Build more housing where driving a car isn't the default mode of getting around and people will naturally start to demand better public transportation services and local spots they can get to via bike or walking. This housing won't suit everyone's needs but there's a significant part of the population who wouldn't mind being carless even in southern California.
Changing LA's car mentality isn't going to happen overnight but it has to start somewhere.
Zoning restrictions are far more restrictive in the United States than in a city like Tokyo, where the government has largely only enacted laws preventing specific cases that would be considered very harmful (opening a heavy industrial businesses in a residential neighborhood for instance).
In most of the US most land in smaller cities are zoned for single family housing only. This often means you can only build a house for one family (no duplexes) with arbitrary restrictions on a variety of other things (minimum lot sizes, maximum house sizes relative to lot size, required setbacks from property lines to the house, etc).
In the event you are able to build a du/triplex it's rare you'd be able to convert any part of it for business use unless the land was already zoned for multi-use, where they allow mixing of residential and commercial uses.
Several years ago I asked my mom why she lived so far from where she worked (Vallejo, CA to San Ramon, CA), and she claimed they were saving money on cheaper rent. Five minutes of napkin paper math later I pointed her and her partner were spending roughly $700/month commuting in gas, bridge toll, and basic wear+tear on their vehicles (based on ~$0.45/mile).
It seems like most people don't account for vehicle costs when accounting for cost of living. Why I'm not positive, though it seems to just be the general abstractness of the cost spread out over time, and the assumption in America that you're going to drive everywhere anyway so it doesn't matter.
Even worse we see this with numerous Uber/Lyft/delivery "contractors" who are putting endless miles on their personal vehicles without accounting for the inevitable cost of replacing them.
Why $.45/mile? Is that real? I keep track of all my expenses, so a few years ago I was able to calculate my real lifetime costs at $.15/mile, asymptotically approaching $.10. Of course when I travel for work the IRS says I charge $.50/mile, which is pure profit.
The IRS numbers assume a newish car (more expensive) that gets poor fuel mileage. It is probably correct for the average car, but there is no reason you need to be average - unless you want to.
In my country (EU, so gas is a bit more expensive) the government calculates* transport costs at 0.37eur/km. So $0.45/mi would be in the right ballpark.
You have to account everything, not just fuel, from car depreciation, servicing (oil changes,...), normal wear (brakes, tires,...), occasional replacements (batteries, wipers, ...), etc. If you drive 20.000kms per year, and a yearly service (oil, filters,...) costs 200eur, just that adds aditional 0.01eur/km. Two sets of tires (winter/summer) are ~2300eur + 8 changes (8~40eur) adds an additional (almost) ~1k eur in four years, 1 more cent. Insurance, registration.. 3, 4 cents. etc.
*that's the untaxed amount you get reimbursed for if you use your own car for a business trip.
There are two different calculations here. One is, what's the total cost of vehicle ownership amortized per mile? That's what the government and most popular types of accounting use.
The other is, given I'm going to own a car already, what's the difference between a shorter commute and a longer one? That's going to be a lower number per mile. A big chunk of the vehicle's depreciation is a result of years rather than miles, insurance doesn't generally track how many miles you drive and charge extra if you drive more, the registration and tax isn't any different etc.
The second one is how a lot of people end up all the way out in the suburbs. They can't afford to live in the part of the city that makes it viable to not have a car at all, but once you have a car as a sunk cost, another ten or twenty (or thirty or ...) miles in exchange for saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on housing starts to look like a good deal.
Though the huge factor people commonly forget is their own time. If your time is worth $25/hour then a half hour each way on your commute is $6500/year. And that's assuming you're only further away from work and not also further away from whatever you do on weekends.
> Ehhhh, I'd say that it's not that skewed towards age of the vechile beyond common correlations
But the warranty period is a huge amount of value, and there are others, e.g. newer cars are safer and have whatever other improvements so older cars aren't worth as much regardless of milage. Then many repairs are age related rather than mileage related, e.g. a car exposed to the elements will rust or experience day/night thermal stress even if you don't drive it.
> Mine does: in 5000km increments. (Australia)
Let me rephrase this. The insurance cost does not scale linearly with miles driven.
Insurance has interesting edge cases, like 3rd party can be more expensive than comprehensive, as risky drivers go for the former.
I've had insurance before, where putting in a higher mileage lowers the premium. I assume there's a lower bound where you start getting into Sunday driver territory where risks start increasing?
Most of the charges you list are mostly fixed (with time) rather than variable (with distance driven). Yearly service and yearly tire swapping: doesn't change by miles. Batteries and wipers: mostly fixed. Depreciation: probably 80% fixed. Insurance: mostly fixed. Registration: totally fixed.
On a marginal basis ("what does it cost me to drive one extra mile?"), I think my cost is about 7-9 US cents on my electric and about 12-15 US cents on my wife's CR-V. On an overall basis ("what does it cost me in total for the cars divided by how many miles I drove?"), the figures are more like $1/mile for the electric (still have a car payment, full insurance, and only drive 4500 miles/year) and $0.30-$0.40/mile for the Honda (paid off, so just carrying insurance, registration, taxes, and some timed maintenance items)
If we moved farther away, our fixed costs stay about the same, and it's only the variable costs that go up.
I did account for everything above. I keep track of everything.
Note that I do my own maintenance on Saturdays, so I don't put a monetary value on my time. However before you say I should account for my time, do you account for your time taking the car to the shop - I started doing that a few years ago and stopped because I realized that for most things I could get it done faster myself than take it in. (taking it in accounting for all time getting the car to the shop, arranging rides (sometimes a loaner car, sometimes my wife's time), and paperwork. When doing the work myself I can stop at the auto parts store next to the grocery store and so much less time needs to be accounted for there.
Yes, that number is very real. Especially if you start including non obvious costs like insurance, on top of ones like gas, maintainence, license and and registration, etc. I’m near $.90/in my current car. (That number is skewed high because It’s paid off early and I now have a 2 mile commute to work, so there was a lot of money upfront and I don’t pack on the miles anymore) but I would wager $.50 is right near the mean. But buying cheap used and running it 200k miles will bring your costs down for sure, but $.10? At 30mpg and $3.00/gallon you’re looking at $.10 cents a mile already!
How is including the fixed costs at all fair? Even if someone lived clothes enough to use public transport some some activities; work during rush hour. People in the US often still need a car to get to everything else in a timely manner such as doctor appointments. Groceries are a big one as well, how are you going to carry 2 weeks of food for 2-4 people on a bus or rail? A lot of public transport users still need to drive to the station.
My estimation is that a large portion of public transport users only use it for part of their transport needs thus making the fixed costs of car ownership a sunk cost.
Therefore, the variables costs; gas (or electricity) and maintenance make the most sense to use in living cost estimations. Even at the extreme end where you can live in the middle of a city and use public transport for mostly everything, you'd still need a car or a friend with one to go skiing.
Owning a car has costs, some if them are fixed, including them are entirely fair.
We could have a debate about including it in a per mile rate, rather than splitting it out, but ultimately they are costs car owners have to pay, and non car owners don't.
A sunk cost is still a cost. A cost you have to pay is still a cost.
We can’t say that car ownership is a consequence of location if you are going to own the car regardless of location. Plenty of city-dwelling transit commuters drive on the weekends; it’s not fair to say that transit access == zero vehicles.
I think we could say it switches from a necessity to a leisure expense, and that city dwelling households can get most of what they want from a single car vs. several.
I'm not sure that we can't say car ownership is a consequence of location. Plenty doesn't mean all, and transit access == zero vehicles is an argument no ones making.
Clearly if a household moves from several cars to one car, fixed costs will decrease, which seems like an argument to measure fixed costs.
I'd agree with your point about vehicles potentially being leisure expenses, you could perhaps go further and start dividing up those fixed costs between leisure use, and business use. I'd even accept the argument that if you need a car, your leisure transport should be free from the fixed costs, as they have to be borne anyway, but they do have to be accounted for somewhere.
The fixed costs still depreciate. You still have to either pay upfront for the car, finance it and pay interest, or lease it, and the car has a fixed lifetime. Repair/maintenance should go in there as well.
I'd be curious how many miles the grandparent has on the car though. My per-mile costs are also sky-high (because it's 10 years old and only has about 40k miles on it - I think it works out to $0.75/mile or so), but the flip side is that if this drives like a normal Honda it should be good for another 150k miles and, if I don't get into an accident or change my driving habits, I will never need to purchase another car.
Current just over 260,000 miles. This makes a big difference in my per-mileage calculations, as you said, someone who drives less than I did (I had a few contract jobs far from home) would see different numbers.
Nit. Your driving costs shouldn't be affected if you pay off your loan early, the cost of the car should be averaged over the expected life of the car. If it were it should be downwards as you aren't paying interest.
If you buy a $30k car, and manage to get 120k miles out of it before you scrap it, you are paying $.25 a mile just in capital depreciation expense. That's before fuel, insurance, property taxes, maintenance and repairs.
What about a $10,000 used car you buy with 50,000 miles and run until a good 150,000? That's just 10 cents per mile. Depending on the make, the repairs may not be much, either.
I've bought $500 cars before. Didn't last too long (it was a nice car, but it was an interference engine and broke the timing chain), but averaged 10 cents per mile.
People who spend 45 cents per mile are the type who lease their cars or buy new cars regularly. Lots of us out here make do happily with far less.
Now, I will admit that it is possible to bring your cost per mile down somewhat. That’s one of my own specialties, which is why I still keep a car of my own around for affordable family roadtrips. If you buy the right car for $5,000, you might be able to squeeze 100,000 miles out of it with no major repairs. In this case the car depreciation is 5 cents per mile.
Gas, at $3.50 per 35 miles (assuming 35MPG), is 10 cents/mile
Tires, at $300 per 50,000 miles are 0.6 cents
Oil, at $25 per 5,000 miles is 0.5 cents
Miscellaneous things like wipers and occasional maintenance visits: $200 per 20,000 miles = 1 cent
So the ultimate cheap driving in a paid-off economy car still costs at least 17 cents per mile.
It's possible to do even better... I bought a used electric car (Volt) for about $9600. It had about 65k miles. It does about 85% of its miles electric (meaning oil changes and brakes are super rare), so over the next 100,000 miles, we're talking about 14 cents per mile total, roughly.
Many of the assumptions are different for different cars. For my car it is $3 per 46 miles, or $0.065/mile. Note that 46MPG is actual, EPA would give me 41.
A car at 120k miles is nowhere near being "scrapped". What will actually happen in that case is someone else is going to buy it and put another 100k miles on it.
Why sell it? The average millionaire drives a 15 year old car they bought new. A well maintained car will last a lot longer than most people give them credit for. You get tired of the old thing, but it will runs.
As a family living in a rural area with a large commute (driving) to a major UK city I still see it as a net benefit even if you factor in large cost for vehicle maintenance etc.
I get to live away from the hustle and bustle of the concrete jungle for one.
out of curiosity, did you account for her time in the car as any sort of expense? I assume it's downtime she can't use to do something else. (though some people enjoy driving, listening to music or podcasts, etc, so for them maybe it doesn't matter.)
Before buying my car I test drove a Mercedes that had what I assumed was a touchscreen. Upon trying to tap it the person working at the dealership said none of their cars have touchscreens because they don't make sense to operate when driving, and instead had a easily reached dial in the center console that controlled everything on the screen. Seems to be the case with any other German car I've been in.
Takes some getting used to compared to just old fashioned knobs & buttons, but far and above better than all the cars we test drove with touchscreens.
It's the worst of both worlds. Rather than having dedicated dials for each function, or a touchscreen, you have a single dial and loads of menus to work through. Want to change the radio station first you have to make sure you are in the radio display context and then scroll through the stations until you find your desired station. Meanwhile, you're constantly taking your eyes off the road to work this dumb wheel.
I've had cars with either, and I'm kind of ambivalent on BMW iDrive vs Honda touchscreen, but my main complaint with everything I've driven is the way Bluetooth will not connect reliably. Sometimes you have to restart your car or your phone to get it back, and once that didn't work and only unpairing it and repairing it worked. This is really, really, basic and I sometimes feel like screaming because when I was younger, whatever the flaws of a radio or CD player, at least they consistently worked every time you switched them on.
I've heard Ed Sheeran's A-Team every time I start the car because the Bluetooth receiver thinks it has to play something and it's going to start at song 1 of my library.
The main benefit (or supposed benefit, if you insist) of the big encoder knob system is that decision and action are decoupled: you can have a short glance at the narrow/deep menu, then take your time doing the next steps of finger work with the eyes back on the road. This is incredibly slow compared to interfaces designed for full attention, but the impact on driving ability is very low. It's kind of like a garbage collector that sacrifices throughput for shorter pauses.
Touchscreens on the other hand lure the eyes into guiding the hand through the selection process, particularly when you lack a haptic reference point because the screen isn't handheld. And then the eyes are already focused on the screen when the next menu page shows up, so it's tempting to continue right there. I guess there must even be some threshold in UI slowness beyond which touchscreens are not quite as bad for safety as faster ones because one would quickly learn that there is plenty of time to focus on the road while the glacial computer's cogs are turning.
Even physical per-function controls are worse once the number of functions gets too high. Volume up/down is easy, but how do you {insert any of the hundreds of functions that you can make safely discoverable, in time, with a slow menu}? Interrupting the process of scanning a wall of buttons with tiny symbols on them for a context switch back to traffic and then continuing the scan without generous re-scanning on resume is a skill that few people would ever develop without explicit teaching, so most would simply take their chances, keeping their mind in the scan. Throughput might still be higher than a deep menu, but the effective pauses are way too long (a quick glance up just to stifle the worst fears while the mind is still on the screen/scan does not count). I would not even be surprised of the annoying inclusion of some frequently used functions in the menu wasn't just penny-pinching or a misguided interior designer striving for cleaner lines, but a deliberate decision to train users in the interface system.
Are there studies to back this up? Because it sounds like that UI has a much higher cognitive load, which can be as bad as having to take your eyes off the road.
Mercedes also has a touchpad that hovers above the command wheel, along with the a tiny little touchpad on the steering wheel for your thumb. Just in case you wanted additional options, though neither work with Android Auto (for 2017 models, at least). The lack of a touchscreen is probably the second most annoying part of Mercedes' Android Auto experience, next to AA's lack of support for the ultrawide display.
Interestingly, Mercedes is sort of simplifying things with the MBUX interface[0] they unveiled with the A-Class: they're adding a touchscreen, ditching the command wheel for a trackpad, and have much improved voice controls. The early reviews were all pretty positive.
I've used these such as bmw idrive and I think it takes far more attention to navigate menus using a wheel than either dedicated function buttons or a touch what you want touchscreen. Selecting a nav address is kill-me-now tedious.
I tried a nissan with nav and it had a pretty useful mixture of the two. It had dedicated function buttons for say radio or map or volume up/down/power (most duplicated on the steering wheel), but the touchscreen was used when that made sense, like selecting a nav destination from a list, or typing a destination with the on-screen keyboard (allowed when stopped only).
I'm only 6'0" but feel your pain. I highly recommend checking your flight on https://www.seatguru.com/ to get a better idea of the seat pitch and whether there's any seats that might be slightly roomier (and ideally not right next to a bathroom).
Seems environmentally unfriendly to rely 100% on electricity in one of the sunnier places in the country — you'd think there'd be a way to pipe in daylight via fiber optic cords during the day, and transition to LEDs as the sun begins to set and during the night.
That said I'm really excited to see vertical farming grow as a market, ideally in denser cities like SF or NYC where proximity to the nearest farms can be a few hours away depending on what you want to buy.
Aha! I remembered seeing something a year or so back but thought it was just a proof of concept by an individual, not officially baked into Google Maps. Just took a look and it's definitely there, though unless you know where to look it's a bit buried in the interface.
http://www.oldsf.org/ is the closest thing I've seen — designer and developer mapped photos to their relatively accurate location, filterable by year. I've actually been able to find photos of two of the houses/blocks where I've lived (Mission and Lower Haight neighborhoods) dating back 50-100 years.
The optimist in me hopes that Google (or other companies) will archive old streetview data and make it available as a true visual timeline over the next few decades.
That's actually from the Bay Bridge heading into San Francisco — tower on the right is 1 Rincon (there's already a few more next to it going up now). Curious if this was a case of "just throw up something that looks halfway decent" or if they're intentionally trying to appeal with the US car culture?
As someone currently using (aka fighting) the web audio API, there's definitely a market for better, clearer information out there, but I'm curious how successful targeting a such a niche market has been?
The book I wrote is a "how to program" book that uses JavaScript coupled with the Web Audio API as a tool to appeal to sound artists. It is not a book to teach those who already know how to program the Web Audio API. When I've gone on Amazon to look at beginner programming books I've found that most "themed" books are directed to those who want to learn how to build websites, mobile apps or games - but none are directed to DJ's, electronic musicians, sound artists etc. I wrote a book that does just that, but as it stands I have no idea if it will sell.
Changing LA's car mentality isn't going to happen overnight but it has to start somewhere.