The Car -- The Falsely Assumed Fast Mode of Transportation
We all have to travel to places in our lives. I'm not talking traveling to foreign places for your holiday trip. I'm simply talking about going from A to B in every day life. Commuting to work, running errands in town visiting the occasional family member an hour away. To simply stay alive, we all inevitably travel from time to time.
Image source: Unsplash.com
Over history the way we travelled changed drastically, and many different modes of transportation have been invented. Nowadays one of the most popular modes of transportation is the car. We've all seen them, we've all been in one, and a lot of us even driven or own one. By many, it's considered the most time efficient way to travel from A to B. Not considering the traffic jam situation people encounter in many larger cities nowadays.
Recently, I've been reading a lot or research on transportation. And while reading all the investigations, I'm amazed that the car is such a popular mode of transportation, still with so much great cycling infrastructure and the steadily improving availability of public transport. On top of that, the price history of a litre of gasoline or diesel doesn't look that great. Not in the past, and most likely not in the future.
A typical argument for using cars is their time efficiency. They get you from A to B fast. But is that really true? If you look into the numbers and take into account ALL the time needed to drive a car, it is actually pretty slow! Let's have a closer look.
The Croatian-Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich, known for some (at the time) controversial works, determined that the average American man, spends about 4 hours per day for his car.
In addition to the time spent driving the car (and inevitably standing in traffic jams, looking for parking, etc.), some of the time spent on the car typically excluded. The money invested and needed to simply drive the car, all compute to a certain amount of time. Time, one spends at work to generate the money you use for the car.
Illich computed, that the average American man, had to work about 1600 hours in order to drive an annual 12000 kilometers. These numbers equate to about driving 8 kilometers per hour. Not the fastest mode of transportation or is it?
Of course, the exact "speed" of your car depends on many factors. Your hourly income, the cost of your car, the fuel efficiency etc. Want to know how fast your car really is? You can calculate it here.
Despite what you might expect, I'm owning a car myself. It's an old second hand beaten down car which I drive rarely. The speed of this car, using the calculator linked in the text above is about 30 kilometers an hour. As an avid road cyclist, I can maintain the same speed on a longer bike ride on a strong day. Think about that for a second.
Cycling, as apposed to driving the car has additional benefits other than the transportation aspect. It has reduced costs and thus less time is needed to fund this mode of transportation. It has a lower impact to the environment. (for the car we didn't include the time needed for carbon compensation at all yet!). Most importantly, in addition to the obvious benefits, it turns out that the average daily cyclist lives longer. Hence, an additional time-gain is made by using the bicycle. Or in other words, using the bike will naturally get you an additional speed-up or free!
In the work linked above, it was found that by cycling 75 minutes per week, on average you live half a year longer. From this one can compute that with every hour you cycle, you gain one hour extra of living. Pretty amazing don't you think?
The calculation for the above statement would be as follows:
Assuming an average of 60 years one could cycle in a lifetime:
60 years X 52 weeks X 75 minutes = 234000 minutes --> ~162 daysThis is roughly half a year of time spend cycling, for gaining half a year of your life.
The bicycle, in this context is quite an amazing invention. It have been researched in these aspects extensively. And it is considered one of the most efficient modes of transportation. It's about three to four times faster than walking, yet it requires us only 1/5 the amount of energy.
Image source: Unsplash.com
In fact, following a chart published in the Scientific American in 1973. A human traveling by bicycle is by far the most efficient traveler compared to other species. Of course, that's because other animals can't ride a bike like we do :-)
Source: Scientific American, 1973
As already mentioned, I am the owner of a car myself. As for many people, that car provides a certain form of freedom. It allows you to go from A to B whenever you want. I still am contemplating if I really need it. Especially during the pandemic, the amount of kilometers I drove reduced significantly. It's not uncommon for me to not drive me car for weeks on end. On top of that, I became more aware of my personal footprint on this planet. Nowadays, I try to travel by bike when I can or by public transport when possible. This further reduced the amount of kilometers I travel by car. Yet, selling it seems like such a big step.
Perhaps after posting this article, it is really time to stop wasting time on my car and take action to finally get rid of that piece of metal I own!
Fully agree buddy! Its a big shame that American cities are designed with cars in mind... so everything is spread out and expensive. I love me car but I hate sittin' in traffic. If cities were designed so we could walk to most things itd be safer for the kids the old folk and families. Pollution makes people sick so youd cut down on that too.
Yeah, it would also create social cohesion in neighborhoods as people run into each other.
You are in the Netherlands, right? Easy to get places and bikes are almost revered! Plus you have an amazing transport system in Europe. In Australia places are distant and the transport is terrible. It's cars or long distance cycling. Hence our petrol guzzling beast! But you should definitely get rid of your car. Shared car ownership seems a good option in Europe. You'd cut down on maintenance costs.
You are making a fair point! I maybe wrote this post a bit too much from a Dutchie-perspective! There are places that are less bike-focussed or simply too spread out. Like Australia is! The car will be gone soon for sure! Just have to finally take action :-)
Happy traveling!
Luckily I am a reseller working from home full-time and do not fit the above statistic. I only use my car about 4 hours per week and sometimes not even that much.
Living in Southern California everything is so far away that not owning a car is not really an option.
I've spend a fair share of time in LA myself, I know what you mean with the need for cars when in the US. It's quite different from where I live unfortunately. Maybe one day, in an ideal case, the world will be accessible with super efficient public transport. Preferable free of costs :P