By Randal O’Toole, The Antiplanner
Editor’s Note: This post recently appeared on The Antiplanner website and we thought it was an important piece for all NMA supporters to read and digest. Check out Part 1 here.
The Benefits of Autos
As a recent article by a British journalist noted, “the war on cars is a war on ordinary people.” Well over 90 percent of America households have at least one automobile and well over 95 percent of American workers live in households with at least one automobile. We drive for 85 percent of our travel and trucks carry 40 percent of ton-miles carrying the goods we use or buy.
The anti-freeway fanatics harp about the costs of driving but rarely admit to the benefits. Those benefits increased mobility, lower costs, and greater equity.
As noted in a previous policy brief, Americans in 2019 traveled more than 16,000 miles per capita by automobile. This is more than the total amount of miles traveled by all modes by the people of any other country in the world. Even including air, rail, and bus travel, people in many western European countries travel less than half as many miles per capita each year.
Americans don’t drive because they have a love affair with automobiles. Instead, they do so for totally rational reasons: cars are faster, more convenient, and less expensive than most of the alternatives. As the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory has shown, a typical resident of one the nation’s 50 largest urban areas can reach almost twice as many jobs in a 20-minute auto trip as a 60-minute transit trip. Even in the New York urban area, the most transit-intensive region of the country, a typical resident can reach almost as many jobs in a 30- minute auto trip as a 60-minute transit trip.
The anti-freeway network’s plans would reduce total mobility, which would have its harshest impacts on low-income people. While many middle-class workers can work in offices only part time on flexible schedules, most working-class employees have jobs with inflexible schedules, requiring them to drive in the most congested traffic.
Autos are also far more economical than urban transit. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (table 2.5.5), Americans spent $1.2 trillion buying, operating, and insuring motor vehicles in 2019, and $1.1 trillion in 2020. For that cost, they traveled 4.9 trillion passenger miles in 2019 and 4.3 trillion in 2020 (counting cars, light trucks, and motorcycles but not buses). That works out to an average of 26 cents per passenger-mile in both years. For comparison, transit fares averaged 29 cents a passenger-mile in 2019 and 30 cents in 2020.
Subsidies to driving are also relatively small. According to table HF-10 of Highway Statistics, subsidies to highways totaled to $57.1 billion in 2019 and $58.1 billion in 2020. These are calculated by subtracting diversions of highway user fees to other uses (shown in cells O16 and O17) from non-highway user fees spent on roads (shown in cell O32) and then adding $10.16 billion, which Congress appropriated to supplement the user fees going into the Highway Trust Fund. (This five-year authorization of $50.9 billion in 2016 is shown in cell Q39 of table FE-210.)
For these subsidies, highways carried 5.3 trillion passenger-miles in 2019 and 4.6 trillion in 2020 (including buses). Highways also carried more than 2 trillion ton-miles of freight each year. Shippers spent slightly more than 20 cents per ton-mile, which means each ton-mile is worth about 80 percent of each passenger-mile. This means highway subsidies average less than a penny per passenger-mile, or less than 4 percent of the total cost of driving. That’s insignificant compared with subsidies to transit, which averaged $1.08 per passenger-mile in 2019 and $2.02 in 2020.
Highways are also far more socially equitable than urban transit. In 1910, before the mass production of automobiles, only the middle- and upper-classes could regularly travel by intercity passenger trains or urban transit. Many working-class people earned a dollar a day or less, which wasn’t enough for them to pay daily streetcar or rapid transit fares. Instead, most walked to work.
Henry Ford’s mass-produced automobile democratized mobility, as his moving assembly lines allowed him to double worker pay and cut the price of Model T Fords in half. As other industries adopted similar production methods, working-class families throughout the nation bought cars and achieved mobility that was unprecedented in human history.
Highways are egalitarian, giving equal access to people whether they are driving a Chevrolet Spark (the lowest priced car in America today) or a Rolls Royce Boat Tail (the most expensive new car in America today). While the cost of driving may average 26 cents a passenger-mile, people can cut this by more than half by buying used cars, buying cars that are less expensive or get better gas mileage than average, driving more miles per year than average, and/or carrying more than the average load of 1.67 people per automobile.
In contrast, transit is highly inequitable as more than three-fourths of the subsidies used to support transit come from regressive taxes. Less than 5 percent of low-income workers take transit to work, which means 95 percent of low-income workers must disproportionately pay to subsidize transit rides they aren’t taking. Reducing or eliminating transit fares will only increase the inequity of asking low-income people to subsidize 80 percent or more of the cost of rides taken by other people.
Some low-income families don’t have automobiles, but the most equitable solution to that is to help them buy a car. The main obstacle for them is not the cost of the car or fuel but the finance charges, as banks charge up to 25 percent interest for used-car loans to people with no or poor credit. Many non-profit groups offer low-interest car loans and have found that helping a low-income family buy a car does more to help them out of poverty than providing them food stamps or rent subsidies.
The Most Resilient Transportation
The pandemic has proven that one of the greatest benefits of motor vehicles and highways are their resiliency. In case of wildfire, flood, hurricane, or other natural disaster, roads are there for people to use to evacuate from or bring supplies into a devastated region, whereas buses, trains, or other mass transportation can only successfully evacuate people if the operators of that transportation are prepared to do so. Before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city had written a detailed plan to use buses to evacuate residents who didn’t own cars, but failed to carry it out and tens of thousands were stranded in the city.
Highways are also available in the event of an economic disaster or pandemic. While highways require regular maintenance, maintenance needs are largely proportional to use and are paid for mainly out of user fees. Thus, the downturn in travel during the pandemic didn’t create a maintenance problem for highway agencies, which received no supplemental funds from Congress due to the pandemic.
America’s transit agencies, however, demanded and received $70 billion in COVID-relief funds. Even now they are complaining that they will face a fiscal cliff when those funds run out in a year or so mainly because they don’t expect ridership to ever recover to pre-pandemic levels.
A clear sign of the resilience of highways and motor vehicles is in the recovery of miles of driving after the pandemic. Driving reached 90 percent of pre-pandemic miles in September 2020, when transit, Amtrak, and the airlines were still under 40 percent. Driving reached 100 percent in July 2021, when transit had barely reached 50 percent and Amtrak and the airlines were still under 75 percent.
The Cost of the War on the Automobile
Highway opponents seek to replace a low-cost method of egalitarian transportation that is mostly self-funded and goes almost anywhere with high-cost forms of inequitably funded transportation that only go where those in power are willing to send them. Highway opponents would also reduce the resilience of the nation to respond and adapt to natural and economic disasters. They cover up these views in a patina of altruism but in fact they are totally elitist, demanding expensive transportation for the well-to-do while reducing the mobility of low-income people.
The worst part is that anti-highway groups have failed to learn from more than half a century of activism that their strategy won’t reduce the amount of driving people do. All it does is waste people’s time.
Randal O’Toole, the Antiplanner, is a land-use and transportation policy analyst and author of Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do about It.
