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

[Michael Bluejay]

Jeff, your original post was what inspired the article in the latest 
edition of Car-Free World.  In the next issue I'll tackle the effective 
speed of autos after converting car costs into time, and here's what 
I'll say (unless I get some good amendments via this list):

"Another way to convert money into time is to figure out the average 
speed of a car after accounting for the time needed to earn money to 
pay for it. Average speeds for urban autos is 25mph (11, see website). 
Based on a 7-mile one-way commute, that takes 140 hours a year. Once we 
add in the 517 hours required to pay for the car [from the table 
above], we have 657 hours total, which brings our average speed down to 
5.3mph -- slower than a bicycle."

I've updated the Almanac page of BicycleAustin with all of the figures 
and links related to the costs of car ownership.

-MBJ-

On Friday, November 21, 2003, at 03:56  PM, Jeff Thorne wrote:

>
> 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?
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Get on or off this list here:  
> http://lists.bicycleaustin.info/listinfo.cgi/forum-bicycleaustin.info
>