Comment by iamcalledrob
8 hours ago
> ~$500/mo for a typical car payment
There is another interesting US-centric perspective here. For some reason, US consumers feel the need to drive new or nearly-new cars.
$5000 can get you a reliable but unsexy used car. I think there is a sort of "Parkinson's law" of consumer spending at play, where financial outgoings will expand to match disposable income.
I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.
A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option. There's literally nowhere to park. Even the rich need to get around, and this creates pressure to improve non-car transport from all sides.
> $5000 can get you a reliable but unsexy used car.
$5000 can get you a 10+ year old used car with 100,000+ miles on it and no warranty. That's fine if you know how to do repairs and maintenance yourself, because then you're buying a part from the internet with a low markup and installing it yourself instead of paying four times as much for someone else to do it. But not every knows how to do that, or has time, or knows how to tell if a used car with no warranty will be reliable before buying it. And if you plop $5000 down on something with no warranty and then have to scrap it after the first year because your $5000 car needs a $5500 new engine, you're not saving money.
There is also the matter of where used cars come from. You can get one for $5000 because someone paid $30,000 to buy it new ten years ago. If more people did that, fewer new cars are sold and then fewer enter the used market and used car prices go up. So you can buy a used car for $5000, but it's not possible for "most people" to do that because if they tried to, they would no longer be available for $5000.
> I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.
Which is the problem with mass transit. You get in your car and it feels like it costs nothing, the only thing that changed is the gas gauge went down by half a tank and the odometer went up. Meanwhile the amortized cost was actually over $100. Then you go to get on the train and you immediately have to swipe your card and get a bill for $40, which feels like a lot for one trip.
Worse, the car is $100+ per trip only if you're amortizing the fixed costs, i.e. comparing to the alternative of not having a car at all. If the fixed costs of having the car are sunk, the incremental cost of the trip is maybe $15, and then when the train is $40, nobody with a car is saving money to take the train when they can.
Whereas if the train is $0, then it's "hey that goes right where I'm going this time and I don't have to buy gas". Which, if it happens often enough, means more people don't need a car to begin with.
> A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option.
Obviously if you make something unavailable then people use alternatives. But in the US it's the other way around -- half the population lives in the suburbs where there is no public transport, nor can there be because the density is too low.
So then you need to find ways to make public transit more attractive (like eliminating the fares) rather than making cars less attractive, because making cars less attractive is going to encounter major opposition from the people who have no available option other than to use cars.