This assumes a rental hub. What about when situations where the rental parks the car in front of door, like zip car?
BTW, I’m also looping in ride share as rental.
With AV in the future, this is even less of an issue, since any closest car can be pulled from the road directly to the person in need (similar to Uber but more efficient).
I agree that single family zoning promotes car ownership for our current level of wealth. I don’t recall arguing otherwise. I don’t know if it is “wise”, just like I don’t know if jetting off to far away places for vacations is “wise”. I just know that lots of people seem to like their little piece of private land.
And, sure, private cars cost money and poor people can’t afford them. When I Google this morning for percent of US households with cars I get a variety of numbers that hover around 90%.
SR1 hasn’t always depended on cars. My daughter lives in a neighborhood of single family houses built before 1920. Narrow lots, two story buildings. I expect that neighborhood depended on walking and streetcars when it was built. But, as soon as people had enough money to buy private cars, newer houses were built on larger lots and cars became a tool to enjoy our new wealth.
Regarding the cost of owning a car, we’re a bunch of actuaries so we probably analyze to death. My anecdote is that our average annual car expense for the last 15 years is $6,104 on a CPI-adjusted basis. We own two cars, but my wife drives so little that I’m fine with representing that amount as the cost of one car.
The Consumer Expenditure Survey says the mean spending for owned vehicles was about $10,000 per consumer unit in 2019. This source gives me about 1.68 vehicles per household. Percentage of Households by Number of Vehicles, 1960-2017 | The Geography of Transport Systems.
Okay, let’s do the obvious statistics.
Number of households in the US in 2019: 128 million
Number of New light vehicles sold in 2019: 17 million
Number of households with at least one vehicle: 115 million
Only 17/115 = 15% of household bought a new vehicle in 2019. (Fewer if we allow for businesses buying cars.)
Average vehicles per household: 1.88
Approximately 8% of the vehicles owned by US households are in their first year of service.
Or: Average age of vehicles on the road: 12.2 years
1/12.2 = 8%
I’m not sure where you’re going with this
Isn’t that the average life expectancy of the car? And if it’s a steady state system, wouldn’t the average age be half of that?
Same here.
We all agree, cars are expensive.
We all agree the policies promote, if not absolutely require, personal vehicles.
How about we start by taking away the subsidies. Raise the fuel taxes and property taxes so that they cover costs ( and this is ignoring externalities like environment) without subsidies from the commercial sectors in the city.
Yup, personal cars are heavily subsidized if you consider all externalities.
Take away these subsidies and you will watch the demand for cars fall drastically.
Oops, you are correct and my wording was sloppy.
The result that I was interested is the same. A few posts back, there was a post about the annual cost of owning a new car. The number looked high, I zeroed on on the word “new” and speculated that it was the first year cost for a new car. I said something casual like “I don’t buy a new car every year”. JM complained about my apparent use of an anecdote, so I pulled up the obvious statistics. Only 8% of the cars on the road are in their first year of service.
I was not assuming a rental hub. I was assuming something like current taxis or ubers, but probably self-driving. They drop off a fare, then travel empty to pick up the next fare. Because of that, they add to the total miles of driving.
I agree that zip cars don’t do that. Instead, they put the burden on the renter who needs to walk to the zip car. Renters who want a car now may have to walk past multiple empty zip car parking places before reaching the one with the car.
We were talking about two different renting models.
You seemed to be complaining about my use of an anecdote.
“I don’t do that.” I replaced the anecdote with the obvious statistics.
Sounds like the same issue if you own a car, and you’re outside - You need to walk to your car. The distance you walk might now be shortened because all cars are shared, so you might just have a car right in front of you now instead of where you got dropped off.
Since we’re talking about affordable housing, and about high-rises, instead of having personal cars, now the entire community will share a certain number of cars, may be at a slight surplus, but certainly less than if every household owned a car in the building. It’s the same concept as flexible workspace space, or the banking system. The system works even better for low-frequency use cars like trailers and RVs.
Yes, we can agree that cars cost money. “Expensive” is subjective. I was objecting to $10,000/yr as the cost of one car. I see we both went to the CES to get better data. Looking at the CY 2019 tables, the lowest quintile averages 1 car per cu, and spends about $4,300 per year on that car.
That’s still money, but it’s more “affordable” than the $10,000. (I should have started here and not wandered around to much.)
I agree that we subsidize fossil fuels of all types by not charging for pollution. And, oil in particular because so much of our military spending seems to be connected to keeping oil flowing into international markets. On other threads I’ve supported carbon/oil taxes to charge for the externalities.
However, if we did that, I expect Americans would still live in car-oriented developments. The percent would be lower, but not dramatically. I expect the biggest change would be the gas mileage of the average car. That’s good for air quality and “fainess”, but it doesn’t stop urban sprawl.
People seem to like their little chunks of land. They also like to travel via immediately available, private, climate controlled vehicles. Policies that accommodate those two desires are likely to create places where cars are effectively required.
I’m fine with raising fuel taxes. I’m not so sure about subsidies beyond that. Maybe you can explain. Regarding taxes, I can see historic reasons why we have property taxes, I’m not sure they still apply. I’m fine with a high tax on the capital gain on land, but I don’t think you are talking about that.
I agree if we’re talking about high rises. I got off track from earlier threads where people were promoting self-driving cars.
The zip car model allows a hybrid of mass transportation and individual transportation and reduces the total cost of the the individual transportation component. The amount of saving depends on the distribution of uses by time. For example, if everyone wants their zip cars on the weekends, but not during the week, we might end up with nearly as many zip cars as private autos. If the use is spread pretty uniformly over time, there could be dramatic savings. Similarly, if we have enough cars to always provide a no-wait vehicle we would need more cars as opposed to accepting situations where all the zip cars just happen to be in use right now and I simply have to wait for the next available.
Completely incidental, but my youtube was playing a video on car ownership and it said that AAA estimated in 2021 that the cost of vehicle ownership is 10000 dollars. don’t ask me how they calculated that.
We each read that a bit differently. I saw 4300 under transportation and figured it was the result of some folks unable to drive (elderly) and some who commuted via mass transit. Both would lower the average spent considerably. I am fairly confident that the average income of metro bus riders is towards the bottom of the income scale in that area. And lastly, the costs include a depreciation, but ignore the problems of coming up with “the nut” at purchase - either new or used.
2022 Ford 150, basic model is $34,900. Not an expensive model. A lease, with good credit, is advertised at $3,995 and $489/mo for 48 months. Put next to either of the first two quintiles income, and that is expensive, you’ll quickly get to $6000/yr.
So let’s buy used. The big difference is the price will go down. Average instant depreciation is 11% when you drive off the lot. Then figure about 15% per year. YMMV. That’s still going to be quite the pill to swallow. Since this is about affordable housing, the higher income levels are not truly in play here. I’m on pretty solid ground saying it is expensive for our target group.
I completely understand that households in the top quintile don’t have a problem and can afford the occasional bill for repairs if needed. The bottom does not enjoy that same luxury.
Blockquote
See my example of cul de sacs above. Resources of the many spent on only a minuscule minority’s desire for a private drive. It’s about land use. Single family residences with a front setback chew up a lot of land. I agree peeps like and want that. Just make sure your revenues from that area cover the costs. Much better than head taxes on employers or sales taxes for everyone. Just my opinion.
Curious here. Can you elaborate on the costs that are currently subsidized? I know there’s road construction and maintenance, and delivery of utilities to outlying areas. Did you have anything else in mind?
If you scroll back far enough, you’ll find that EG’s source was AAA. He didn’t have a link, but I think this is it: Annual Cost of New Car Ownership Crosses $10K Mark | AAA Newsroom
I focused on “new” and guessed that meant “first year”. It turns out that:
The study assumes a five-year ownership period, with the vehicle being driven 15,000 miles/annually (or a total of 75,000 miles).
If the average car lasts 12 years, then fewer than half the cars on the road are in their first five years of ownership.
Both EG and I ended up going to the Consumer Expenditure Survey: https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables/calendar-year/mean-item-share-average-standard-error/cu-income-quintiles-before-taxes-2019.pdf
He was concerned about low income households. The CES says the bottom quintile averages $4,300 on one car. The middle quintile averages $9,400 on 1.9 cars.
With mandated parking spaces and the resultant sprawl, everything is further apart. So any wiring, piping, sidewalks all have to be longer. Additionally energy costs for single family homes are higher since there are no common walls.
Gotcha. But don’t ad valorum property taxes and tiered electricity charges already sort-of account for that?
I wish some suburban places had sidewalks. I’ve occasionally had to walk through traffic to fight the car-centric culture.