Since accepted wisdom (at least among the Coastal Elites, if you pardon my usage) is that Cars Are Evil, why are they still around? The list of evils is long: injuries, deaths, pollution, global warming, congestion, obesity, noise, etc. The list of substitutes deemed superior to the car is just as long: bikes, scooters, buses, trains, trams, planes, feet, etc. (Even pogo sticks are now A Thing: https://cangoroo.tech/ ) And we’ve been hearing about this for a century or so. You think Uber was the first to propose giving up your personally-owned car in favor of eternal ridehail?
So, to repeat a deliberately obtuse question: why are cars still around? And not only around, but multiplying? Experian reports there are almost 285 million light-duty vehicles on the road in the USA, up a few million from this time last year. If there is “peak car” in our future, well, it hasn’t arrived yet.1 And this number is clearly above the number of driver’s licenses in force (perhaps 235 million), so we can’t even drive all the cars we own all at once.
There are dozens of hypotheses as to why the car persists in its dominance here. Long distances in a big country. City infrastructure built only after cars started mass production, so the infrastructure is tailored to them. Evil corporations buying up and scrapping rail lines. Other evil corporations bribing politicians to subsidize cars. Inertia. Popular views of mass transit as socialist or even communist. Car culture (there are 116 entries on the Wikipedia list “Songs about cars”).
And all or some of these may be true, or false, and there are more theories. But in a way they don’t matter much, since in the end it is consumers who make the decision to buy cars, and the diversity of their motivations likely exceeds the scope of all our theorizing. So if we just start with consumers, and ask them what they think about cars, maybe that’s the best we can do. But we can’t just ask them straight out, because we all know how misleading opinion polls and surveys can be.2 One approach that can be more reliable is to couch the question in terms of cold hard cash, particularly in the form of the WTAC (willingness to accept compensation) methodology. Here, researchers focus on “How much would I have to pay you to give up X?”, which puts a dollar value on the product under examination, and collapses all explanations and excuses into one cold hard number.
A recent paper by Moody, Farr, Papagelis, and Keith, “The Value of Car Ownership and Use in the United States” does exactly this3. (Before we continue, I accept full blame for any misinterpretation of their results.) By conducting very careful WTAC surveys of Americans in Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, and Washington DC, they conclude that Americans place a high value on car ownership. A very high value. And, discouragingly for the War on Cars! team, a very very low value on other less sinful options. Herewith this post’s killer chart, generated by yours truly from their work:
(Personal Car 1 is the result of an SBDC (single binary discrete choice) experiment design, and Personal Car 2 is the result of a BWS (best-worst scaling) experiment. The colors vary, as the red bar is SBDC, and the blue bars all BWS. See the article for details on the methodology.)
Yes, you are reading this right. For the average person surveyed, you’d have to pay them $11,000 to $17,000 per year for the privilege of taking away their car. To put that in proportion, you’d have to pay the same person almost $10,000 to take away their phone for a year (all those TikTok videos gone!). But look at the less sinful transport options. “If you wanted me to give up access to the bus for a year, I’d do it for $3. Train, $2.” This is an astonishing gap: three or four orders of magnitude!
Now, you can argue with the authors’ methodology. You can look for errors in sample selection or question formulation or the math involved. But they’d have to be very, very far off to close a gap this vast. Americans really don’t want to give up their cars (the assertions of your nephew at College X notwithstanding).
My view is that the car outperforms the rest because it encompasses all the rest. It is thus greater than the sum of its parts. In short, the car is the Swiss Army Knife of American mobility. Perhaps it doesn’t do any one thing best, but it does almost everything well enough. It can drive as far as a plane can (but take forever), it can go most everywhere a bike can (but pay more to park), it can go directly to a destination the way a train can’t (but won’t let you sleep along the way), etc. And so the owner of a car finds it easy to give up the other options, because the car can do it all. And to probably distort the metaphor, this explains, at least in part, why a Swiss Army knife costs so much more than just an assemblage of individual knives, screwdrivers, files, and tweezers: all the functions you need, all in one place. (The car also does things that none of the others can do: you can use it for personal storage at any time, and even as a hotel room in a pinch. See almost any song by Meat Loaf in this regard!)
Note that none of the above takes into account cost: for example, we don’t know how much a train ticket costs, in the mind of a survey respondent, relative to the few bucks he’d accept to not ride it. But the authors do mention that annual ownership cost of a car is $9,300, as per the AAA, and so the value clearly exceeds the cost. (I dispute the $9,300 number, since it is based on the cost of a new car, and the average American is more often buying a used car, with its correspondingly lower annual cost. Thus I see the gap between value and cost at more than (e.g.) $11,000-$9,000=$2,000 … probably more like $4,000 or $5,000. Annually.)
Interestingly, the authors decompose the $11,200 figure into ownership and use values. The value of using the car is some $4,700, but the value of owning the car is some $6,500. The value of using the car is from being able to go from point A to point B. The value of owning the car is that of control, flexibility, reliability: the value of having the car available to use when and how you want it. I can’t summon a train precisely when I want it… and even a ride hail car may not show up on time. And if I want to stop along the way somewhere for a coffee, my bus driver is not going to agree.
The implications of all this for planners and pundits and politicians is that, in the USA at least, it is going to be very hard to dislodge the car from its central role in American transportation. Drivers don’t just like their cars, they see them as providing value that is significantly higher than any other option, and that is higher than the typical cost of the car. Maybe they are wrong, but this is what they believe. As the authors conclude in a deadpan way, “The reality is that the average value of car ownership and use is at least an order of magnitude higher than the value of other urban4 transport options, including ride-hailing, public transportation, and non-motorized transport.” Would you like to see Chicago become the Copenhagen of Illinois, flooded by happy citizens pedaling e-bikes? Your path to that alternative future is, for better or worse, very long and very steep…
We have seen fleet sizes decline in other places, notably in Europe, but this post is about the USA.
Everyone reading this newsletter (all 4 or 5 of you) has a friend or relative who asked you for advice about which car to buy, and, after they provided a list of criteria (e.g. fuel economy, safety, durability), and you suggested a few cars meeting those criteria — they then went out and purchased exactly the opposite vehicle. We’ve all been there: “I was thinking Odyssey but we got the Camaro….”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00731-5
This study’s results were for urban areas: we can only imagine that the gap between the car’s value and the value of other options in rural areas would be even greater.