Private transportation: no operations subsidy, but at what cost?

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Northwest Airlines, now owned by Delta, from Cliff1066.

On this blog I've tried to draw attention to the expectations and perceptions we have of different forms of transportation, and in particular the lack of scrutiny that airline subsidies get relative to that of train services. They each receive billions of local and federal dollars for infrastructure and for operations (TSA and air traffic control for air, basically all rail employees); airlines are privately owned though, and passenger rail is not, so it gets more negative press when it loses money. But while we may spend less on per-mile subsidies for air travel, we're finding more and more that private transportation has its own costs: steadily decreasing quality in the form of higher fares and more fees, less comfort, and fewer options.

A recent Brookings report highlights Delta Airlines' recent elimination of hub services in Memphis as emblematic of the trend toward consolidation of both airport hub designations and airlines themselves: customers are being left with fewer departure options, their airline choices are increasingly limited, and the flights they do manage to get are nearer full-capacity. Shortly thereafter, another article, by David King and David Levinson at Streets.MN, thoroughly explored the benefits and drawbacks of private networks, like broadband services, and public ones, like the US interstate system.

I include a summary of both because this quote from the latter article unwittingly explains the problems discussed in the Brookings report (emphasis mine):

Generally speaking, the public will over-invest in network size relative to the social optimum and the private sector will under-invest relative to optimum, though it gets very complicated.

Much like the US highway system, we can think of the various connections between airports and hubs as a network, and it's clear that the private airline sector, as it retrenches, is under-investing relative to the social optimum. The purpose of private businesses is not to strive for the social optimum, of course. Its purpose is to make a profit. This is why you see more and more fees, fewer flights with center seats unoccupied, and more concentrated hub services. The airline industry needs to make a profit to continue to exist, and its had a pretty rough time of it over the years:

Red line is airline profits before tax, blue line is profits after tax

In virtually every way--cost, convenience, comfort--air travel has gotten worse over the past decade, even without consideration for the burdensome security regulations imposed upon them in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. But without those changes, without the baggage fees, the full planes, the discontinued routes, airlines simply couldn't afford to operate. It couldn't be any other way than this. Airlines had over-invested in their network, and now we're seeing them pull back. We as taxpayers haven't had to absorb the financial losses of the past decade, but we've paid in poorer quality of service by nearly every metric.

Whether that's a fair price to pay is up for debate. For my part, I feel no particular urge to change it, and it would probably be an insurmountable task even if it were desirable. This is the new normal. Next time you're unhappy with the quality of your flight, it might help to remember that back when flights were more enjoyable the airline was probably losing money on it.

As I've stated in previous posts, I'm not interested in bashing on airlines. I think they're fine, for what they're here to do. What I'm mostly interested in is a recognition of the fantasy-land of aviation we've been living in, where for the past 30 years the industry's average profit margins have been just 1%. We've been flying around at basically zero markup--private businesses don't like that. As the profit margins of North American airlines increase over the next few years (they're around 4% now), we're likely to get a more realistic view of what real private transportation networks look like, and then we can look at things like propositions for privatization of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor from a much more informed, realistic perspective.

34th and Stone: the Burke-Gilman's most dangerous intersection?

The Burke-Gilman trail is an incredible transportation and recreational resource for the city of Seattle. Not only do I (along with hundreds if not thousands of others) use it nearly every day for commuting to work from Ballard, I also credit it with getting me back into riding my bicycle several years ago. Jumping straight into riding the streets of Seattle was daunting after growing up in the suburbs and not getting on a bike since my sixteenth birthday; the Burke-Gilman offered me a safe, comfortable place to regain my skills and ultimately opened up the rest of the city to me and my bike.

With special concern for newer riders, and those who are just new to the Burke-Gilman, I have to draw attention to the very unsafe conditions in Fremont at North 34th St and Stone Way. Anyone who's biked through here is probably familiar with the problem. I was motivated to write this post after seeing a bicyclist come within a few inches of being hit by a taxi today, and while I'm tempted to blame the generally manic and dangerous driving of cab drivers here, the fact is that neither the driver nor the bicyclist really did anything egregiously wrong. To see why, we need to look at the intersection.

First, here's the view headed westbound on the Burke Gilman:

Westbound view. A = Burke-Gilman trail, B = car lane.

I've marked the lanes in question with letters: the space below the "A" between the fence and the dark building is the Burke-Gilman trail, and the space below the "B" is the eastbound car lane. What you can probably gather from this image is that the people going eastbound on the Burke-Gilman (i.e., toward me, traveling down the "A" lane) can't see what's going on in the "B" lane as they approach the crosswalk. 

The following image illustrates the scale of this blind spot even better:

Eastbound view, with crosswalk displaying walk symbol.

For more than 100 feet the bicyclist is unable to see what's going on in the car lane, and vice versa. The problem is actually worse than that, since the car lane is at a higher elevation than the trail up until the building blocks the view, so neither drivers nor bicyclists have any idea what to expect until they get to the crosswalk. And as I highlighted in the above image, the bicyclist is sometimes being told during the length of this blind spot that he or she is cleared to ride through the crosswalk.

Here's what it looks like from the eastbound car lane, at the stop line on 34th St. at Stone Way:

View from eastbound car lane. The trail is behind the Solsticio building, and the presence of bicyclists on both sides of it may further confuse drivers.

The reason this is a problem, of course, is that crosswalk signals tend to say "walk" when the parallel vehicle lanes's traffic lights are green, so cars can and do take right turns through the crosswalk while bicyclists and pedestrians are using it. And although I'm sure it's technically illegal for a car to take a right turn through a crosswalk without taking due care to look for pedestrians and bicyclists, in practice this isn't done very easily; drivers really can't see who might be coming up from behind that Solsticio building without already starting to encroach on the crosswalk. I'm certainly not trying to defend their actions, but this is at least partially the fault of the road design making it very difficult to see potential hazards (i.e., people).

On the flip side, some of the blame goes to bicyclists who don't slow down enough while moving through the crosswalk. (I'm guilty of this.) Even with a walk signal it's a very risky move to roll through a crosswalk at 15 mph or more when cars just a few feet away have a green light to pass through the crosswalk. We can get indignant about the fact that we have the greater right to the space, and we probably should, but that doesn't change the fact that if there's a collision we're the ones getting hurt.

Currently, the crosswalk signal only says "walk" for a portion of the time that the parallel car lanes are green, so in theory bikes and pedestrians get their chance to get through then cars get theirs. In reality this is a very busy, often backed-up road for cars, and if they see what looks like a clear crosswalk during the walk signal period they're usually going to go for it. If it hasn't happened already (and I'd be very surprised if that were the case), it's just a matter of time before someone is hit and possibly seriously injured. And it's especially likely to be a bicyclist who doesn't know to be wary of cars they can't see until the last minute. Something needs to be done.

What should it be? I'm not sure. Because of the amount of traffic on 34th St during rush hours and the lack of a right-turn-only lane it seems unlikely that we'll see any kind of partial limitations on right turns--if they were prevented until the crosswalk signal said "stop" you'd end up with the one driver waiting to turn blocking dozens of cars behind him for half the duration of the green light. I don't honestly care what the solution is as long as it works, but the first idea that comes to mind is to eliminate all right turns from the eastbound lane of 34th St.:

Alternate route for 34th St drivers, along N Northlake Pl.

At worst this would divert drivers a few blocks, and, based on my own anecdotal experience, many of them are headed east of Gas Works park (which starts at the bottom right of the above map) anyway. A possible compromise could be engineered in which drivers can take a right at Stone Way during the car-only phase but must travel through otherwise, but that might be overly complex. 

Regardless of the solution, the city needs to take a look at this and start work on a solution. If the several near-misses I've seen in the past few months are any indication, the status quo is a serious accident waiting to happen.

Dual court rulings reaffirm Bloomberg taxi service goals, consumers benefit

Taxi service in NYC just got a lot better thanks to a couple of appellate court rulings, clearing the way for an additional 18,000 livery cabs to serve northern Manhattan and the other boroughs, and the use of smart-phone apps to better connect riders to drivers. From the New York Times:

As early as next month, thousands of the newly designated taxis — bearing fresh apple green paint, new roof lights and taximeters — will begin to descend on neighborhoods where yellow cabs rarely visit, addressing an inequity that has existed for decades. [...] 

The ruling, which overturns a lower-court ruling that had stalled the action last year, also clears the way for the city to generate as much as $1 billion by auctioning off 2,000 medallions for wheelchair-accessible yellow taxis; the measure required that 20 percent of the livery vehicles be wheelchair-accessible.

Predictably, the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents taxi fleet owners who benefit financially from caps on the total number of taxi cabs, does not approve. More from the NYT:

And many yellow-taxi operators, disinclined to share street hailing with livery cabs, have challenged the plan since its inception. The Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, a plaintiff in one of the suits, called the decision “a crushing blow to New Yorkers who loathe the brand of end-run politics that created this law.” 

“The court’s finding that somehow hailing livery cabs in the Bronx is a ‘matter of substantial state interest’ — code words that were used to bypass the New York City Council — is alarming,” the group said in a statement. “The ruling kicks open the door for systematic abuses for future executives in cities throughout the state, but particularly in New York City.”

Their arguments refer to how the Bloomberg administration brought their case to the state when the city council shut down their plans to expand taxi service, and it certainly is unfortunate that things had to go that route. But note something very important: there's nothing in the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade's complaint about the impact of these rulings on consumers--all they talk about is "end-run politics" and "open[ing] the door for systematic abuses".

And why is that? Because this is a huge win for consumers and the taxi fleet owners know it. They can't very well say, "Shucks, people in Queens are definitely going to get better service and the drivers are going to be better paid at more consistent rates, but... but... our profits!!!" The fleet owners are the only ones who really benefit from an artificially limited supply of cabs, so doom-saying it is.

The taxi business is one of the most highly (and unnecessarily) regulated and uncompetitive service sectors in the country, and this is introducing a little bit of competition into that system, in New York at least. It's very likely that fleet owners will lose out a bit as a result of these rulings, and perhaps even taxi drivers themselves, who already make far less money than they deserve. I think most people would agree that the benefit to the 8 million people living in NYC and the millions more who vacation or work in the area exceeds the losses of the taxi industry--and if you're concerned about the taxi drivers themselves (as you probably should be), then your real qualm is with the medallion system.

Taxi medallion price appreciation since 2004, from Carpe Diem.

Infrastructure investment is about safety and mobility, not construction jobs

The Columbia River Crossing proposal, in Portland, Oregon.

Any time someone makes the case for new infrastructure investment you can count on two things: 1) use of the word "crumbling," and 2) an enthusiastic remark about the number of construction jobs created. Jobs are always important, but in the case of investment in roads, rails, bridges, sidewalks, etc., there are few things less relevant to a project's value. We build and maintain our transportation infrastructure to provide for the movement of people* and goods and to ensure the safety of the users of that infrastructure. These are the primary measures by which we should judge the virtue of such investments; job creation doesn't even belong on the list.

Just as an example, take the proposal for the Columbia River Crossing bridge between Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon. This controversial project would cost at least $3.1 billion (and as much as $10bn) and would provide an average of 1,900 construction jobs per year while being built. Even if costs came in at the low-ball figure of $3.1 billion, that works out to more than $1.6 million per new job, and those are jobs that would only last a few years at most. If the goal is cost-effective job creation then this proposal fails spectacularly.

The obvious point here is that the purpose is not cost-effective job creation. Rather, the value of the bridge itself is what will make this pencil out as a good investment, or not. The cost of the bridge must be weighed against its ability to improve mobility (for both economic and social purposes) and/or increase safety; those measurements, along with the much more speculative and therefore secondary considerations of "added value" or " private investment potential," are the only things that can yield a good return on investment for a product of this nature, or any transportation project for that matter.

The value of 1,900 jobs--or even 10,000--is insignificant relative to the cost of construction, and if keeping those costs low is one of the goals of the project (as it should be), fiscal prudence may work at cross-purposes to maximum employment. And that's okay. Construction jobs may be a nice bonus, but they're only worthy of consideration and celebration after the value of the project itself has been evaluated and maximized. If cost-effective job creation was the goal, we'd be better off paying people $50,000 a year to dig and refill holes all day or pick up garbage off the side of the road.

*The people in question may vary significantly from neighborhood to neighborhood and region to region--this will be dependent on the values of those communities. Some will prioritize the movement of cars and trucks while others will prioritize transit, walking, and/or bicycling. Among these sets of priorities there will certainly be differences in return on investment that should be evaluated critically, but the point is that mobility and safety still must be the primary considerations regardless of who the users of that new or improved infrastructure might be.

John Norquist, the Most Interesting Man in the World

I'm attending the Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Salt Lake City this year as part of a Streetsblog Network training/workshop/networking event, and on Wednesday afternoon we had several guest speakers address our group. The last of them was John Norquist, current CNU president and former mayor of Milwaukee, who's urbanist cred as mayor includes the the removal of the Park East Freeway and a decline in poverty coincident with a boom in downtown housing.

Early in his talk he spoke highly of Streetsblog and his own use of the site. He mentioned that, at 63 years old, he doesn't use the computer much, but when he does he regularly drops by Streetsblog to get the news. Clarence, the man responsible for Streetfilms and a big Norquist fan, said that might be the best endorsement Streetsblog has ever received; as such, I thought I'd commemorate the event with a suitable meme.

So without further ado, the Most Interesting Man in the World:

You have to admit, there is a resemblance.

With new study, air travel subsidies get another pass

There's a new MIT study out highlighting the struggles of small- and medium-sized airports, which over the past five years have seen 18.2 and 26.2 percent declines, respectively, in domestic flights. This means that people served by these airports have less options, and also that the costs of their flights have increased faster than those at larger regional airports. 

NPR has more on the specifics.

Plane taking off from Decatur airport. Photo from decatur-parks.org.

First, I just want to point out that this means service is objectively worse for travelers over this time period, even with continued federal and state investment in airport infrastructure. Unlike what we see with Amtrak, however, I have yet to hear any politicians threatening to pull the plug on the $4 billion in federal (and who knows how much state) spending on airport construction, or the billions we spend on security and traffic control. Are they okay with continuing to prop up an airline industry intent on withdrawing service from much of the country?

Perhaps a better analog of Amtrak's service--the unprofitable long distance routes, at least--is the US DOT's Essential Air Service. It saw the smallest decline in flights of all airport types, five percent. The EAS was created in 1978, coincident with the deregulation of private airlines, and was "put into place to guarantee that small communities that were served by certificated air carriers before deregulation maintain a minimal level of scheduled air service."

This service costs over $200 million a year, with most of the ~150 affected airports only making a few 19-seat flights a day; you can bet it serves far, far fewer passengers than Amtrak's 5 million annual long-distance passengers, or its 15 million state-supported route passengers. (Amtrak requested $373 million in operating support this year, a number that has been declining rapidly in recent years as ridership has soared.)

I genuinely have nothing against the airline industry, and actually think their private, deregulated system is pretty effective. As a whole, the airline industry also serves many more passengers every year. I don't even really mind the EAS much, although there are some cases where it's clearly being abused. The point is that just as with our system of roads and highways, no travel mode comes without some amount of subsidy (nor should it--mobility is an invaluable public good). Despite this, only rail and transit are portrayed negatively for their dependence on public support. 

This double standard is ridiculous, but especially so for the following reason. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on roads every year and tens of billions on airports and security, and does anyone honestly think either driving or flying has gotten any better? Rail, transit, and bikes on the other hand, the most scorned forms of transportation in this country, and worst funded, are only becoming safer, more convenient, and more popular. I don't even know who the joke is on.

How do we address "Sunk Cost Bias"?

When someone is interested in shifting from car dependence to greater reliance on active and public transportation, they're often faced with a problem: the vehicle itself, one of the greatest costs of car ownership, is already paid for. Unlike gasoline and parking, which are relatively fixed and recurring expenses, a car is a sunk cost--the purchase is in the past, and much of its value is irretrievable. At that point the only really noticeable costs of driving--the ones that affect you on a regular basis--are gas, insurance, maintenance, and parking. Taking only these into consideration can make driving seem much more affordable.

From NYdailynews.com

This is less applicable to those who wish to sell off their vehicle and abandon car ownership entirely, but few people are willing to take such a leap without trying a car-lite lifestyle first. For those who just want to dip their toes in the water, to try something between complete car dependence and complete transit dependence, using public transportation isn't so much a replacement and reduction of costs as it is an additional cost. Not only do you still have to pay for insurance and some gas, you now have to pay for bus fare as well, and suddenly the savings don't seem like such a great deal compared to the relative inconvenience of transit (excluding the few places in the country where transit is actually more convenient). It's a catch-22: as long as you're holding onto the car you're not saving a lot of money, but unless you're saving a lot of money you may not be convinced to get rid of the car.

This problem is compounded by something I'm calling "Sunk Cost Bias," the tendency to try to make the most of your investment by driving more. This may sound foolish since the more you drive the more the costs pile up, but, in a way, it's also perfectly sensible. After all, the more miles you get out of your car, the lower the per-mile cost of ownership. And if you've already got the car and don't have a monthly transit pass, a trip on the bus or train can actually cost more than driving if you're only going a short distance.

We all know that public transportation is a less expensive way to get around that owning and driving a car, but what's less appreciated is that it's not a straight line from one extreme to the other. The jump from car-free to car-lite is massive. In reality, the spectrum of car usage and costs looks something more like this:

Just replacing some car trips with bus/train trips won't save you much money, but for many people getting rid of the car altogether may seem too drastic. The question then, as policy makers and policy advocates, becomes how to bridge this gap. How do we make it more appealing to try a car-lite lifestyle, with the hope that some who try it will end up going car-free?

Here are just a few quick ideas:

1. Widespread adoption of mileage-based insurance rather than a flat charge could reward people for driving less.
2. Likewise, vehicle-miles traveled fees instead of (or in addition to) gas taxes, which will be ever-less-burdensome as car mileage improves.
3. There's also evidence that offering drivers free transit for a few months can change their long-term commuting habits.
4. Renting out your car while you take the bus might also be fairly lucrative. Maybe some car-share services out there are interested in buying peoples' cars and including a bunch of free access to their service in addition to a decent chunk of money.

None of these feel like they're enough though. For nearly all the people I know who don't own cars, it took moving to a new city or a maintenance catastrophe to finally get rid of them. (In my case, both at the same time.) It shouldn't be such a big deal to consider ditching your car.

So what do you think? If making the car-lite experience more appealing is critical to getting more people to go car-free, what can we do to improve things?

Pro-car populism is about protecting cars, not people

Bill Lindeke over at streets.mn wrote an interesting post a few days ago titled "What To Do with Pro-Car Populism?", about a recent discussion he had with an old friend. The premise of it is summed up nicely in the following paragraphs:

I began explaining the distortions in the parking market. With his economics background, I thought he’d be interested. I did my best to describe the cumulative effects of minimum parking requirements, the perverse incentive structure of parking meters, the hidden cost of asphalt, and so on. The solution, I said, was to externalize the price of parking, raise prices in certain areas and begin acknowledging the opportunity cost of urban space. (See my explanation here.) Prices should reflect the cost of parking, I concluded. 

I was surprised at his reaction. ”What about poor people?” he asked me. “You’re going to make it impossible for them to drive. In my city, nobody can afford to live in the city. I've been to these towns and neighborhoods where the poor people live. They’re miles away from jobs. They drive everywhere. You have to think about them!” He began to get passionate, as he usually does. “If you make parking expensive, only rich people will be able to drive. Driving will only be for the wealthy.”

For many urbanists it can be kind of a slap in the face to be told you're not looking out for the interests of the poor, since we generally see dependence on the automobile as having negative consequences for everyone, and lower-income people in particular. Often, we may see ourselves as champions of the poor and down-trodden, fighting against a car-centric status quo and the great costs associated with it. But it's true that, within the current framework, increasing the costs of parking, gas, etc will disproportionately hurt the poor.

Lindeke's answer to pro-car populism amounts to a rejection of the premise; that is, a system in which driving is subsidized (as it currently is) can never be favorable to poor people--parking reform, vehicle-miles traveled fees, and everything else is just tinkering around the edges of an already busted system.

I think he's completely correct, but even he admits that he's not entirely satisfied with his response. After all, car subsidies and expensive city housing is the framework in which we live. To change things in a way that makes things better for a much greater number of people, the poor included, we need to demolish that existing framework and build anew, from scratch.

The following paragraph from Lindeke's post is where I think that reconstruction might begin (emphasis mine):

We've demolished affordable housing to make room for freeways and parking garages. We've eroded government services through municipal fragmentation, civic tax shelters, and fostered spatial segregation. We've abandoned our transit systems, relegating them to the margins. We've refused to accommodate transportation alternatives in ways that foster deep inequalities.

This is just a small part of the overall problem, but it highlights the choice we have when making local spending decisions, a choice that always exists even if we don't always acknowledge it: do we spend this money on making driver cheaper and easier, or do we spend it on increasing the supply of affordable housing (like the Yesler Terrace redevelopment, for example)?

Choose: more of this...

Right here in Seattle, for example, we have the Pacific Place parking garage. In 1998, the city bought the garage for $73 million, and it has been losing money for more than half that time. Now the city is looking to sell it for $55 million rather than continuing to bail it out year after year. 

...or this?

The city did not need to build or operate this garage. They did it because they wanted to encourage business downtown by making it easier to drive in the city. This was a choice to prioritize ease of driving over affordable housing, whether they thought about it in those terms or not (and you can be sure they didn't). It made it easier for people to get downtown by car, poor people included, but the basic problem of having to own an expensive personal automobile was unresolved. And, let's be honest: the people shopping downtown, on average, are not the people pro-car populists are concerned with.

The root of the problem, and what drives the pro-car populist's argument, is that poor people generally can't afford to live in the parts of the city where transit access is best. As long as that is true, owning a car will be necessary, or nearly so, for many of those forced to live in the suburbs. Instead of trying to reduce driving costs for lower-income car owners, why not just spend that money on providing them with housing in the city where they don't need to own a vehicle?

The problem with the pro-car populist's position is that it doesn't contain a solution. You just keep pouring money into services and infrastructure that keep driving costs as low as possible for the poor, but driving is always going to be problematically, if not prohibitively expensive for some people. And it's only going to get worse. 

The pro-car populist understands that allowing more people to live in the city is good for health, environment, access, and, if affordable housing is available, the pocketbook, too. In combination with other housing supply policies (like reaping greater incentives from developers by relaxing height/density/parking regulations), we should consider the long-term return on each dollar spent on driving subsidies versus affordable housing. By doing so, we can start to actually address the root cause of the problem and shift the paradigm of poor = suburbs = car dependence = poor, give people a greater array of choices, and save people some money and commute time in the process.

Owning a car doesn't cost the average person $9,000 a year

Every year, the auto club AAA releases a study titled " Your Driving Costs" that--you guessed it--calculates the average cost of driving for various vehicle types. And every year, urbanists and other transit, walking, and bicycling advocates point to it as evidence of how expensive it really is to own a car. This year, for the first time, that average yearly cost exceeded $9,000.

The problem with this, as anyone who's ever simultaneously owned a car and earned less than $80,000 a year can tell you, is that it's completely untrue.

Owning and operating a car is indeed an expensive venture, but for the average person $9,000 per year is a pretty wild exaggeration, and for most of us the truth of that is obvious. Sharing this study without appropriate qualification is irresponsible, and especially so for those of us working toward a healthier, safer, more efficient and less restrictive transportation system. When car owners are told what they may perceive to be a lie about the cost of their driving, they're not likely to be receptive to any of your other arguments.

Before I stopped driving I owned a 1995 Toyota Camry for about five years. It cost me $5,000 to buy and I ended up running it into the ground before its time, but even with fuel, maintenance, insurance, and everything else the annualized cost of ownership couldn't have exceeded $4,000--and that was a lot of money for me at the time! (Actually, it'd be a lot now, too.) It didn't come anywhere close to the AAA "average" though. And, in fact, even the average fully-employed adult doesn't spend so much.

AAA's annual study [PDF] is widely reported on every year, by organizations ranging from transit advocates, to local government, to the AARP, to CNN. Given its automobile-oriented mission, it's taken for granted that AAA is not going to misrepresent the truth by artificially inflating vehicle ownership costs. The report itself even says that their goal is to "promote the interests of motorists and travelers." So what's the deal?

Cost estimates from AAA's "Your Driving Costs"

One possibility is just poor modeling. The study calculates the cost over five years, assuming the owner is driving 15,000 miles per year. Implicit in the study is the assumption that the average driver is buying a new car every five years. In reality, new-car owners hold onto their cars for closer to six years, and those cars aren't usually headed to the junkyard after the first owner is done with it--the average age of vehicles on the road is roughly 11 years. Over the next five years, the auto industry is also only expected to sell about 70 million cars to more than 200 million drivers. Used cars still rule the road, but they're being entirely overlooked in this report.

The study assumes that these cars are being paid off in five years, which is pretty typical. It completely fails to account for any of the years afterward, however, when the car owner is no longer making car payments (and the rate of depreciation has decreased). It's possible that AAA is really only interested in calculating the driving costs for people who purchase new cars every five years, but it's not clear why they'd desire such a narrow focus, and even if they do it's their responsibility to better communicate that fact. Mainstream news outlets aren't going to do the work for them, unfortunately.

Another, more charitable answer to this is that AAA is being selective about who they include in the study. Discussing their report's methodology (which is proprietary) they note: "It incorporates standardized criteria designed to model the average AAA member's use of a vehicle for personal transportation over five years and 75,000 miles of ownership." [emphasis mine] AAA has about 53 million members, and its likely that their members are somewhat more affluent than the average car owners, so it's possible that among AAA members average yearly costs really are around $9,000. The study limits itself to mid-priced vehicles like the Ford Fusion, Toyota Camry, and Honda Civic though, so this seems doubtful.

"What about me?"--Tesla Roadster, From TopSpeed.com

As to why this matters, I've already noted that this is argument is a huge turn-off for those who drive older cars (just look at the comments section of any articles discussing the study). It's actually worse than that though: some families really are spending $9,000 or more per vehicle every year, but the type of person earning enough to buy a new car every five years is the last person you're going to convince to get rid of their car for economic reasons. For the most part, people who burn through cars that quickly are not hurting for money. The people who might actually be swayed by concerns about their transportation spending are exactly those for whom this number is least accurate.

Just to grind this point into the dirt, 15,000 miles a year is a lot of driving. If you drive that much, there's a good chance you live pretty far away from all you do: work, go to the movies, shop for groceries, visit friends, etc. The easiest and most likely car-to-transit convert is someone who lives closer-in, nearer to city centers where transit, bicycling, and walking access is much better. So again, if you want to focus on those people the 15,000 mile estimate (and associated costs) is probably way too high.

I've written about the impact of transportation costs on peoples' lives and think it's incredibly important that every car owner understands the true, full cost of driving. The way to do that, however, is not to offer a one-size-fits-all number, especially one that doesn't even fit anyone. If asked to calculate how much they spend on driving, including the cost of purchasing their car, maintenance, and all the rest, people are perfectly capable of doing so. The problem is that not enough people are being asked, or asking it of themselves.

Whatever the cost is for the individual, the question then is whether the freedom of movement they get from owning a car is worth that amount. Is that freedom worth $4,000 a year to you, even in light of the health, safety, and environmental benefits of more active forms of transportation (assuming those things matter to you)? How about $6,000? Even if $6k a year could buy you a home worth $100k+ more than your current one, or pay off your loan ten years early? These are questions that can really change a family's thinking on transportation. Starting off that discussion with what amounts to a lie can shut that conversation down before it's even begun, so we need to be careful when communicating costs to those who know them best.