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> Cars are great for transportation and have enabled humankind to travel further and more often then ever before, but they are also 2000+ lb. death traps and c

by ashark 9y ago

> Cars are great for transportation and have enabled humankind to travel further and more often then ever before, but they are also 2000+ lb. death traps and combined with alcohol they are an absolute threat to everyone's safety. The time savings provided by cars, once you factor in time spent to pay for them, pump gas, perform (or wait on) maintenance, plus actual travel time, is dubious for anyone earning average income. I've run the numbers, and even for me earning way over, it's practically a wash versus a bicycle. Then consider its effects also on distances between things and how many people are now dependent on cars (=less free), and it's not hard to see widespread ownership of automobiles as overall a very negative force in society.

gaius 9y ago
The time savings provided by cars, once you factor in time spent to pay for them, pump gas, perform (or wait on) maintenance, plus actual travel time, is dubious I call shenanigans on this. How much time do you spend pumping gas? I doubt I spend more than 5 minutes a week, maybe even every two weeks. As for travel time, just other day I was thinking, my 30-minute journey would be a day's walk probably, starting and finishing in darkness. And carrying all my stuff on my back I would have been exhausted at the end, if I'd gone cross-country instead of on metalled roads, instead of arriving in no time feeling fresh as a daisy. If the weather was bad perhaps I couldn't have made the journey at all, on foot. And as for maintenance, well, I have a Toyota, so that doesn't take much of my time either!
- ashark 9y ago
  Cost of gas. Cost of maintenance. Cost of insurance. Cost of replacement car from time to time. Cost of parking, both at home (garage is part of the cost of your house, if you own/mortgage) and at work. Direct time lost to gas pumping, maintenance, replacing a tire, detours taken to reach gas or maintenance places, whatever. Time of actual commute. Find typical values for normal working people for these, find typical commute distances and times, find average hourly wage. Figure out how much of an average person's working day is spent paying for car-related expenses, how much non-driving time goes toward one's car averaged per day, and add those to actual commute time. Compare with time to travel average commute distance by bicycle. That's without considering the effects of omnipresent automobiles on city layouts and how they force everything to spread out (enormous parking lots much larger than the destination they're for, incredibly wide roads, massive "green spaces" to provide buffers between ugly, noisy, smelly, dangerous highways and areas for humans, big front yards for similar reasons, and so on) [EDIT] to save you some time, the average spent on car-related stuff in the US per year is about $9,000. Average hourly wage, 26.55 or so. Call it 50 working weeks a year, 5 days a week. Looking at about 1.35 hrs per day paying for car crap, on average. Plus actual commute time and other time lost to cars for various reasons. And I doubt they included cost of garage on house or whatever in those numbers.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Compare with time to travel average commute distance by bicycle. But that's not a fair comparison, because bicycle commuters have completely externalized the cost of the infrastructure they rely on. You have to compare commuting by car against commuting by bike with no roads. That's why I compared it to travelling on foot across country in my comment.
  - gaius 9y ago
    [EDIT] to save you some time, the average spent on car-related stuff in the US per year is about $9,000. Average hourly wage, 26.55 or so. Call it 50 working weeks a year, 5 days a week. Looking at about 1.35 hrs per day paying for car crap That "car crap" is also the ability to head into the mountains or to the coast or the lake at the weekend... while cyclists, so smug during the week, are left begging for a lift. Like children being taken to after-school activities.

by ashark 9y ago

gaius 9y ago

The time savings provided by cars, once you factor in time spent to pay for them, pump gas, perform (or wait on) maintenance, plus actual travel time, is dubious I call shenanigans on this. How much time do you spend pumping gas? I doubt I spend more than 5 minutes a week, maybe even every two weeks. As for travel time, just other day I was thinking, my 30-minute journey would be a day's walk probably, starting and finishing in darkness. And carrying all my stuff on my back I would have been exhausted at the end, if I'd gone cross-country instead of on metalled roads, instead of arriving in no time feeling fresh as a daisy. If the weather was bad perhaps I couldn't have made the journey at all, on foot. And as for maintenance, well, I have a Toyota, so that doesn't take much of my time either!

ashark 9y ago
Cost of gas. Cost of maintenance. Cost of insurance. Cost of replacement car from time to time. Cost of parking, both at home (garage is part of the cost of your house, if you own/mortgage) and at work. Direct time lost to gas pumping, maintenance, replacing a tire, detours taken to reach gas or maintenance places, whatever. Time of actual commute. Find typical values for normal working people for these, find typical commute distances and times, find average hourly wage. Figure out how much of an average person's working day is spent paying for car-related expenses, how much non-driving time goes toward one's car averaged per day, and add those to actual commute time. Compare with time to travel average commute distance by bicycle. That's without considering the effects of omnipresent automobiles on city layouts and how they force everything to spread out (enormous parking lots much larger than the destination they're for, incredibly wide roads, massive "green spaces" to provide buffers between ugly, noisy, smelly, dangerous highways and areas for humans, big front yards for similar reasons, and so on) [EDIT] to save you some time, the average spent on car-related stuff in the US per year is about $9,000. Average hourly wage, 26.55 or so. Call it 50 working weeks a year, 5 days a week. Looking at about 1.35 hrs per day paying for car crap, on average. Plus actual commute time and other time lost to cars for various reasons. And I doubt they included cost of garage on house or whatever in those numbers.
- gaius 9y ago
  Compare with time to travel average commute distance by bicycle. But that's not a fair comparison, because bicycle commuters have completely externalized the cost of the infrastructure they rely on. You have to compare commuting by car against commuting by bike with no roads. That's why I compared it to travelling on foot across country in my comment.
- gaius 9y ago
  [EDIT] to save you some time, the average spent on car-related stuff in the US per year is about $9,000. Average hourly wage, 26.55 or so. Call it 50 working weeks a year, 5 days a week. Looking at about 1.35 hrs per day paying for car crap That "car crap" is also the ability to head into the mountains or to the coast or the lake at the weekend... while cyclists, so smug during the week, are left begging for a lift. Like children being taken to after-school activities.