How much do things really cost?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
How does one account for underpayment of labour or the inconvenience of roads?
You could go further and quantify the effective costs of that struggle, but I don't think you need to. If something you buy contains 2 hours of labor that should have been paid $8/hr but was paid $4/hr, then there's a component to the "true cost" of at least $8.
you could really paint the picture either way you like, given enough effort.
I had pondered itemized bills so that we may at least make that data available but it wouldn't be very useful compared to what it costs to gather the data. It just wouldn't fit in our attention span. The shooting from the hip approach taken by De Aanzet is good enough to expand the attention all the way up to HN and beyond.
However, those same roads also allow rapid and fine-grained transport of almost everything physical that anyone in society uses: food, clothes, furniture, building materials, most industrial materials, machinery and components all probably were moved on a truck at some point. Probably the only thing that likely didn't is water, and even then the treatment chemicals did. Even if goods moved from ports to regional hubs by train (which they probably should), you still need to move them by road from the hubs (and again if they are used to produce other goods). Much as I love trains, they're no good for delivering 1000kg to a specific urban building, and much as I love bicycles, neither are they.
So, much of that road that counts for the cost of the car drivers would still exist even if the cars didn't. Even in the suburbs you will still need houses to be visited by vehicles sometimes, even if only for construction or emergency purposes.
Moreover, because the vehicles that would be left are physically large and heavy (heavy goods vehicles, emergency vehicles, public transport and construction equipment), the cost of roads would not substantially decrease even if you deleted every car, since it's those vehicles that dictate minimum road strength and that wear roads most in the first place.
It would also be a generally good idea to break this "go to the office" mentality unless there is work that can only be done there. That's some low-hanging fruit to reduce our energy use.
The truck thing is easy: treat them as commercial vehicles and see if people still think they're cool with a speed limiter, tachograph, mandatory maximum driving times and a more rigorous driving test[1]!
And, yes, I do know about that thing with the seats in Ford vans, but there might be a billion in fines for that.
[1] Which begs the question: would doing that for all vehicles reduce externalities with less usage, lower speeds and safer driving?
Aren't car drivers, and their passengers, a very large portion of "society"? And even for those who never use a vehicle, don't they depend heavily on many other members of society who do, such as doctors, teachers, fire and police, food providers, and almost every other class of worker?
Are you saying that somehow the vast legions of car drivers/passengers out there are not part of society and therefore are not paying the true cost?
Looking at the causes of death in the developed world, I think food (fast, restaurant, processed and junk food + sugary drinks) kills way more people than cars, even when accounting for pollution, brake dust, etc.
Bit of a false comparison. I have no problem with you drinking soft drinks, and I can do it myself in the moderation that I choose. However, if I want to live near a train station, odds in Germany are basically 100% that there is also a well-traveled car street there with all the accompanying problems. It's more like smoking in someone else's apartment and less like drinking sugar in someone else's apartment.
> Why have two rooms (bedroom+living room) if you can't be in both at once?
I mean you clearly don't even believe this yourself. Not sure if there's a point trying to explain how this comparison doesn't make any sense, either. It has nothing to do with the aforementioned hidden cost of >1 ton metal box transportation with an occupancy rate of one point something.
A big difference is that I can chose to eat healthy food as an individual, but it's basically impossible to escape the negative impact of cars without a major shift in how government allocates space and money.
I think the point here is that driving is subsidised and therefore more people that perhaps otherwise wouldn’t drive.
It’s perhaps very easy to assume the consequence of decisions are obvious and inevitable, but it can be good to question that too.
I guess this would be an immensely tangled argument, but I think the broader point that people don’t understand the total cost of driving because it is so subsidised is a good one.
By your criteria the vast majority of that country wouldn't be classified as a "society".
At least in the US, the government is paying vast and unsustainable sums of money to prop up a failing and inefficient form of transportation.
That inefficiency was created at a time when the US was the only significant industrial power.
We no longer have extra factory capacity from the second world war or armies of returning GIs to work in those factories or buy those products. We now have to compete on the world stage against other economies we're poorly matched to beat.
It is time to move on to the 21st century and design our solutions to fit our current capabilities instead of what existed 70 years ago.
Even though that is clearly an opinion-based statement, it's objectively wrong. The vast majority (3/4) of highway/road spending is done by state and local governments, not Federal. For the states/local governments, the amount is usually about 6% of all spending. About double that of police, and 2/3rds of hospitals and higher ed.
It's not like roads don't also serve commerce. Even with robust rail infrastructure, that last-mile would require roads. 6% of the budget for something that benefits every single member of society in immeasurable ways seems like a pretty good deal to me.
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
> It is time to move on to the 21st century and design our solutions to fit our current capabilities
I am not sure single opinion would have clear idea of what is 21st century capabilities.
I simply can't understand how car users impose "true costs" on everyone else, but not themselves, which is what the GP was claiming.
[1] http://www.financingtransportation.org/funding_financing/fun...
No, because part of the cost is the fact that pollution in that area affects everyone -- including non-drivers. You're paying part of the cost, yes, but not the whole thing.
Imagine if there was some mechanism such that non-drivers inhaled as much pollution as there'd be if there were no cars*, and drivers inhaled as much pollution as is proportional to however much pollution they themselves create (this would vary not just based on a binary do/do not drive, but on how much you drive and how polluting your vehicle is). Then each person would be paying the true cost.
A true cost has to be proportional to the damage done, such that changing behavior results in changing cost paid.
* leaving aside the impracticality of zero non-electric cars for the moment
You shouldn't have to travel long distances to do those things. This is only considered normal in the US because so much was built specifically for the convenience of drivers.
In pretty much any pre-car city you can get everything you need on a daily basis within a 10 minute walk from home, and if your job is farther you can ride a train.
Edit - For people familiar with the NYC region, here's a 5 miles radius from midtown. https://imgur.com/a/cfIqOvo This is an enormous area, and my rough guess is that 4 million people live in that circle.
> If somebody has managed to situate themselves in an ideal location for them specifically to live without a car, then they almost certainly only managed to do that by benefitting from the positive externalities created by car owners
I can, and frequently do, walk to my nearest supermarket. But I know for a fact that if cars disappeared for a day then it would be unable to open its doors. These small areas of hyper-convenience don’t exist without cars.
I live 9 miles away from my office though, so that would be a lot more difficult.
> In pretty much any pre-car city you can get everything you need on a daily basis within a 10 minute walk from home
I’m sure if you wanted to undo 80+ years of economic development, we’d be able to recreate that society… that economic development is of course one of the positive externalities you’re choosing to ignore. So if this is your agenda, I’d suggest you try to figure out how catastrophically devastating that would be for the economy first.
That's completely backward. Here are two different takes on how cities subsidize suburbs and rural areas.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-rural-america-needs-c...
Rural, perhaps, but not suburbs. Most of those studies play fast-and-loose with the term 'metropolitan area'. Most metros include inner-ring suburbs, outer-ring, and generally the exurbs as well. It's only once you start talking about 1.5-2 hours out from a major city does it become 'rural'.
At least with the metro I'm familiar with (Philly), the surrounding counties (suburbs) vastly subsidize the city itself. The wealthy taxpayers live in those 'burbs and commute in to work. The explosion of remote working, and the commiserate loss of city-wage-tax from those that used to commute, is already straining the system. If remote work continues at this level, many downtown areas could implode.
As so many have pointed out in this sub-thread, and so many other places, the pattern of US urban and suburban development for the last 80 years has essentially assumed the predominance of private vehicle ownership and use. It's not a surprise, therefore, that within these patterns of developments, car ownership and use brings significant benefits (even if it also causes significant negative externalities). However, what is also true is that these patterns of development severely penalize lack of car ownership in a way that not even old world cities do. My sister who lives in London leaves her car parked for roughly 95% of the time and moves around by mass transit. If she had no vehicle (like her daughter, also in London), her life would change very little. By contrast, the resident of most US cities and essentially all suburbs who attempts to live without a car will be hamstrung in most areas of their life.
> small number of cities
Hilarious. The cities for which this is most obviously true contain a huge proportion of worldwide human population. And most cities in most of the world outside of N. America have this as a fundamental truth because of their history (in many of them, residents are coming to recognize the enormous downsides of superimposing private vehicles on a city infrastructure designed around other means of moving around).
So yes, it's true that if you design a contemporary N. American city around widespread ownership and use of private vehicles, there are some positive externalities associated with said vehicles, and they should be taken into account when quantifying the "true cost" of those vehicles in that context.
But if you for any reason do not want that to be a guiding force in the design, and maybe even worse, if you accidentally screw up the design, not only do the positive externalities vanish, but the negative externalities grow in scale and scope.
Public transit should include automobiles.
I don't know how to drive a car. I have lived in Canada, India, and now The Netherlands.
Structures giving preference to personal automobiles are a civic failure, pure and simple.
I currently live in Auckland, New Zealand. Other cities that I have lived in for at least 1 year include Jakarta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seattle, Ft Lauderdale, Wellington, Berlin, London and Nairobi.
Your comment is an ad hominem, which is a logical fallacy, and you should be ashamed of using it. But in addition to that, it’s an ad hominem based on and assumption you made, and that assumption is incorrect. I would honestly recommend that you set your standards for yourself much higher than this.
Need to travel further? Public transit or your country is embarassing.
The point is that everybody pays the costs whether they drive or not. If the costs were more directly tied to how much each person drives, there would be a lot less driving overall.
Yes, driving a car to get from A to B in (usually) the fastest and most comfortable way wastes some energy and generates some pollution... but so does reading a book (wood for paper, ink, energy for lighting), eating any non-local food, eating meat, sex not for procreation, etc.
I think sex for procreation is likely the one thing you could possibly do with the highest resulting pollution.
* UPS is trying "equad" bikes: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ups-tries-out-equad-elect...
* London has bike paramedics: https://www.londonambulance.nhs.uk/calling-us/who-will-treat...
* Most taxi rides in urban areas could easily be replaced with e-pedicabs
> They are able to reach patients quickly and start to give life-saving treatment while an ambulance is on the way.
You still need an ambulance, because that person is going to need to go to hospital in nearly all cases except the most trivial "fell over while drunk" cases, and backies are impractical for the average person in need of a paramedic.
IMHO, we should things the way they are, and spread the true costs of driving across all of society. The rich should pay higher taxes so that they pay more than the true cost of their car usage, to subsidize the driving of the less well off.
Alternate ways of saying the same thing include "make driving optional" or "driving should be considered a luxury."
I.e. we should structure our cities and towns so that most people are able to conveniently do most of their activities without driving.
Similarly, only the rich should fly private? Or should we go and subsidize that for the masses, too? Some things are simply expensive and don't scale if you want to allow everyone to do it -- "if everyone would live like us we would need X earths" comes to mind.
So I'm not sure what you're proposing. Should there be a maximum personal vehicle kilometers allocation rather than just charging what it costs to clean up the pollution again? Not saying I'm for or against that, just wondering what you think the alternative could even be.
https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/big-cities-are-pas...
where the people saying "Big Cities are past their prime" were extremely down on public transportation. It's possible they are correct that we could really never have good public transportation in the USA because our cities aren't designed around it. But, I did want to reach through the podcast and shake them, "Go visit the largest city on the plant, Tokyo!" and see if you can't imagine public transit working for a city of 34 million people.
Of course it's possible the reality is it just can't happen in the USA. See the fiasco of SF's Central Line. I'd argue the best place to try is Los Angeles. It used to have the best in the public transit in the world in say 1920-1950 but it was all torn down. In any case, it looks like it has maybe enough people that a truly good public transit with nice stations as destinations and express lines etc would work but you'd have to magically make about 80 lines appear. A few lines at a time will never get to the MVP of actually making the system useful for the average person that wants to get from A to B because it would require 80 lines to get from every A to every B.
Also, people seem to forget that Japan's system is privatized and the incentives seem to align. The train companies create/fund/own buildings at and around their stations so they have every incentive to make people want to ride the trains as use their stations and all the buildings and businesses around them. Some of them even build housing.
And, if they don't like the big city version then they can go to Amsterdam (pop 800k), Antwerp (500k), Barcelona (1600k), Copenhagen (600k), Helsinki (630k), Koln (1000k), etc... that all have pretty great public transportation.
If more people can afford to get to work because of the subsidies then the net output of work done could be greater than the cost of the subsidy itself.
The difference is that the latter would happily NOT work, or at least not work at what they do, if they could support their life. The former will happily change their life to make work easier.
It's okay that you like bikes, that you design your life around bikes. You're offended that other people don't or that bikes don't work for what they want to do.
FWIW, my wife and I worked >50 miles apart for over a decade.
I know, we shouldn't have done that.
The "getting to work experience" isn't the only thing that is important.
You don't know, or care about, the benefits that people get from living a life that you don't want.
I never said that. I'm Dutch, but my work is further than biking distance also, so I take a bus to work. Previously I worked even further away and took a shorter bus ride, then switched to a train, and walked five minutes on each end. That was a bit further than is comfortable to do >1 year, but in the train I could relax for an hour and in a car you can't relax and read a book, code something, nap, etc. for even thirty seconds without running into some barrier. Audio books kinda work but that's about the limit.
I'm not saying "organise your life so you live next to your job". At this point I'm saying "wtf is wrong with a bike lane", though, reading back, my original point I guess was more about "what is wrong with more efficient transport than >1 ton metal box transportation with an occupancy rate of one point something"
Of course, you do have to be okay with spending time around other people. That seems to be a tough sell for the rich that can afford other options
Buses and trains are only efficient than cars if they have a reasonable number of riders who want to go between roughly the same two places at roughly the same time. (Note that the number of people passing by two points is NOT a good proxy for going to the same places.) That's easy with a lot of population density, especially in a small area. But, without those conditions, cars are more efficient.
The Netherlands is a great case for buses, trains, and bikes. The US is different. (As the saying goes, Europeans think that 100km is a long way while Americans think that 100 years is a long time. The typical US car travels 20-25km per year and 50km/year is not rare.)
The Netherlands has less than 18 million people in roughly the area of New Jersey, which the fourth smallest US state. (New Jersey plus New York City have roughly 17M people.) The US is 240-270x as large, depending on whether you count water. (To put that in context, the land part of the Netherlands is less than 280x larger than Disneyworld.)
As to "spending time around other people", the "fraction of population in urban regions" numbers look similar, 90% for the Netherlands and 80% for the US, but half of the US "urban population" lives in small towns that are dozens of kilometers from the next town. That's simply not possible in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands has roughly 15x the population density of the US and even the "rural" regions are close to the cities because they can't be far away.
The longest distance across the Netherlands is roughly 300km. The short way across the US (Mexico to Canada) is over 2,500km and the long way (Atlantic to Pacific) is around 4,500km.
I work from home, so my "to work" is down the hall. That said, when I did work on site, I never worked where mass-transit between near to my house and near to my work made sense and I never worked close enough to bike. (Note that I live in Silicon Valley, which is pretty high density for the US.)
But, there's more than work.
Most weekends, I travel over 250km. About once a month, I travel about 630km. None of those trips have enough people going the same places at the same time to justify small vans, let alone buses, and trains are completely out of the question.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...
[0]: https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/financial-models/europe/featu...
Edit: added source
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...
Just to state one potential counter argument: as far as I know most road damage is caused by trucks (I don't remember exactly but IIRC there is a quadratic or even cubic relation between weight per wheel and applied force to the asphalt), so most road maintenance cost is not related to personal car usage.
The width of a road (# of lanes) is determined mostly by how many vehicles per hour are travelling on it, which means mostly cars.
The width of a lane is determined by how many large vehicles per hour are travelling on it, which means buses and trucks.
The grade of a road (how steep it is) is generally determined by the lowest weight-to-power ratio, i.e. fully loaded transports
The grade of asphalt used is determined by annual average maximum and minimum temperatures, how many heavy vehicles will be using it, and how many vehicles total will be using it (lower grades of asphalt can be used on smaller streets, lower quality binder can used in areas with less temperature variation, and asphalt with higher quantity of coarse aggregate and larger compactive effort has to be used if it's a truck/bus route)
The frequency a road is resurfaced is governed by a few things, frequency of heavy road users is a big one (but at least in my local area, the number of freeze-thaw cycles is more important)
All that is to say: road damage is largely caused by trucks and freeze-thaw cycles, but cost of the road is largely governed by how many lanes of traffic there are, which is caused by cars. Remove all the cars from your street and a two lane non-divided highway with a passing lane every couple KM would suffice in most places.
Somewhat mitigated by large vehicles having more axles, but each of those axles counts.
So if a 40 tonne lorry has 5 axles, the vehicle does (5/2 * (40/5)^4/(2/2)^4) = 10240 times the damage of a big car weighing 2 tonnes, and 163840 times the damage of a car weighing 1 tonne.
Which, does mean that the vast majority of road wear is down to heavy vehicles. But it does also means an SUV or a Tesla (2 tonnes) causes 16 times the damage of a Micra (1 tonne).
https://www.morgenbladet.no/ideer/kommentar/2022/02/15/enorm...
Basically, a car in Norway is subsidized with on average 10000nok / 1200usd per year, so not even close to paying for its own use. This also doesn't include the fact that electric cars don't pay any taxes when bought, so society is losing out a lot there as well given that 90% of all new cars now are electric.
Here's a German paper saying that the society bears 40% of the costs associated with owning a car: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...
[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...
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:(
Why financially penalize exercise? Even physical activity aside, why do you think everybody needs exactly 2,000 kCal/day to maintain their weight?
What about tall people or people with abnormal metabolisms? I require more than 2,000 kCal/day to maintain a normal weight, even when completely sedentary. Why should I suddenly have to start paying more per calorie past 2,000 kCal?