Ease Of Life As Quality of Life Indicator: Our Long National Obsession With Cars

One thing I have never understood about Americans is their love of cars and I am from Texas--SUV country par excellence.

To me a car is like a prison sentence, once all the real costs are figured into the purchase. First there is filling it up. Easily $50 right now, $2600 a year. Then their is oil for the engine, $5 every couple of weeks, maybe every other month or so. Then there are state taxes, $100-$200 a year, maybe more in other places. Tolls? $1.50 each way once a day equals $60 a month, just for the twenty or so business days when using toll roads. Then there is the upkeep. On an American car I'd assume on average over a year it comes out to maybe $1000. On foreign cars, especially European luxury models? Much higher. Then there are inspection stickers, or exhaust fees for some states: $200 a year in some places, $30 in others. And don't forget the insurance racket: $1500 a year? Maybe less, maybe more? Finally, we come to the price of the car in the first place. I think it's pretty hard to get into a car for less than, say, $14,000, so maybe a minimum payment of $400 a month for five years, so about $4800 a year? What's that come out to for a year: $10,000 just to drive one car! (Just imagine having two teens in the house?)

Wouldn't you rather save $8,000 a year and only pay $2,000 a year in infrastructure taxes to ride the subway? Or light rail? Or an excellent bus system? And improve our national rail network? As a part of the bargain you would walk more, get exercise, be healthier and as another bonus spend more time in closer quarters with your fellow Americans, building communities, making new friends, the chance meetings of people reading the same book on the metro or bus? (I salivate thinking of all the extra time to read books!)

Or, keep spending $10,000 a year on cars, building ever more far suburbs, locking ourselves in gated communities, shutting out our fellows, and fighting oil wars in the Middle East?

Seems like a simple choice to me. But then again, I'm here in Singapore. I walk to work. I walk to eat dinner down at the food stalls and meet new friends. I walk to go get a bit of coffee. I walk to the store to get a new iron, and ironing board and carry it with me back to my flat. (Or, you can always ride a bike!)

Of course, there are always valid excuses, but the "I have four kids and need a big SUV" isn't even close to being valid. Now, if you work on a farm? Or live in a deep rural community, sure, you need a car. But city dwellers? Not on your life.

What am I missing, that old, time worn, hackneyed excuse that a car equals the open road and freedom? Codswallop if you ask me! Have you ever ridden a train across country? Trust me when I tell you it is much more relxing and edifying than driving, tense traffic and big rigs blowing by you at the speed of light. And when it comes to trains versus planes? Well, their is simply no comparison.

Like I said, I've never understood our national obsession with cars. And financially it's beginning to look a lot less attractive.

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Sean Paul Kelley July 13, 2008 - 2:12am

Sean Paul Kelley's diary | printer friendly version |

( categories: Agonist Travel Journals | Asia: South-East | USA: Domestic Issues )

Very good

Unfortunately, unlike Europe and most of the rest of the "older" world, America was built around the car instead of around the train and other forms of public transport (aside from the airplane--an even more stupid idea when you consider the environmental impact).

You can't walk or ride a bike in San Antonio if you want to. There's no way to get across freeways without getting run over and killed. No bike lanes, no sidewalks.

It will take major changes and in quick order to change this and the public doesn't seem to realize the severity of the problem.

Forget drugs. Our national addiction is gasoline.

I did inhale.

Don July 13, 2008 - 10:12am

Yes,

it will take major changes not only in road design but also in car drivers’ attitude. Sharing the road with cyclists is ‘learned’ behavior.

I remember well a harrowing incident that took place in downtown Ottawa when I was riding a bike with my two little girls on it. One was in a front seat attached to the steering wheel (she was between my arms) and one in a back seat. As I was riding close to the side of the road, a taxi suddenly pulled up in front of me with the passenger door swinging open immediately. It took fast reaction and considerable skill with my bike to avoid an ugly crash.

Even now, with the number of cyclists proliferating, I never ride with the same comfort as I would in Holland where car drivers and cyclists are used to each other as they have shared the roads for as long as I can remember ... road and traffic designers there pay equal attention to motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians.

_{"While not a Playboy reader, she invites a male acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Chagall, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." - not a Hugh Hefner quote}

adrena July 13, 2008 - 11:52am

american drivers need to be

american drivers need to be held accountable for their actions. people who cause accidents with cars against bicycles need to have their licences revoked for at least 2 years. commerical drivers should have their licences revoked forever for a first office. people need to be held accountable for their actions as they are in europe.
again, massive cultrual shift is required, in american attitudes. the real problem is the me first fuck you attitude that most americans have about their entire lives...

johnfire July 13, 2008 - 2:13pm

The one time I almost got into a accident ...

... riding my bike in Germany was when somebody from the US base took my right away. Just one data point but it certainly supports your point.

I am also not very comfortable riding my bike up here in Canada. Watching the Canada's worst drivers TV show didn't help either.

quax July 13, 2008 - 11:01pm

T. Boone Pickens

has a plan to keep our addiction satisfied:

http://www.pickensplan.com/

We send $700 billion a year to foreign lands for the oil we use (at current prices). The largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world.

Ouch.

I did inhale.

Don July 13, 2008 - 11:09am

Looks like a scam, feels like a scam

I've read the site. Where's the plan? Why is he taking this approach? How will the transmission lines get built?

I've read the wind power falls in summer (the peak season). In addition the transmission lines need to run about 2,000 miles to the NE population centers. Expect 50%-75% of the power to be lost to resistance heating in the transmission lines.

I have difficulty believing this be to "altruistic". Looks more like a speculative scam, especialy coming les than 2 weeks after the Feds declared a moratorium on using public BLM loand for this purpose.

Synoia July 13, 2008 - 7:00pm

rural transportation

I can see how we could change urban America to switch from the auto to mass transit but what do we do about rural America? I have a small farm (60 acres) and a part-time job that I drive to 4 days a week. It is a 30 mile round trip. That is 120 miles a week x 50 = 6000mls/year. I would love to figure out how to reduce my dependence on my car but the population density does not make a bus service likely. If we had a safe bike path I might consider the long haul at least part of the time but I am not going to fight for my six inches of pavement with cars and trucks whizzing past me.
Does anyone have any good ideas for this problem?

farmgirl July 13, 2008 - 11:36am

go to your local county and

go to your local county and town officials and demand strongy that bike paths have to be created for your communitity

johnfire July 13, 2008 - 2:10pm

The use of rail beds

could help in the rural areas. For example in MN we have the 80 mile long Paul Bunyan Trail made from unused rail beds.

Tina July 13, 2008 - 2:24pm

Work where you live

in one place, not two. Then you can be close enough to your work to have options.

chalo July 13, 2008 - 5:13pm

Unfortunately, that's often not possible

For instance, in my line of work (palliative care), no one dies in the same place.

_{"While not a Playboy reader, she invites a male acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Chagall, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." - not a Hugh Hefner quote}

adrena July 13, 2008 - 5:24pm

That would be a valid exception to the rule. eom

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”

Ryszard Kapuscinski}

Sean Paul Kelley July 13, 2008 - 8:32pm

Telecommute?

Why do you have to be physically at work?

Synoia July 13, 2008 - 9:41pm

The company I work for is

in many ways supporting, creating opportunities and encouraging telecommuting. That's part of the reason I took the job. After years of skimming off the creme and not really being productive I feel like I am putting something back into society.

Sean Paul Kelley July 13, 2008 - 11:14pm

Easier to lay off telecommuters!

Plus, they don't need office space, or they can share office space with other telecommuters, just for the few times when they come in.

creativelcro July 14, 2008 - 12:45pm

Socialized road beds

It should be pointed out that in complete socialist fashion, the government already completely subsidizes private vehicle road construction and maintenance. If the government would take over construction and maintenance of all railbeds and leased vehicle rights to transportation companies for train service, we could have an efficient system quickly.
Of course, this can not happen under our present crony capitalist form of socialism, actually national socialism or fascism.
Nothing good will happen until that changes.

JT July 13, 2008 - 11:43am

very good point. some things

very good point. some things NEED to be run by the government. infrastructure, health care, public transportation, are a few.
capitalism does NOT solve all of societies problems...

johnfire July 13, 2008 - 2:09pm

btw i am very serious about

btw i am very serious about this. people like us are going to have to scream to high heaven to change things. also when people go against us we are going to have to find ways to either convert them, or cast them as villians who stand against the best interests of america for the next hunderd years. we dont have any choice, as this has been done to progressives for so long that unless we fight back we have no chance.

johnfire July 13, 2008 - 2:15pm

I calculated that my car costs

about $3,000 per year. But I only fill up once or twice every month, have no payments to make, have no tolls, and its in good working condition. So your estimate sounds pretty close to me.

I would love to take a train across the country rather than fly. I don't care if it takes an extra 12+ hours or so. Airplanes suck.

Bolo July 13, 2008 - 12:26pm

Electricity is the answer

Much auto usage is short-range per day (under 50 miles) and a huge amount of it is stop-and-go. We don't have to give up cars, as long as we're willing to shift the basis for powering them away from oil.

There's no shortage of ways to generate electricity and distribution is orders of magnitude less costly than oil. Nuclear alone, if done properly, could provide us with ample non-carbon power for the next 100 years. While PV and wind can contribute, it's nuclear that's the only major source of non-fossil power.

I don't live too far from Interstate 5, the highway that runs between Canada and Mexico on the west coast. It never ceases to amaze me that the freeway is full of long-haul trucks at all hours of the day, yet the railroad that perallels it is usually deserted. What would happen, if we'd upgrade just that one rail line with a modern trackage and ran electric-powered trains on it and displaced all of the truck traffic doing the LA-to-San Francisco-to-Seattle run?

Petronius July 13, 2008 - 12:55pm

Broken Busiess model

Power generation has a broken business model. It accounts (pays for) neither for the emissions, nor use of clean water. When it does, you'd be surprised at the true cost.

Nuclear will never be profitable if the cost includes disposing of the waste. Nuclear power just extends the broken business model.

Synoia July 13, 2008 - 9:39pm

One of the problems with current nuclear

...is the gross inefficiency of the current BWR/PWR technology, which wastes about 95% of the fuel (leading to huge waste disposal problems), in comparison to fast-neutron designs which actually "breed" more fuel. Carter shut down our FBR technology in the 70's--at about the time we quit building nuclear generating plants (the last one in the US was commissioned in 1978). That's right--the US hasn't built a nuclear power generating station in 30 years. A friend with GE Nuclear has mentioned to me that the latest designs didn't even use microprocessors (the certification cycle was too long to get them into designs). So our power plants are running with, at best 40-year old technology.

Russia and France both operate FBR installations, have plans to construct more--and India is jumping on the bandwagon with thorium-cycle breeders.

How far we've dropped when we no longer define state-of-the-art in nuclear technology!

Petronius July 13, 2008 - 11:17pm

sure great idea the problem

sure great idea
the problem is the attitudes of americans. at this point having a car is such an ingrained idea that the resistance to using public transport is horrendous. i live in germany one of the main reasons i came back here was that i dont need a car at all. but most americans feel that the convienence of being able to hop in the car and go when ever they want is their god given right. most americans think that riding a bike is some kind of demeaning activity. what you need is a massive deep attitudual change, before you are going to get this. 10 $ a gallon gas will do alot to change attitudes. however as the person above noted, alot of people who live in rural areas will never be able to use public transportation, because population density is not high enough to justify putting in public transportation in these places. my own thought would be that taxes should be massively raised in urban areas on autos and the money raised should be used for public transport. taxes on rural fuel need to be lowered or held steady so that farmers etc have access to fuel. but this wont work unless you also set up a system to prevent urban dwellers from buying cheap gas by driving out of the city. really america needs a massive major paridiagm shift in our attitudes to create a new kind of system that leads to lower gas consumption. this is going to be a major major problem for leadership in america in the coming years

johnfire July 13, 2008 - 2:08pm

Not going to happen here

I didn't see masses of car commuters turning to public transit in the 1970's oil embargo, when one couldn't buy gas at any price. I doubt that people will turn to mass transit today, because there's no shortage of gas, just high prices.

Before people took the bus in the 1970's, they'd form carpools and simply cut back on the number of trips they'd make. I don't see any difference with today. There's no big cry to upgrade rail transportation and the public transit systems are about as disorganized and unreliable as ever. No attempt is made to service suburbia in any sort of organized manner.

One thing that Europeans don't seem to appreciate is the distance involved in the US, particularly as one gets west of the Mississippi. For example, my state isn't a particularly large western state, yet it's larger than the UK and has only about 3 million inhabitants. My county is larger than the eastern state of Connecticut and has but 2 cities with population over 20,000--and they share a common border. Nor do people who do not live here understand the topography, which can be quite mountainous.

One might as well propose a mass-transit system for all of Russia--say, a high-speed rail link between Murmansk and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.

Petronius July 13, 2008 - 3:51pm

Yes, but national size

isn't much of an argument against high speed rail connecting large metro corridors. I mean, just connecting Boston to NY to DC is a huge improvement. Or a rail line up and down the California coastline.

And actually, don't we already maintain a huge interstate system across the entire continent? I know we're much bigger than the European countries, but we already have a transit system that spans our entire length and breadth. Why is maintaining such a large network of roads seen as more achievable than a smaller network of rails that connect major cities?

We could definitely do more up and down the east and west coasts. Add a line out to the Midwest (Chicago), across the northern plains and into the rockies (and hopefully through, somewhere near Denver, to connect with the west coast line). Add another one across the south, through Texas, New Mexico, southern AZ, and into California. Four major trunks that could connect most large cities in the country.

Then we could start working on some of the more rural areas. But those four trunks alone would be hugely beneficial.

Bolo July 13, 2008 - 4:38pm

Road building out West is hugely expensive

...compared to the eastern and central US. This relief map shows why.

I don't see the will to extend a high-speed rail line north of San Francisco materializing in my lifetime, no matter how much sense it seems to make.

Petronius July 14, 2008 - 11:45am

"98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation...

...For Others"

Sums it up, eh? I love the Onion :)

neuhausr July 14, 2008 - 12:45am

Whether rail and other transit systems

is affordable depends on population density. Where density is high, rail and other forms of mass transit is affodable, where it is low, it will not pay for itself.

Governments used subsidies to provide rail lines to remote communities--they never become profitable.

The electrical grid in North America was never maintained and if masses of people turned to using electricity to energize their cars and bikes, the grid would collapse because of lack of maintenance and funding of infrastructure. Nuclear won't ever be economical. North American governments must fund all forms of fossil and non-fossil forms of energy to get North America off the teat of oil dependency which includes solar, wind power, human power, and anything else that helps alleviate world-wide increasing shortages of oil.

Zillions of strategies are needed!

canuck July 14, 2008 - 2:33pm

Sean-Paul

Since your addressing quality of life issues, please give me your opinion on life in Singapore and countries nearby:

Mongolian Steppe turned into a desert! Trees and grass disappeared.

Malaysia rainforests, video: Teymoor Nabili reports from the oldest rainforest in the world on the devastating effects of deforestation in South East Asia. (Originally aired 23 Feb 07) the landscape is changing drastically due to logging for the black market Indonesia is becoming a scorched earth.

Since you’re close to Malaysia, how is Malaysia and Singapore dealing with climate change? What regulations were placed in those two countries that penalize polluters?

Were you able when you were living in the financial district able to clearly see buildings in the distance without smog blocking your vision?

Click to see a Malaysian dead river.

I watched a programme on CBC last night that indicated China was in dire straights regarding pollution! Rivers are dying and people are getting cancer. Peasants have no rights….they just die as chemical companies continue to pollute rivers while reaping economic benefits. Tragic when human life's are disregarded in favour of economic profits!

Now that the newness of Singapore may have worn off, what is Singapore doing that mitigates climate change? What are you observing about Singapore's attempts to correct dying rivers, air pollution and the inability of peasants to be able to grow crops to feed themselves? i.e. what is Singapore doing about climate change and pollution?

canuck July 15, 2008 - 1:55am

coincidentaly,

funny, I had pretty much the same thought as I pedaled off to work last week: the cars are sold with the implication that they give you freedom when in fact they have given us depenency on some of the least progressive regimes in the world and all the compromises that entails.

At a seminar on how to fund the college education of those two teenagers you mention, I was mildly surprised to learn that the average family spends more on its cars than it does on either education or housing. With gas doing what it has, that won't change.

My kids got those educations...and still don't own cars.

Freedom is not more important than fairness, just easier to sell and a lot easier to fake.

greensmile July 16, 2008 - 12:38am

the reality that once was

http://zuma.vip.warped.com/gaspirit.jpg

http://zuma.vip.warped.com/red55ford03.jpg

http://zuma.vip.warped.com/red55ford06.jpg

http://zuma.vip.warped.com/red55ford07.jpg

http://zuma.vip.warped.com/taupe.png

is still there even if alcohol fueled.

the thing is, the conveyance is the thing,
and it cannot be conveyed.

add your best girl, and let it take you.

consider the garage -your own -fully yours -fully equipped
-with ancient, well-used and familiar tools, from decades past,
your old crawler and floorjack and jackstands, the radio on,
a full pot of coffee by the air compressor with clean rags piled atop,
and th worn bench with the spark plug cleaner installed above,
where you've honed so many cylinders, overhauled so many heads,
cases, blocks, carbs, pedal assemblies, and built so many
crankshafts and lapped valves and bent brake lines and soldered wires and thought a million holy thoughts...

consider the road at 100+ miles an hour, so fast you're looking so far ahead you don't know how so very many multiples of yards, hour after deep hour, gobbling up countryside in the night unto day unto night again into another place in the land entirely, looking to your side and wondering of all the many mysteries that are not mysteries when right beneath your feet -and knowing every nut and bolt, and knowing the holy toolbox in the trunk will get you home no matter what. driving becomes transcendant as the flow becomes the dance that can't be done any other way. ever ever ever ever. again.

add your best girl (so to speak), and let it take you.

the core motor is a simple thing. you could carve one from a rock (so to speak). once familiar, and demystified, there's a holiness in spark and fuel and air. maybe it ain't right, maybe it ain't good, maybe it ain't virtuous, maybe it ain't no more at all but it's there and more real than history will can or will ever record. earth herself may not like it, for all the perversity of such use and abuse of her and her air and land, but she understands all too well. and it really does figger it's got only a brief time (barely over a 100 years) to have been.

the reality that once was.

drive, drive, drive...

Zuma July 17, 2008 - 9:10pm

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