BIKE: Back to Illich and the hours it takes to travel by car

[Jeff Thorne]

Back to my earlier post wondering whether there's any reason to have faith in
Illich's 1970s calculation that one gets little more than 5 mph by car after
calculating how long it takes to travel 7,500 miles and how long it takes to
earn the money to afford to do it (1,600 hours) . . . 

M. Bluejay's recent post included these 2001 data on costs of car ownership:


Principal on car loan
 $3579
 
Finance charges on car loan
 $359
 
Gas & Oil
 $1279
 
Insurance
 $819
 
Maintenance & Repair
 $662
 
Licenses, Parking, & Misc.
 $534
 
Total Yearly Costs
 $7,232
 
(annual average car costs for 2001 were $7,232)
. . . The average American earns about $17/hr., or $14/hr. after federal
taxes. So $7,232 in annual car costs takes 517 hours to earn. That's a full
three months of work each year. Just to pay for the car. [and this ignores the
travel time itself, which must be used to get the full mph figure, and time to
find parking too.] . . . 
    More on the costs of car ownership, and calculators to figure out other
uses for that money, are available at Bikes at Work.

I don't have the data for an Illich-like mph calculation based on this, but I
do note that, given say 10,000 miles average yearly travel (is this right?)
that's over 70 cents a mile.  And that's for the average American, including
Bill Gates and Michael Dell.  How would the figure be different if the average
earner figure were calculated only on the incomes of those who actually have
to plan their spending on cars and such--say the bottom 80% of incomes?