Enviro-QOD
Why isn’t big business getting behind better development practices?
Atrios notes:
It costs a lot of money to own and operate a car. AAA pegs it at about 7 grand per year (.pdf). That’s close to $600 per month. Living in a place where you can reduce the number of cars per household provides significant savings. Minor changes to development patterns which would open up that up as an affordable possibility for more people would be a good thing.
Many people see owning a car as an inevitable expense. It isn’t.
It seems that large companies could have the muscle to demand that states and counties have integrated transportation plans which could get people to work without cars.
That would be like giving workers a $7,000 per year raise! (Or more likely, would allow employers to pay workers less.)
PS. this post is timed to appear while I am in my car making my 30 minute earth crushing drive home from work.
Win/win!
I don’t think that atrios tags his urban design posts but his blog is a dotted with a wealth of hurrahs encouraging growth along mass trans corridors. We need mass trans in Delaware and we need it through a mass stimulus bill. Too bad Markell kept the Hayward-Wicks continuum in power in DelDOT. The limited access highway is the only damn thing on the table.
Atrios obviously has never lived in a rural area, where owning a car is an absolute essential.
Plus what happens if you ditch the car, then get laid off from your job that’s located on a bus route? If you haven’t saved for a new car, you’re screwed.
This idea won’t work everywhere, but where it can work it should be implemented. When I look at some of my favorite cities it’s amazing how public transportation figures into the reason I love them.
Well, if you own a car, you don’t have to drive it to work. This saves a significant portion of the $7K.
Mass transit. Very efficient.
I suppose that in a managed society we could all use public transportation. I once did, to commute to my office at 20th & K after a job where I commuted 50 miles each way.
I now have a commute a bit longer but it takes under an hour and is generally free of traffic. There is only one flashing red on the route and it extends into Maryland. A view of the Chesapaeake Bay is worth something.
I do get 26 MPG and chose a car that makes driving fun. Some people never lose the interest in a lot of things.
I suppose there are some would-be ‘social engineers’ who would ‘encourage’ people to do ‘what is best for them’. Others opt for freedom. Freedom to live where they want an work where they want.
Art, stop being ridiculous. Mass transit makes sense in certain areas. Nobody here is calling for a subway in Laurel… but, wouldn’t it be great to have a better way to get to the beaches?
I worked at a Domestic Violence Shelter before and it was not far to the nearest bus. However, for women to get the nearest Department of labor was about an hour. To get to jobs at the chicken plant it was 2 hours each way.
For people living in or near ellendale it takes 2 hours to get to Georgetown (which is only 10 to 15 minutes away by car – unless you are lucky to catch the express bus that runs once a day).
Rural Sussex County without a car is just not possible, though I wish the bus routes were more convenient especially if going to the beach.
Oh yeah, a trip from Sussex to Wilmington takes about 4 hours by bus.
I still think there must be a better way for the Dover to Wilmington travel person, but I’m thinking that until there is rail for this, I’m not that interested.
Atrios’ point is more about planned development options — advocating for more development where people can make a realistic choice to live without the costs of a car. His point is that there are long tem savings to this kind of development — saving on a car is one, but also saving on all of the infrastructure for cars. He lived in Irvine for awhile, so I’d say he surely does know about life where a car really is pretty vital.
And as for Delaware’s spending on mass transit from the recovery package, Harry Themal provides a good summary of the wish list projects:
Mass transit would be aided by four new railcars for SEPTA service between Newark and Philadelphia; expanded park-and-rides in Rehoboth and Odessa; a new DART Dover Transit Center, and expanded DART Mid-County Facility.
These do count as mass transit, and importantly, count as shovel-ready. Any more mass transit tasks here (like commuter rail or something) is not something that could be rolled out for construction in the next 90 – 120 days. With the usual caveats of whether the State even gets the money they think they’ll get.
You fail at reading comprehension.
Reading between the lines on anon2700’s comment, it sounds like typical selfishness. “I hate things that don’t benefit me immediately!”
The AAA estimate includes gas at $2.94/gallon, and assumes an essentially perpetual car loan.
It also charges you for the depreciation of your vehicle.
So if I keep my car for longer than 4-5 years, purchase gas at the current rate of about $1.89/gallon, and don’t charge myself depreciation as something I pay out (since I don’t), and then take the $.55/mile tax deduction for the eligible miles I drive, surprise, surprise, that number drops by less than half.
Funny what happens when you click through.
Every estimate makes assumptions — that is why they call it an estimate, right? You just went to the page where they help you estimate your own costs for driving and found that your costs were less.
What exactly is the wingnut disease that makes them unable to tell the difference between “expanding access to and encouraging use of public transportation” and “forcing everyone to stop driving cars”?
How about freedom to use convenient public transportation, too? Or is that the bad kind of freedom? Moron.
Gas is already going up again. I read that gas will be $2.50/gallon by summer. I think that once demand comes back, gas prices will skyrocket back up again.
X,
All those slaves in Belgium and Sweden on the tram need to throw off their chains.
cassandra
Every estimate contains assumptions–yeah, and those assumptions need to be challenged when they are not necessarily germane to the population as a whole.
Nor does Atrios take into account the fact that commuting via mass transit (surprise, surprise) isn’t free–you pay for tickets, you pay for the taxes to build the mass transit system, and you pay to maintain it. You want a true figure, those dollars have to be subtracted back out of the so-called pay raise.
That so-called $7,000 pay raise also comes at the cost of a tremendous amount of freedom in terms of scheduling your own time and being channeled into directions that somebody else wants you to go….
Dear xstryker,
If I fail at reading comprehension, then you get an A in Making Shit Up, and an A+ in Totally Misreading Posts.
I was responding to atrios’ statement: “Many people see owning a car as an inevitable expense. It isn’t.” – simply pointing out that yeah, in places like large swaths of Kent or Sussex counties, it IS. And of course, it also is if your employment situation changes and you lose that cushy job that’s a 30-minute bus ride from your home.
I’m not objecting to the idea at all. I’d LOVE to be able to give up my car and walk, bike or take a bus to work. Especially the bus… I’d love to take a quick nap, or relax and read the paper, on the way in. But I’ve never lived in a place or worked at a job where that’s possible. As Suzanne documented, it takes forever to get from one place to another using DART. It would take a wholesale restructuring of “development patterns” – meaning a complete rebuilding of towns and roads – in southern Delaware to make bus access easy and affordable. Or else just a couple million dollars more to put more buses and routes out there.
Of course, if you want to turn off everyone who lives south of the canal, go right ahead and ignore them.