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Cars Are A Disaster For Society -- Here Are the Numbers

Ray Delahanty | CityNerd0 HN recommenders · 2024–2025
414K views · explainer · evergreen · Uploaded 2023-11-22

CityNerd's Ray Delahanty tallies the personal costs of driving and then the externalities that car dependency imposes on everyone else, with numbers for each. It is an urbanist case that driving is heavily subsidized and costs society far more than drivers pay.

HN commenters cite it as the video version of the research on the social cost of driving when arguing cars impose uncompensated costs on others.

Transit, cities & urban planningCars, EVs & motorcyclesSocial issues & culture

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3 comments from Hacker News

@eesmith2024 · in “What the world can learn from Copenhagen's cycling revolution”

I think the mentioned report is "Transport transitions in Copenhagen: Comparing the cost of cars and bicycles" at [LINK] Along these lines, in a less scholarly form: "Cost-benefit of cycling infrastructure" - [LINK] "Making the Economic Case for Cycling" - [LINK] A related paper is "The social cost of automobility, cycling and walking in the European Union", [LINK] That paper has a YouTube version on the CityNerd channel, "Cars Are A Disaster For Society -- Here Are the Numbers " [VIDEO]

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@dangus2024 · in “California's gas prices to increase 65 cents per gallon with new fuel standards”

I think about this the other way around. The federal government and other states have artificially low gas taxes that are a direct subsidy of gasoline car dependence. A state like California imposing a tax like this makes them one of the few states that's actually aware how much the consumption of a gallon of gas costs society and manages to charge someone for it. - The federal gas tax has been 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, and has not increased to account for inflation - Vehicles are more fuel efficient than in the past, which has reduced the demand for gas by the gallon on an individual basis. - The cost of infrastructure materials has increased (e.g., building new roads and bridges) There is a very decent argument to be had that nobody is actually paying the societal cost of driving, that all of society just loses value by driving. In other words, each mile you drive in your car incurs costs on the rest of society that nobody directly pays, and therefore everyone pays. [VIDEO]

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@chriswarbo2025 · in “Accepting US car standards would risk European lives”

> TLDR, UK road users pay for far more than the road network. Right, but driving has far more externalities than just the cost of the roads. For example: > Results suggest that each kilometer driven by car incurs an external cost of €0.11, while cycling and walking represent benefits of €0.18 and €0.37 per kilometer. Extrapolated to the total number of passenger kilometers driven, cycled or walked in the European Union, the cost of automobility is about €500 billion per year. Due to positive health effects, cycling is an external benefit worth €24 billion per year and walking €66 billion per year. From "The Social Cost of Automobility, Cycling and Walking in the European Union", [LINK] (which I heard about from a CityNerd video [VIDEO] )

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