You Are On Car Welfare; The Everyday Insanity of Driving

I always think about the absurdity of driving at least once when I’m driving. The system has evolved so slowly over time that we find ourselves in normalized insanity.

When I want to go somewhere I strap myself into a steel box on wheels that weighs about a ton and a half. I strap myself in because it is dangerous out there. Over 35,000 people are killed every year doing this, and for each death about 8 people are seriously injured. Some are crippled for life. The death toll is the equivalent of two fully loaded passenger jets plummeting out of the sky every week. If that were happening the problem would solve itself because nobody would fly. We each have about a 1 in 107 chance of ending our lives in a car accident. We each have a lifetime chance of about 7.5% of being hospitalized after a crash. But we drive. It’s about the freedom of the road, right?

Well, freedom of departure time, perhaps. If you are driving on a two lane road and you drift a couple of feet to the left you will probably smash head on into another vehicle at a combined speed approaching 100 miles per hour. A few feet to the right and you’ll hit a tree, a power pole, a pedestrian, or a building. You have to thread the needle at high speed, surrounded by others trying to do the same. Or, perhaps, not trying quite so hard to do the same. We have all seen drivers engaged in extraneous activities, from placating children in the back seat to talking on the phone. (Phone use causes equivalent impairment to a BAC of 0.14%, or six drinks in one hour) (and no, a hands-free earpiece makes no difference*) Road deaths were declining slightly until the widespread adoption of the mobile phone. Now distraction is starting make inroads on alcohol as a source of highway deaths.

An expression for an exceptionally short time is “the blink of an eye.” Medical science says that this is about a third of a second. At 65 miles per hour that is just over thirty feet of travel. Look down at your dashboard for a full second and you have traveled 95 feet. If you have had even a few drinks and get headlights in your eyes you can be blind for three seconds or more, which is almost the length of a football field.

Those of you who have read my blog before know that I am an energy wonk. Driving is insane on this front as well. A reasonably well tuned car might be 15-20% efficient at converting gasoline into forward motion. Your car is really a rather efficient furnace that happens to roll around with its spare energy. Your car outweighs you about 20:1. Best case scenario, one gallon of gasoline out of 100 actually pushes you, personally, down the road. This is, in theory, the point of the exercise. The other 99% is either wasted as heat or used to push the vehicle itself around.

And push it does. Most of the energy your car does turn into motion is used to push air out of the way. Air drag goes up by the square of the speed. Accelerate from 20 mph to 40 mph and the force needed to keep your car moving goes up four times. Sadly, the average car of 2021 is no more aerodynamic than the average car of 1935. We know how to do much better. The General Motors EV-1 electric car had a drag coefficient (Cd) of 0.19, compared to an average car with 0.3 to 0.4. For comparison, the Cd of a ball is about 0.47. Someone estimated that if the EV-1 had an ordinary four cylinder engine it would get 75 miles per gallon. But no, we want cars that look like slightly rounded bricks.

In total, about 10% of the world’s oil supply ends up in our gas tanks. Put 10% of the deaths in oil-state wars on our account, plus 10% of the oil-based pollution and greenhouse gases.

We drive a lot. People in some major-metro suburbs drive upwards of two hours to get to work, alone in their giant brick-shaped vehicles like everyone else. An average car today travels over 14,000 miles per year. Back in the 70s the number was 7,000 miles. Just for perspective, look up your daily commute on a mapping/navigation app. The standard Google Maps has little icons across the top for cars, bikes, public transit, and walking. Hit the walking icon. For some people their daily commute would take days on foot. A hundred years ago most people were walking to work. Cities and towns were set up that way. Now, because of single use residential zoning, in many suburbs it is illegal to site businesses within walking distance of people’s homes.

It turns out that we don’t get a lot for what we put in to our cars. A writer named Ivan Illich, in his book “Energy and Equity” estimated that an average car owner spent 1600 hours per year either driving, earning money to buy, fuel, and maintain the car, or otherwise engaged in car related activities. At 7,500 miles per year that worked out to 4.6 miles per hour; a brisk walk. I did a basic calculation using the U.S. Department of Transportation estimate of an average 14,263 miles per year for 2019. On average we spend 563 hours in our cars each year and spend $9,561 on the costs of ownership. At a median wage of $19.33 per hour a median American works 494 hours to earn that. This doesn’t include the time we spend in repair shop waiting rooms, at gas stations, or at the DMV. As it is, this works out to 13.5 miles per hour, a reasonable biking speed.

The actual number is undoubtedly lower. There’s also the $100 billion annual cost of vehicle air pollution, including 53,000 deaths, and $242 billion in economic losses from crashes. We have a personal transportation system with a death toll that rivals the opioid epidemic and an ROI on our time and money that can’t beat a bicycle rickshaw.

Most of the money we spend on driving is hidden. Put bluntly, we are all on car welfare. A study by the Vermont state government found that a pay-as-you-go gas tax would double the price of fuel. That is, if we paid the full cost of road building and repair, law enforcement, and other driving-related government expenses in a gasoline tax it would add $3.25 to the price of a gallon. That gallon of gas is subsidized anyway. If we paid all the associated costs of gasoline (oil company subsidies, pollution related illness, our military guarding oil shipping lanes, etc.) then gasoline would cost at least $10 per gallon. At an unsubsidized $16 per gallon, how much would we drive?

We don’t distribute the costs evenly either. It’s one of those startling engineering truths, but damage to roads by vehicles goes up by the fourth power of the vehicle weight per axle. A Fiat 500 has a curb weight of around 2500 pounds. A Ford F150 crew cab pickup has a curb weight about twice that. Per mile traveled, the Ford pickup will cause 2⁴ or 16 times the damage to the roads. A U.S. General Accounting Office study found that a fully loaded semi (5 axles, double tires) causes 9600 times the damage of a passenger car. Of course, neither the F150 nor the semi pays anything close to that kind of premium for damaging the roads. Car welfare is a fraction of truck welfare.

The problem is that we are trapped. Our entire lives are twined around the automobile. That technology defines our lifestyles, our daily schedules, urban design and our city, state, and federal budgets. It has squeezed out alternatives in our budgets and our landscape. Most importantly, it has squeezed the alternatives out of the general public imagination. For most Americans, owning and driving a car seems an inexorable, unquestioned part of life. It’s just how you get places. And you have to get places because they aren’t close. Traffic is like the weather; something to be endured but not changed.

Your choice of car is an expression of your identity as much as a mode of transportation. This is true whether you thought about it that way or not. Cars are inescapable in film and television, as background, as enabling technology, as drivers of plot, and as symbols. The idea of an American future without cars is relegated to dystopian, post-apocalyptic science fiction.

Many years ago, when I was converting cars to electric power, one of my business partners said, “Converting cars is easy but converting people is hard.” The primary problem of transforming our transportation system is changing minds. Most people don’t think there is a problem. Most that do realize there’s a problem think that the solution involves a modification of cars; new fuel, self-driving, tweaks.

There’s another saying: The problem will eventually solve itself, but not in a nice way. The automobile era is just that; an era. Geology and physics will not let this go on forever. In the U.S. we have a quarter billion two-ton steel boxes on wheels, each driving 14,000 miles a year, traveling 65 miles per hour, with one person per car, over huge flat strips of petroleum and gravel. There is no way to reform that into sustainability. The inevitable decline in the quantity and quality of fossil fuels will end the car era. The only question is whether we anticipate this and change our ways before the crisis hits.

So, what do we do? First, get the big money out of politics. This is my “Carthago delenda est.” Until those who profit from wasted energy and lives can no longer choose our lawmakers we will get no change.

If we can win that battle, we need to take a step back and look at basic principles. We tend to mistake mobility for access. We want to get to work, to get food, to see each other, to play. Right now that means going some distance, so we think about speed and comfort and route capacity. However, what we really want is to end up in close proximity to these things. Changing zoning and urban design could bring these things closer.

Some people and places are, by necessity, farther than a walk or bike ride away. Climate and terrain may be a problem. In that case, we should consider the number of people on any given route, the necessary level of comfort for the distance, the appropriate speed for the distance and environment, terrain, local climate, and the built environment. The point being, start with a clean sheet of paper and try to use the least amount of materials and energy per passenger mile to get the job done safely. The result won’t look like a car on a road.

That last sentence circles us back around to job #2, right after campaign finance reform: persuasion. As I said before, the ubiquity of cars combined with massive hidden subsidies has squeezed alternatives out of our collective imagination. The costs and consequences of the car have been compartmentalized away from our driving experience. The beginning of change is the awareness of the flaws in life as it is. The facts and numbers I have laid out for you here have to become part of the general public consciousness before people will be willing to change. Even then, there will be an excruciating process of unwinding our emotional attachment to the present system. Every fact has an emotion attached. The people and corporations that benefit from our subsidized carnage will weaponize these emotions. It will be a generational battle.

To reiterate: Geology and physics will end the automotive era even if we don’t. Our only decision is whether we pull over and park or drive off a cliff.

*I know what you’re thinking. Bullshit. No. Drunks think they are driving just fine. The science is done. You are not magically different from everyone else in this regard. If you think someone who downs six shots and drives is immoral then ignore your phone while you drive.