New cars are very expensive. It is often cheaper to keep driving your older clunker than to purchase a new vehicle - even with $3.50 gas and ten more miles to the gallon.
Average commute is 16 miles
Saving $500 to shift from a car that makes 20 to the gallon to one that makes 30 to the gallon just does not add up.
Gas Prices $3.50
Old Car MPG 20.00
New Car MPG 30.00
MPG Increase 10.00
RT Commute 32.00
Gallons for Old 1.60
Gallons for New 1.07
Daily Savings $1.87
Weekly (5 days) $9.33
Annual (50 weeks) $466.67
If you want people to get into more efficient cars you either have to make the bad ones more expensive (gas taxes - which are horribly regressive - are the easiest), or you make the efficient cars cheaper (tax credits, no sales tax, no registration fees, etc.)
It’s very easy to confuse the *cost * of gasoline with the *price * of gasoline. We’re already paying for much of the cost through increased health costs, environmental damage, and defense spending. A well-designed gasoline tax would simply transfer how those costs were covered, if (and it’s a big if) the proceeds of the tax were used to cover health, environmental, and defense costs. Of course the proceeds would almost certainly be used for other purposes, but the signal to the consumer would definitely be in the direction of reduced consumption.
That’s just on the commute. I only see 8000 miles per year there. Does the average car owner only drive 8000 miles a year? That seems a bit low.
This rather large NHTSA PDF says that as of 2004, the number of vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. was 2,963 billion, and there were 237,961,000 registered vehicles in America. (JFTR, that’s about 9 million more vehicles than people over age 16 in 2004.) That computes to an average of 12,452 miles per vehicle. So we’re probably talking more like $70 per vehicle, per year, per mile per gallon increase.
I understand what you are saying, and I think we agree.
The point that I was trying to make is that because many of the costs of driving are hidden (including the building and maintenance of roads and highways) most people, as long as the pice of gas is low, will drive everywhere because it is the easies way to get around. Therefore, there is no support to change the built environment.
A perfect example is how people howl about train subsidies and Amtrack needing to turn a profit. Yet no expects roads and highways to turn a profit. They take for granted that being able to drive anywhere and everywhere is a right. If the cost of driving was shifted in a more visible manner. There would be considerable support for changing the built enviornment.