a few years ago and stopped because I realized that for most things I could get it done faster myself than take it in. (taking it in accounting for all time getting the car to the shop, arranging rides (sometimes a loaner car, sometimes my wife's time), and paperwork. When doing the work myself I can stop at the auto parts store next to the grocery store and so much less time needs to be accounted for there.
I've bought $500 cars before. Didn't last too long (it was a nice car, but it was an interference engine and broke the timing chain), but averaged 10 cents per mile.
People who spend 45 cents per mile are the type who lease their cars or buy new cars regularly. Lots of us out here make do happily with far less.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-...
Now, I will admit that it is possible to bring your cost per mile down somewhat. That’s one of my own specialties, which is why I still keep a car of my own around for affordable family roadtrips. If you buy the right car for $5,000, you might be able to squeeze 100,000 miles out of it with no major repairs. In this case the car depreciation is 5 cents per mile.
Gas, at $3.50 per 35 miles (assuming 35MPG), is 10 cents/mile Tires, at $300 per 50,000 miles are 0.6 cents Oil, at $25 per 5,000 miles is 0.5 cents Miscellaneous things like wipers and occasional maintenance visits: $200 per 20,000 miles = 1 cent
So the ultimate cheap driving in a paid-off economy car still costs at least 17 cents per mile.
Newer vehicles are a lot better, but cars age quite a lot faster with salted roads.
My estimation is that a large portion of public transport users only use it for part of their transport needs thus making the fixed costs of car ownership a sunk cost.
Therefore, the variables costs; gas (or electricity) and maintenance make the most sense to use in living cost estimations. Even at the extreme end where you can live in the middle of a city and use public transport for mostly everything, you'd still need a car or a friend with one to go skiing.
I'd be curious how many miles the grandparent has on the car though. My per-mile costs are also sky-high (because it's 10 years old and only has about 40k miles on it - I think it works out to $0.75/mile or so), but the flip side is that if this drives like a normal Honda it should be good for another 150k miles and, if I don't get into an accident or change my driving habits, I will never need to purchase another car.
We could have a debate about including it in a per mile rate, rather than splitting it out, but ultimately they are costs car owners have to pay, and non car owners don't.
A sunk cost is still a cost. A cost you have to pay is still a cost.
I think we could say it switches from a necessity to a leisure expense, and that city dwelling households can get most of what they want from a single car vs. several.
Clearly if a household moves from several cars to one car, fixed costs will decrease, which seems like an argument to measure fixed costs.
I'd agree with your point about vehicles potentially being leisure expenses, you could perhaps go further and start dividing up those fixed costs between leisure use, and business use. I'd even accept the argument that if you need a car, your leisure transport should be free from the fixed costs, as they have to be borne anyway, but they do have to be accounted for somewhere.
I get to live away from the hustle and bustle of the concrete jungle for one.
NIMBY Environmentalist, please take note: For example, in the bay area, high housing prices push people to the outer boundaries of the bay for housing, like Tracy, Stockton and beyond. Imagine the impact on the environment as most people are commuting 100+ miles per day more than if they were simply allowed to live where they work.
This is a real thing. Exhibit A is the San Francisco Sierra Club.
https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/the-sierra-club-fi...
The SF group seems to just stick their fingers in their ears and shout "I'VE GOT MINE GO LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE LIKE STOCKTON OR MAYBE IOWA".
Actually, it's a bit less fair then that.
When it comes down to it, these are individuals who don't want outsiders moving their community, or new units driving down the explosive growth in property values they have experienced.
As usual, it is just greedy people wanting more.
It may be unrealistic and have huge costs, but it's not malicious. I'd hate it if I moved into my neighborhood 15 years ago in a low density unit or single family home, and now have to deal with nonstop construction, noise, traffic, and general overcrowding as people keep moving in, property taxes/rents go up, and wages stay the same.
That's exactly the point.
Having lived there for a number of years, it's just different, really, and certainly not "worse" than the US, if you're an adaptable person.
Our rental here in the US has a massive front lawn that is a complete waste of land and water - to keep the stupid lawn that no one ever, ever uses green.
It has a big back yard too. Our kids like it, but to be honest, I think they preferred the situation in Italy, where we had no yard, but a park close by where they'd often find friends to play with.
There's no way the west can continue to grow consumption. The world will run out of trees.
Which is a fine thing to want -- so go live somewhere that occurs naturally without regulatory restrictions. There are plenty of areas in the US, or even within California, with low and medium density that require no artificial restrictions to keep them that way.
Some people definitely care about their property value and generally use their house as an investment and a retirement plan. A heck of a lot of people just want to be able to keep sleeping at night. Short of buying a lot in the middle of nowhere, it's ALWAYS going to be a gamble, and its pretty natural to expect it not too change too much if there's no indication it will. I'll give you that if you buy a single family in SF today and think it's going to stay that way, you're pretty silly. But it was well within my lifetime/adulthood where it wasn't that crazy an idea.
So could a million other things. The local government could become corrupt and raise taxes while cutting services to divert money to cronies, leaving you in the middle of a violent slum with a high unemployment rate. Your employer could move its offices thirty miles further from where you live. Climate change could put your whole town underwater.
The solution to things changing in a way you don't like is to vote with your feet. And at least in this case you're effectively being compensated for it, because an area that is being developed will cause your land to be worth more. Some developer will pay you a lot of money to put up more apartments or condos where you are, and then you have all that money to go somewhere else -- where the land will generally be less expensive, yielding you a nice profit to compensate you for your trouble.
You can live in any kind of place you want. You can't expect that place to never change.
And predicting this isn't really that hard. I can predict with reasonable certainty that twenty years from now Des Moines will still not have the population density of New York City, and a person making the same prediction twenty years ago would also have been right. San Francisco is the exception, not the rule.
Where I lived in Italy, it was pretty normal to see everything from SFHs to 10-plexes, but big apartments with dozens of units were not very common at all.
Or you know, just vote in municipal election or go to cityhall hearings, since that's how cities work, and that's exactly how people do it. It's not super weird for people living in a city to try and dictate how the city they live in work.
Last time I moved cities I ended up having to move 3 times in a row because of unexpected things. Yes, some people can do that without breaking a sweat, but it sure got exhausting. If I lived to 1000, I wouldn't really care, but life is short and there's only so many times you can do life altering changes. If moving was that simple, there wouldn't be so much criticism over people getting displayed by raising housing costs, after all.
> And predicting this isn't really that hard. I can predict with reasonable certainty that twenty years from now Des Moines will still not have the population density of New York City
Except a NIMBY thinks about "their backyard" for a reason: Who cares about the city's population density. The problem is the 10 story building popping up across the super tiny quiet street because a special permit was issued to override zoning.
The problem obviously being that there are people who work in the city and would like to live there but can't afford to and thereby don't get a vote even though they have a stake. So then you get efforts to overrule the cities at the state level and so on, and the outcome of that process is whoever can capture 50%+1 of the votes regardless of your preference as an individual. Whereas if you move to somewhere your preferences are likely to remain satisfied you don't have to worry about any of that.
> Last time I moved cities I ended up having to move 3 times in a row because of unexpected things.
Moving is work. But so is fighting everybody just so you don't have to.
And the people who want to be able to live in the city don't have that option. Moving into the city is what they want, but the housing needed for all of them to do that doesn't exist, so their only option is to cause it to.
> Except a NIMBY thinks about "their backyard" for a reason: Who cares about the city's population density. The problem is the 10 story building popping up across the super tiny quiet street because a special permit was issued to override zoning.
Not a lot of ten story apartment buildings go up in the middle of a hundred square miles of farmland.
You already said "The problem obviously being that there are people who work in the city and would like to live there". So people who are already there and already have that should give it up so others can have it. Got it.
> even though they have a stake
A stake for sure, but compared to people who not only work there, but sleep there, go to school there, pay taxes there, shaped it, took part in the decisions that made it what it is? A very minuscule stake. I don't live in the city I work in. Short of them shutting down the roads and the subway, those who do can do whatever they want. Fortunately they seem to like those roads and subway, so there's no big push (that I've seen) to do so.
The people who want to live there want to live in a city, i.e. a place with ten story apartment buildings. The people who are already there can continue to live there all they like, but if you don't want to live in a city with all that entails then why are you? There are suburbs all over the place if that's what you want.
> A stake for sure, but compared to people who not only work there, but sleep there, go to school there, pay taxes there, shaped it, took part in the decisions that made it what it is? A very minuscule stake.
Explicitly because you're imposing rules that prohibit them from having those things, even though both they and the owners of the property that could be used to allow them to do that would like to allow it.
> I don't live in the city I work in. Short of them shutting down the roads and the subway, those who do can do whatever they want. Fortunately they seem to like those roads and subway, so there's no big push (that I've seen) to do so.
There is a clause in the US Constitution that allows the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. It's used as an excuse for them to regulate everything under the sun, but its purpose is to deal with conflicts between regions. If Texas has a bunch of oil companies and wants to enact protectionist rules to impede the rise of electric cars, there is a national interest in preventing them from doing that.
It's no different between cities and towns. Everybody wants protectionist policies that benefit themselves at the expense of everybody else, but those policies are net negative for society and the people you're screwing over have every right to try to stop you.
Not SF obviously, but most places where these debates pop up ARE suburbs. Thats the whole problem. People spend forever finding a place that suits their need, and then others come in trying to transform them into something that suits theirs instead. Which is fine I guess, but I'd be hard pressed to say one side has the moral high ground.
The $3k/yr number mentioned for the cost of transportation via car in Houston is on the same order as an MBTA rail pass in the Boston area. Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston.
Yes of course transit is not free but that's true whether regardless of your mode of transit. The premise is solid. The analysis is lacking.
$84.50 * 12 months = $1014 per year
As someone living in metro Boston, that is a large difference in cost from my perspective - approximately equivalent to 2 months of rent.
I did the whole "live in Boston and just use public transit thing" for awhile. Then I moved to one of those cities that MA likes to pretend doesn't exist and my transportation costs stayed about flat. If I had made heavy use of Uber/Lyft they probably would have decreased. My friend commutes in from Worcester and rides the train because of the tolls and the fact that his work subsidizes the rail pass. In a sprawling city with free/cheap parking there would be no economic reason to do anything but drive.
Bingo! That's exactly what the linked article is about. How much extra are you paying in rent? How much are you saving on transportation? What are total costs of [rent + transportation] in both cases? How much time is wasted on transportation when you're paying lower rent? These are questions that need to be asked.
Why would you not want to "craft" your living situation to give you the optimal setup? No, you can't have everything, but a "crafted" lifestyle that avoids need for transportation may be preferred by many, and may in addition in some cases be cheaper _and_ provide higher quality of life. Maybe not, maybe not for everyone; but those are questions that need to be asked, not simply have, "What are housing rental/purchase costs?" be taken as deciding question of what places have higher cost of "housing".
Add to that the fact that you are going to be packed in like cattle, won't have a seat to sit on unless you board at the very first station, and can count on a 30-60 minute delay at least once a week ... the MTBA is probably the single biggest stressor in the Boston area.
My housing costs would be roughly twice as high (from $2,500 to more like $5,000 per month). Living closer just isn't an option.
I'd really like to see how you come to this conclusion.
There are downsides like traffic, car maintenance, and parking, but in general, cars are probably more comfortable than public transit in the US. I'm also ignoring externalities like pollution and unsustainable suburban sprawl growth. I'd rather take the subway Mon to Fri in NYC, but if the roads are empty, the streets are faster and more comfortable.
Unfortunately, public transit is awesome if everyone has to take it, but if enough people opt out, and we give them an option like a personal car and pave roads over where we could have had public space, then cars become optimal for the individual.
It would cost me approximately $23/day to drive to work accounting for gas + parking, even more if I wanted to pay to use the HOV lane. Instead I drive to a park and ride and take an express bus. The total estimated cost is around $6 including my gas costs.
Somebody pays for the cost of your parking. If you're parking at work, it's your boss. If you're parking on the street, it's taxpayers at large. If you're parking in a park and ride, it's you.
Park and rides are generally built in areas where the cost of parking is much lower then it is downtown, so the overall cost of a P&R + bus ticket will often be lower then driving and parking the whole way yourself.
Public transit is generally safer and less costly when you start taking into account accidents and injuries resulting from them. There's also the immense value of being freed from having to focus on the road, which gives you the ability to multitask and read, write code etc.
I used to do just that back when I rode the bus to and from college.
you don't have this in your car.
Don't get me started on people suffering from road rage.
In personal terms, I sought a new job where I could take the T or bike to avoid driving as the extreme antisocial behavior of other Boston drivers was taking a serious toll on me.
You misspelled "creating previously non-existent middle manager positions for powerful people to place people in as political favors"
I find being in close quarters with that many people way more stressful then driving.
In European cities the most common unpleasantness is drunk people late at night coming back from clubbing, at all other times it is as pleasant as it can be. It was certainly a shock to discover the reason for empty Muni carriages during rush hour so after moving to SF. To give people from outside the bay area an idea, elevators on the stations now have a person in them at all times to avoid them turning into public bathrooms. The area of the city all the underground lines go through have historically been the congregation area for the homeless, and there are a lot of homeless here.
But everything you listed there, except people and AC, doesn't apply to commuting, which is the main transportation people in suburbs rely on.
30 minutes sleeping in mean I've just added one hour to my car commute time (we joked that the difference between leaving at 6:30 and 7am is getting to work at 7am and 9am), whereas I just catch the next train and get there exactly at the same time as I would have before... plus 30 minutes. If I want to pick up beer, I just grab some from the liquor store on the way to the train or whatever, and carry it, no big deal. Re: rain, traffic accidents go way up in the rain and everything slows way down on the freeways, but the train doesn't feel it at all and still gets there exactly at the same time. It's got AC on it so I'm not uncomfortable on hot days.
Public Transit generally sucks in America so yea, driving is better because the above reasons don't apply when the train comes once every 3 hours, is unreliable, and the AC is broken. But the option does exist to have good public transit, it just needs the funding. Other cities and countries have figured it out, it's possible.
So given that good public transit is an option, is better for the environment, is cheaper in real costs, why not seek that out?
Our public transit is actually very well funded. London’s Tube spends half as much money per passenger mile as New York’s subway. (And the New York Subway or DC Metro get half their operational funding from the government, while the London Tube pays for its own operational funding with fares.)
Just because non-Americans have figured out how to do something doesn’t mean Americans can’t. (For example, we spend among the most on public education per student, but get worse results.) Good, well managed, public services is something that appears incompatible with our culture.
Culture, or system of governance? Culture is too wishy-washy a term. It seems to easy to give up - ah sorry, Americans are just too stupid/lazy to figure it out. Nah. I want to figure out what specifically about the structure of our infrastructure development is, and fix it.
Right now, folks in our county are trying to shut down three light rail stops that have already been built and are operating. (Transit is a “conduit for crime.”) If we do that, we have to pay the federal government back a bunch of money we got to build those stops in the first place. Americans hate infrastructure. And they don’t particularly like each other, so they have built a distributed society that doesn’t require as much centralized coordination.
It’s not stupidity or laziness. Americans are too individualistic to build infrastructure. Nobody can put the needs of society over their own needs. That’s why every infrastructure project is a disaster of inefficient self-serving union workers[1] and endless litigation. (I have an acquaintance who is ethnically Japanese, and moved back to Japan after growing up in the US. She remarked to me: “Americans don’t really go around thinking about how what they’re doing affects other people.”)
Once you really internalize all that, it’s pretty fine. I kinda like the suburbs. I like being able to roll right up to a chain restaurant and park, instead of having to shlep a stroller up and down stairs. In my old age, I’ve realized that if you’re living in New York or SF, you’re doing the whole America thing wrong. That just forces you to constantly confront all the things Americans do poorly (transit, zoning, social services). Kansas City! You can drive everywhere, traffic isn’t too bad, cost of living is super low, etc.
[1] In the NYT piece on why the Second Avenue subway costs so much, there were French transit managers pointing out how ridiculously over staffed the project was. The French were pointing out how inefficient we were.
Maybe you're right that America as a whole can't. I think the younger liberals though, at least from my experience with them, willing to put forward the needs of society. I think many of them have no choice, because the individualist option just isn't available anymore like it was in the past.
Thank you for your words on this.
One of the things I've noted is often the opposition is basically insane.
From voters in the Santa Cruz mountain blocking construction of a sewer up HWY 9. Needed because everyone's septic systems are polluting the ground water and streams. Blocked after all the planning had been done. The Feds, State, and Country would have paid for most of it. But blocking construct meant all the planning costs had to be paid for by the home owners. Total $1000 each.
To suing to block the construction of the California high speed rail. Because they might run a tunnel 3000 feet under someones toy horse ranch in the San Gabriels.
It's that a car-heavy culture takes the choice away for everybody for any other transportation.
I'm sure driving around Houston is great, but say I don't want to, for whatever reason (I want to drink a lot to celebrate something)...or say I can't, because of a health condition...
because of the car culture, I now have no choice.
There should be a way to structure cities to return choice to people, instead of giving up 35% of our usable land to streets that force people to move about in personal vehicles; freedom should mean the freedom to choose one's transportation, not just the freedom to own and maintain a vehicle.
I disbelieve. If you don't want to be caught up in nasty traffic, you have to check the reports, and have knowledge of when rush hour gets bad. So you're still on somone else's schedule.
One way to show that car transport is much more "valuable" than public transport in terms of convenience and comfort is to observe that very rich people almost universally travel by private car.
Do they? I thought this would be hard to know, has there been a survey? And is this true even in cities with decent public transportation?
Yea, exactly, there is no good public transit, anywhere, in America.
There are cities throughout Europe and Asia where the thought of needing a car to get groceries is comical - the grocery store is right there, or a short hop on a bus/metro away, and it comes every 3 minutes so no big deal.
The USA desperately needs infrastructure help.
I live in Chicago within a 3 minute walk I have my choice of Jewel/Osco or Trader Joe's (which are both right by an L stop, so they're accessible to other people near the L as well). An extra few minutes and I can go to Target. An extra 10 minutes and I can walk to Whole Foods or Mariano's.
My rent isn't super low (~1650/month + electricity for a ~700 sq ft 1 br; parking would be $200+ extra if I had a car) but a CTA pass is only $100 / month and it's pretax. Of course not every part of Chicago is like this.
The light rail is 1 block away and goes directly to University of Minnesota or Mall of America with stops between.
During the winters, rain, or bad weather, the entrance to the Skyway is across the street.
I don't see how it can get any better.
I sold my car and lease out my parking spot for $150/month. I have a Metro Transit GoToCard [0] I fill up with $20 or weekly/monthly day passes.
Most of them will occasionally take the subway, depending on time of day and where they are traveling. However, all of them travel by car when more convenient (which is often). They also tend to schedule calls during private vehicle commutes (impossible on the subway) and they'll sometimes put up with longer travel times in order to do so.
Car ownership is significantly more expensive than $3k/year.
6.5k purchase price. Cost to Charge less than 50$/mo th. Maintenance nill. Insurance cheap ($35/month)
MBTA is like $100 a month, which is $1.2k, which is less than half of $3k.
Having lived in both places, and currently living in metro Boston without a car, I'm of the opposite opinion. To each their own.
... as long as they help pay for the externalities all that driving is responsible for.
A great bit of activity San Francisco saw recently was someone renting out parking spaces as "office spaces" for like 2.50$ an hour. It pointed out that a similar space in a building would probably go for more like 10$/hour or more, highlighting how little we're valuing our street-side real estate.
"Denmark is approximately 43,094 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km. Meanwhile, the population of Denmark is ~5.6 million people (321.0 million more people live in United States)" From a quick search.
Also, given the numbers I just posted, even if your 80 percent number is right, that's still a portion of the population doing long commutes, and that number of people is more than the entire population of Denmark!
Look, I've traveled in places with great public infrastructure and I really want the US to work very hard towards it, but I get tired of all the Europeans who always in any thread of this subject start ridiculing us without even fully comprehending how large the US is. Do we need to put major money and work into it? Yes. Does that mean it's actually feasible for people to get rid of their vehicles? Not yet for anyone except those in the best public transpo cities.
"Your argument is stupid" ... great one...
There are people with very long commutes in Europe too. I personally know people who commute 100km+ one way.
If you had to drive 75 miles to get to the next Walmart you probably didn't live in an urban area so any arguments against cars in urban areas don't apply to your lifestyle. You won't find public transport in the countryside in Europe either.
And driving is much more stressful and unsafe, as well. You can't be off when you're driving, but you can definitely be off when you're taking the subway. On days when I was especially tired, I would just zone out with my eyes closed.
Now I just have a 10 minute bike commute, and it's my favorite commute I've ever had, but I do miss reading as regularly as I did back then on the subway.
I would love to not have to own a car in my city, but we'd need to increase density and transit significantly.
Yes, it is irritating to be stuck in traffic in a car -- you have to move your right foot back and forth between the accelerator and brake while you sit in your adjustable leather seat, traveling on your own schedule to your custom destination in climate controlled comfort while rocking out to music, an audible book or a podcast.
It's a trade off. One of these tanks the planet and the other doesn't, however.
Source?
Here is a Quora question and answer that states buses consumed 20% more energy than cars per passenger mile in 2009[1]. It references a US Department of transportation document that can now be found here(pdf)[2]. Tables in chapter two. Not sure about more recent figures.
I made this comment as I remembered an AC Transit (Alameda County Transit which includes Oakland) study that said their average mpg per passenger was around 8 mpg some time ago and I found that surprisingly low.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Do-buses-really-result-in-increased-en...
[2] https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Edition30_F...
My perspective: sprawl fucking sucks. That's what this is about - not just driving, but what a city built on driving leads to: sprawl. 45 minute commutes to college from Clear Lake while I'm doing nothing but kinda listening to an audiobook or something. So demotivating. Not really being able to hang with my classmates after school cause I can leave at 4 and get home in 45 minutes or 6/7 and get home in 1.5-2 hours.... or just wait until 9, 10, which fucks me cause the next morning I need to be on the road at 6:30 sharp if I want a "reasonable" 45 minute commute. Oh, and when I turn up to school, better leave 20 minutes to an hour to find parking. That's not hyperbole, parking was that bad at University of Houston.
Compared to the train I used to take to Mountain View - my "worst" commute from my time in the bay area. Still a "long" trip, but I'm sitting on a train reading, playing a video game, or sleeping. Traffic is not a consideration. I can go in rush hour or whenever, I'll still get there at the same time. I get off the train and bicycle to the office, leave my bike downstairs and that's it. No idling in the parking lot shitting out CO, waiting for someone to walk into the parking lot so I can offer them an AC ride to their spot in return for the ability to park in it when they leave.
Growing up in that sprawl was painful. Our suburbs were spread out not too bad, but enough to suck hard. One of my best friends was a good 3 miles away in a different suburb (so I had to go the long way round to actually get to an entrance. Sometime's I'd toss my bike over the 10 foot sound barrier thing and try to scale it but stopped after spraining an ankle). Bicycling there would take 20 minutes if there were bike lanes, but there weren't, there were "sidewalks" with giant roots pushing the concrete up that were too big to hop on the bike, or there'd be massive puddles in the dips or dirt and sand ready to slip me up, so I was on/off/on/off the bike, waiting 5 minutes at an intersection for a walk signal and still keeping my head on a swivel because nobody expects someone to actually walk in the burbs. So, it'd take me like 50 minutes to get to my friend's house. If it wasn't so hard, I think I would have hung outside more with my friends, and played less videogames. I distinctly remember chatting in WoW about how we'd consider hanging out, and then say "nah don't wanna bike an hour" and just play more WoW.
Then when you finally do get a car, it's not that much better. First spend 45 minutes driving a pentagram across the suburbs picking everyone up, then drive another 45 to get to the city or wherever. It just sucked!
So, I don't know about cost, I don't have the math for it, but it was terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE and I hated it growing up. The convenience of living in a mildly walkable city like SF with even the mediocre (from int'l standards) public transit they have here is to me leagues better than the bullshit I put up with in Houston. And then you go to a city like Taipei and see what this world is capable of creating... it's a dream.
I'd bet that few people exclusively take public transit in Boston. People still take taxis and car-shares, hitch rides with friends.
The key is that for many important high traffic routes, the highest quality of life option in Boston is transit, far better than sitting in traffic.
Even in parts of the world that have amazing public transit systems, there are use cases where a car (whether owned, rented, or hired), fills in the quality of life gap very nicely.
What you do is a luxury of the rich. Most people simply can't afford the luxury of carlessness in an urban center.
The ever increasing "metropolisation" as we call it, is scary. More and more, you better be able to afford living in a big city or suffer the negative consequences
Are those the same people that tell me to move out of the city into a bigger place and commute in? They seem pretty smug about their choice, “you paid how much for your tiny little house? You could buy a mansion for that here”
Well this is why those people are wrong.
Note that it depends on the locality though, some places manage to find the sweet spot - not too far and still not that expensive. In some cities this doesn't exist.
Here in the UK the AA come out every time theres a budget, asking for lower fuel duty for "hard pressed motorists".
The reality is fuel isn't that expensive, as evidenced by the fact that large 4x4s are getting increasingly popular, and people are happy to drive the half mile to the local shop to buy a pint of milk.
Edit: Plus EVs are a thing now, if fuel prices really were that bad.
[1] - https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/France/oil_consumption/
As the parent comment mentioned, they're also the ones that didn't appreciate in the 2010s (after crazy appreciation in the 90s/00s): https://www.meilleursagents.com/prix-immobilier/ile-de-franc...
In the UK you get into the centre of London from many places outside, on public transport, faster than you can cross London. And buy the much bigger property.
Can't be possible to keep everything always cheap unfortunately, while living in the city is more expensive
Look at AQI of New York, compare it with Cardiff.
Not only people living in small cities are missing opportunities but also quality air, water and other inputs.
What do you even mean??
But in many places cars being loved so much no one can get around to the detriment of everyone and the places we love. Thus looking to hack a better way of getting everyone moving is natural.
Sometimes when I drive to work, the ride home can take 45 minutes to an hour for 3.5 miles. I can ride my bike faster.
But personal automobiles start creating issues when we are required to drive to pick up groceries or drop kids off at school. When everyone does this we get terrible traffic, suffocating pollution and an environment that winds up being built to focus on machines over people.
This is killing our health, our relationships and our environment. We don’t want to ban cars, we want a culture that gives transportation choice: driving, biking or walking. So many parts of our cities and suburbs right now only give one choice: “driving.”
Last thing, I’m also an introvert, but running errands and commuting on a bike is great. Aside from dangerous or aggressive drivers, most of my interactions with other people is limited and when it does happen is positive. No one really bothers you like they do on transit or while walking.
Probably not. You might be the only one willing to take the inevitable scorning you'll get for admitting it though.
I like cars and enjoy driving too, but I hate paying ridiculous amounts for parking, dealing with rush hour traffic and driving on crowded city streets. So I take the bus in to work and avoid all the above.
In 21st century, I think at least 50% of jobs can be fully remote.
There's how you feel about "driving and finding parking in rush hour in midtown Manhattan" and how you feel about "driving down beautiful back country roads with no traffic".
Without discussing the context of where and when, giving opinions on driving is almost meaningless. I mean, here in Manhattan during the day, the subway comes often enough that you don't need a timetable, and you can get most places on a whim a hell of a lot faster than you would in your car.
You can't do that with cars though at any time. Because there is traffic and parking spaces to deal with.
Unless you're only going to big super markets like Target or a shopping center and you've never encountered this problem, you really can't go anywhere cool while driving. Please don't mention something like taking your car to a national park or something. That's what car rentals are for.
In my observation (living in the SF Bay Area for almost a year now), being stuck in traffic is usually still faster than public transit (unless you're lucky enough for all your destinations to be near a BART stop and lucky enough for your home to also be near a BART stop; as soon as you throw in Muni or SamTrans or CalTrain you're looking at much longer travel times even excluding the time loafing about waiting for the next leg of the trip to arrive).
Parking is indeed a problem, but if you think about it, plenty of people do manage to find parking spaces (obviously, since people are parked in them), so you just gotta be prepared to wait for one to open up (or find one a bit further out; helps when there are plenty of parking garages around).
> you really can't go anywhere cool while driving.
You can't with public transit, either, unless "anywhere cool" happens to be on the transit route and you're going there (and going home afterward) during that route's hours.
> Please don't mention something like taking your car to a national park or something. That's what car rentals are for.
lol. That's also what owning your own vehicle is for, plus being able to use it day-to-day for things.
When I first moved to SF, I did so without a car, forcing myself to get used to BART and Muni (and learned very quickly that Muni's timetables are illusory at best, but that's a story for another day). It's fine until you need to haul something (like me trying to haul a bunch of desktop parts back from Fry's) or need to go somewhere outside of the transit agency's service area or before/after their normal operating hours (like me trying to do a lot of things in the city).
Thankfully, I didn't get rid of my car, and as soon as I moved to a place with better parking I retrieved my car and I've been quite a bit happier ever since (though not happy enough to continue to want to live in/around SF, but that's also a story for another day).
Most urban areas are where actually legit "nifty"/cool/worthwhile restaurants/attractions/parks/etc are (for a reason). The latter is often positioned on the former. Feel free to map highly rated (even highly rated AND expensive restaurants) restaurants in proximity to public transit areas for a quick example. It's not an accident.
>When I first moved to SF,
I don't think comparing the public transportation of a city notorious for its NIMBYism and catering to one particular class of society is a good idea. Certainly no one has ever used SF as an example of a metro that has good public transportation.
Why not? It's a realistic example, and it seems like a lot of American cities have similar problems. It's fine to speculate on how much better the world would be in an ideal universe with robust mass transit and spherical cows, but right now we're talking about the actual cost of living differences in actual cities.
I went to Taiwan a few years back and didn't rent a car for the two weeks I was there. I was able to explore the city of Taipei thoroughly on their incredible public transit system, including getting mostly out of town to visit the street of stinky tofu, and taking the metro system to a famous cable car tourist destination that led to some tea plantations.
I also trekked all over the rest of the island on rail, high speed rail, and inter-city buses, visiting major metropolitan areas and weird small towns.
Gosh, if we had something like that here, I'd sell my car in a heartbeat. I'd even give it away.
But I do enjoy driving when the roads are uncrowded; just being required to, to get anywhere fun, that's no good.
I used to drive into SF occasionally and wish I could ditch my car outside the city. Hotels charge $30-50/night when I rarely need it while I'm visiting.
In/near a city you learn to inquire about parking before you leave, because it may not be an option when you pull up. Twice in the last six months I've gotten my car stuck in a garage overnight. The first time I missed the closing time the second I lost my ticket and there was no attendant on duty after hours.
There are a lot of externalities that aren't obvious. Only a fraction of the cost of road maintenance is included in the price of fuel. The rest comes out of general/other taxes. Fuel, even though it has a specific tax, is subsidized. Many ordinances require buildings to have a certain number of parking spots, occupying real estate that could be better used elsewhere. I remember hearing that a parking lot in many of cities is the highest value property.
Then, of course, you have the more obvious burdens like car maintenance and traffic.
That’s not a sound assumption. The typical pattern is younger people living in the city and moving to the suburbs as they get older and have kids. In the latter case, transportation costs go up because the amount of transportation that needs to be done goes way up. My wife and I went from not having a car in Chicago to having two cars in the Annapolis suburbs. One car is necessary because we now have to drive to the train station to get to DC. That fits in with the article’s premise that increased transportation costs offset lower housing costs somewhat. The other, however, is necessary because we have two kids who need to go to a ton of different places. Even in Chicago, it’s unlikely that your work, your wife’s work, your kids’ school, and your kids’ extracurricular activities are all going to be near transit.
Also, the article assumes that transportation erases the housing cost difference without accounting for the fact that people might purchase more transportation because housing costs are so much cheaper, not just because they have to to cope with sprawl. We moved from a 1,400 square foot 3BR downtown to a 2,800 square foot 4BR in the burbs. Our mortgage is half of what our rent used to be. Had we continued to pay city rents, we may have continued to drive my 10 year old fully paid off car. Instead we bought two newer cars, not because they were necessary for the commute, but because we had the extra cash.
The article also leaves out the third rail of urbanism: schools. The folks who live in our neighborhood in Annapolis could not afford to buy a house, even a much smaller one, in DC with a public school as good as the one we have here. The folks I know trying to square that circle (living downtown in one of the handful of good school districts in the city) are paying three times as much as we did for housing. (And, as a result, live in gentrified neighborhoods with little economic or even racial diversity.)
How long has this been the typical pattern? Auto-oriented suburbs are an experiment two generations in the making. Before that development, there was a sharper urban-rural divide. I would not be surprised to see the US largely swing back to that arrangement within the next 60 years.
The lack of good schools and affordable houses in cities seems to be the deal killer. In my own experience, I don’t know any middle class people trying to raise kids in the city. Out of my friends’ circle, the folks trying to stick through the city thing are all high income ($200k+ household). My wife and I stuck it out downtown for a while—until our daughter was five. But the costs add up shockingly fast. For example, for the first four years, you can’t send your kids to public school even if you want to. A daycare near my office in DC is $2,400 per month for infants. Near my house in the Annapolis suburbs, it’s $1,500 at the high end. Most of the good public schools are in Northwest, where $900,000 is table stakes for a house (and where you need a car anyway because there is no metro).
They take Houston as an example, which is on the opposite end of the housing cost/sprawl spectrum from, say, San Francisco, but the "sprawl tax" math doesn't work here. Given average apartment costs and 30yr mortgages at about 4%:
Houston Avg House Cost:about $300k or $1400/month
SF Avg House Cost: about $1.3 million or $6100/month
Difference: about $54,000/year
Houston Avg Apt: about $1100/month or $13k/year
SF Avg Apt: about $3500/month or $42,000/year
Difference: $2400/month or $29,000/year
I think unfortunately there's too much noise from factors like weird regulations and anti-housing hyper activists in cities like San Francisco to get a good comparison.
Of course property in San Francisco or NYC is going to be significantly more expensive than far-off sprawl around Houston. As they say in real estate, it's all about location, location, location. Living in the city is highly desirable for many reasons beyond just having lower transportation costs.
Well, that's assuming you own / lease a vehicle.
Instead, if you're using public transportation then sprawl translates into time. Longer distances translate into more stops, and perhaps even a transfer, or two. That time adds up.
If you're lucky you drive to the train station. But best I can tell, if you're using buses to get around locally, you're paying dearly in time. In fact, a couple days ago I saw a report on the local news that SEPTA (PHL, PA) is seeing bus rides / riders declined. They attributes this it Uber and Lyft. Apparently, the market is figuring out - faster than SEPTA - that time really is money.
Is it specifically car costs that people find hard to grok?
In London you could live in Zone 1, walking distance from your work, and pay 0 GBP for essential transport, or you could live in Zone 6 and pay ~250GBP a month, or you could live in a small town or village somewhere with a rail station and pay 250-500 depending on distance.
You can't really avoid knowing it unless you just don't care what anything costs.
A few years back I moved from a flat around the corner from work to one quite far out. The cost savings were minimal with transport accounted for; negative if I valued my time. The main thing was being in a more suburban location, less concrete etc.
Discretionary Income Per Hour Lost to work:
Discretionary income: Income minus taxes and minimal housing costs.
Hour lost to work: Time at work plus time commuting
That more completely captures the tradeoffs that policymakers face.
They can't just sigh and expect people to move further out, be cause, yes, it increases discretionary income, but also increases time lost to work, so isn't necessarily an improvement.
Higher taxes might be a good idea if they can be used to scale up transportation capacity in proportion to the hit to DI.
And policies that reduce pre-tax income might be a good idea if the housing savings cancel it out.
It seems that when demand for public transit is high, politicians often put forward light, elevated, and subsurface rail boondoggle projects instead of just buying some buses and organizing routes, the incremental, somewhat temporary improvements necessary to move toward better transit connectivity.
The answer is yes. Comparaing housing costs to transportation costs is not accurate. Housing costs are fixed based on neighborhood so most residents are forced to either pay the price or move. While transportation costs can always be budgeted lowered by many methods. EX: using fuel efficient vehicles, car pooling, sharing vehicles, etc.
Housing prices both renting/buying are usually fixed based on similar houses in the area. You arent going to see a $2500 a month house next to a $600 a month house. So the idea that you can just buy drastically cheaper houses in the same neighborhood is not true. Roommates are an option for singles. But not feasible for families
In the US, many neighborhoods (esp. newer) were constructed all at once by a single developer. This is how you get the "sameness", and finding a significantly cheaper home is not possible in these places. In other places, it can be.
Maybe not in a modern cookie cutter subdivision, but in older neighborhoods, definitely. My street has a lot of variety of size and occupancy. We have big single family houses, smaller single family houses, duplexes, triplexes, and a house with a mother-in-law apartment.
>Roommates are an option for singles. But not feasible for families
Roommates can work for families with the right architecture, I've seen it work before, personally. Of course, if you're completely closed off to the whole idea just on principal, it won't work.
On the one hand, I appreciate that they're trying to put numbers on a problem we all feel in our gut. You can't hand-wave it away by saying "well, things change".
But, at the same time, things DO change. At a time when many goods and services are at an all-time low in terms of costs, why WOULDN'T housing costs go up? On the one hand, costs will be affected by constrained or increased supply. On the other hand, there's the demand side. If I can afford to cheaply feed and transport and clothe myself, why would I not choose to allocate a greater share of my income towards housing closer to work, or with more space, or in a more desirable neighborhood? The choices we all freely make with how to allocate our income necessarily drives affordability for others.
And easily tested.
Is it true that the other costs of living have gone down in real terms. If it is, then we also need to know if people are buying those cheaper products and services.
We also need to know which groups of people are affected by which price-changes-over-time, in real terms.
This seems like information the statistics bureaus are likely to collect, definitely recall seeing this sort of data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and I vaguely recall the costs of living have gone up but I’ve never attempted to dissect the data.
I think the most important idea from the parent comment here is whether it’s possible to live on rice, lentils, onions, and potatoes, plus heating and cooking energy, at a lower rate now than the recent past, and if so why are we choosing not to.
For food it really depends on what you get. Meat seems to be higher, but I'm always amazed at how cheap bananas and potatoes are (and rice). Paying per minute for phone calls is a thing of the past too.
However a modern lifestyle also comes with more "almost necessary" expenses, such as home internet, cable ($150 - $200 a month), plus cell phone ($160 per month for two lines, to get unlimited calls and data). But electric usage is lower due to higher efficiency appliances and lighting.
I agree with you on the "almost necessary" expenses. While nobody "needs" a $1000 smartphone, of course, it's hardly reasonable to not expect someone to complain about the cost of living unless they're adjusting their rabbit ears and using a tin cup and string. In particular, for many lower-income people, their (say) $400 smartphone might be their primary computing device
In other words, it's complicated!
That's exactly what it is. Cars are lasting longer so more of the market is shifting to various types of used (e.g. CPO Avalon is bought by people who would have formerly bought a new Echo) and there's a bunch of secondary mechanisms and financial incentive shenanigans that further this.
The "almost necessary" level of those bills is ~$60 for internet and netflix and ~$45/line with a company like straight talk.
Paying $150-$200 for TV and Internet is on the very luxurious side of TV/Internet, and $80/line is both a luxurious amount of data and a premium cellphone carrier.