Since the assembly line began churning out Model T Fords, the automobile industry and oil industry have enjoyed government subsidies allowing them huge profits at taxpayers’ expense. Without highways, roads, bridges and their continued maintenance, there’d be no way to use automobiles. According to the USDA, a new road costs between $2800 and $3500 per mile. Providing a means of using cars at taxpayer expense is a subsidy. It would be no different from the government providing the entire country free WiFi to use their computers. According to this article in Reuters, the oil industry collects $36.5 billion in government subsidies. If Enviro Girl understands this correctly, the government charges everyone a tax and then gives the money to corporations that make a profit using our money to operate. That doesn’t qualify as capitalism, that’s a form of welfare.
Yet the minute Enviro Girl reads about spending government money on mass transit or bike trails, people object. They whine about the cost of such projects, but no one seems to whine about the cost of building new freeways, interchanges, and bridges. Our country has invested for decades in allowing people to transport themselves in cars to get from place to place. The cost of driving is not reflected in gas taxes.
For too long the true cost of driving has been hidden from consumers. Enviro Girl knows it costs her nearly $400 a month to drive when she calculates the cost of her car payment (spread out over the life of her vehicle–she’ll drive her Momvan until it dies of natural causes someday), auto insurance, registration fee, fuel, and maintenance. She gets weary of hearing people dicker about the price of gasoline per gallon because in her view it’s not enough. If she could, she’d ditch her Momvan and ante up for a $50 bus pass. And Enviro Girl lives in a place where she can usually park for free. Driving her clan around in a car is the least cost-effective way to travel, and that’s not even considering the environmental costs associated with driving.
Therefore, Enviro Girl was shocked to learn what driving really costs when she went to this website to calculate the true cost: $12,009.45 a year! Head over to The True Cost of Driving to find out what you’re paying annually to drive. It’s time to change our tune, America. Mass transit, walking, biking–we need to wean our population off the “freedom of the road” because frankly, it costs too darn much.
I just calculated my mileage, feeling smug since I work at home and the husband drives work. I shouldn’t have been too smug since we still came in at nearly $10,000 year — it’s our once/month road trips around the state and one once/summer driving vacation that drive it up for us.
I like this idea, but I find their math seriously flawed. What about those of us who carpool? Drive a hybrid? What about public transportation? Buses and greyhounds run on those roads too. It ain’t all us private folk.
I’m not saying our reliance on the car isn’t a bad thing. But instead of lambasting the whole system, let’s address the real problem – American’s who feel they need the biggest and baddest gas guzzler, times 2 or 3 for each family. If more folks bought smaller, more efficient vehicles and looked for ways to car pool, the impact would decrease significantly. And you’ll find, if you dig deep, that the real impact to American highways comes from the semis hauling all our junk across the states. Move that back to the railways and highway costs would decrease significantly.
(Ah-hah! I knew I’d use that civil engineering transportation class at least once in my lifetime!)