Cars Are Expensive, Poor People Take the Bus
To me, one of the most frustrating recurring notions that comes up when talking about transportation policy is the idea that bad policies that subsidize auto commuting over all alternatives is a handy way of helping out the poor. What people don’t understand is that, in reality, car ownership rates are much lower among the poor than they are among the non-poor. It’s common sense when you think about it — cars are expensive and poor people don’t have a lot of money. Consider this chart of car ownership rates by ward in DC:
Part of what’s going on here is that Ward One and Ward Two are well-served by transit and are close to downtown so it’s convenient for a lot of people to walk to work. But if you compare Ward 3 to Ward 8 the difference isn’t that Ward 8 is better-served by transit or better-located. On the contrary. The difference is that Ward 3 has the fewest proportion of poor people of any ward whereas Ward 8 has the most. And not coincidentally, Ward 7 has the second-most. Poor people, being poor, often can only afford to live in inconvenient neighborhoods that are ill-served by transit. But being poor they often also can’t afford to buy cars. Consequently, they’re just out of luck. The progressive move isn’t to keep subsidizing cars, but the reverse — to use congestion charges and performance parking fees to raise funds that improve the quality of service on the bus lines that poor people rely on.
Beyond the inconvenience bad transportation policy poses to those too poor to own cars, it takes a substantial economic toll on poor people who do have cars. Car ownership among the poor, for one thing, tends to be an on-and-off kind of situation because you’re talking about buying crappy, unreliable cars and you may not have the funds necessary to repair or replace a vehicle when it breaks down. Meanwhile, you have people taking on debt to afford their car and/or investing what little capital they have in a depreciating asset, both of which make it difficult for the working poor to translate their income into wealth. Ultimately, this should all be pretty obvious. Everyone understands that cars are expensive — the most expensive consumer item normal people buy. Subsidizing an activity that requires you to own one and making everyday life extremely difficult for most people who don’t have one is especially hard on poor people.
44 Responses to “Cars Are Expensive, Poor People Take the Bus”
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January 2nd, 2009 at 8:59 am
Look Matt, it’s clear that if one supports congestion pricing, vehicle taxes, limitations on street parking, toll roads, higher gas taxes, etc., it means that you hate poor people and probably stomp puppies to death for fun too. Poor people have a God(ess)/Marx-given right to (a) own cars and (b) operate them as cheaply as possible. And the purpose of government is to make sure of that. Only some kind of crazed Ayn Rand fanatic would suggest otherwise. Hand in your progressive credentials and join the Cato Foundation already!
(The preceding message has been a simulation of what at least 50% of the following comments will be.)
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:23 am
Hey, but increasing mass transit options will be bad for poor people! Just read the comments of previous threads. I mean we can’t raise the rates on the meters, because it will hurt poor people who don’t own cars!
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:30 am
How do the poor people in the wards with very high non-vehicle ownership and poor transit get around? Do they walk? Is there a higher percentage of trips by bicycle? or Do they stay put? I’m guessing zip car is not an option.
I ask this because I live in an inconvient place with limited tranit options and would love to get rid of my car. I just can’t figure out how. I think these people (nescessity being the mother of invention) might have some clever solutions.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:33 am
Of course, the real underlying idea is that bad policies that subsidize auto commuting over all alternatives is a handy way of *keeping* out the poor. It defeats the purpose to red-line a poor neighborhood if the undesirables can just hop on the metro and sully the nice parts of town.
I don’t think you can have a real honest conversation about urban and transit policy unless you recognize that the defacto segregation of poor communities is a central, if unspoken, feature of the status quo.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:37 am
I’m really glad you finally wrote this post. I’m tired of commenters jumping down your throat over parking meter increases and how much they hurt the poor. I often got the feeling that many people posting here have little experience with actual urban areas.
For example, I remember in one of the previous posts on the Chicago meter rate increase, a commenter argued that it would screw the maids who work in hotels downtown. Having lived in Chicago, I can assure you that most hotel maids aren’t driving to work; they’re taking the bus or the train. Hell, I was basically middle class and I had a car, and I wasn’t about to drive downtown and try to park on the street. Anyone arguing otherwise has no idea of the realities of urban downtowns or the people who live and work in big cities.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:39 am
This is very true. If you are healthy, being poor is often all about the car. The purchase of a clunker that soon breaks down is a big setback. Not having a car can put the hurt on your social life as well.
If there is a bus system getting to work is usually not too bad but looking for work is very difficult. I think in many cases the secret is people get rides from friends, relatives and neighbors for special trips and use the bus for the routine.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:39 am
“The difference is that Ward 3 has the fewest proportion of poor people of any ward whereas Ward 8 has the most.”
Yuck.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:50 am
After reading dozens of posts by Mr. Yglesias since I have been visiting his blog, I am left wondering why he hates cars. A car, for other then commuting purposes, is the best transportation invention ever for getting from point A to point B. I say this as someone whose bicycle mileage greatly exceeds his car mileage.
January 2nd, 2009 at 10:06 am
I think Matt would agree that, in the United States, there are a lot more poor people than rich people. A lot more.
While the percentage of poor people with cars is certainly lower, the overall number of poor people with cars is higher than the number of rich people with cars. There are a lot of poor people who would be screwed over by a scheme that added significant costs to driving.
January 2nd, 2009 at 10:49 am
One thing that is notable about the real estate crash is that many have finally realized that owning a home isn’t something everyone should do, and that poor people are often ill-served by owning–they don’t build wealth, and they’re often locked in to living in one place when they’d be better off moving.
It strikes me that saying that poor people shouldn’t have cars is that it in a way encourages the same sort of lock-in behavior. If you’re poor and you don’t have a car and you live in Ward 8, better transit won’t help you if you want to take a job in Reston, or Houston. A car will.
January 2nd, 2009 at 11:08 am
@SLC:
It’s because Matt has never been outside of the Boston-NY-DC corridor and can’t comprehend that people like to drive cars and have houses with yards.
January 2nd, 2009 at 11:14 am
What the hell do car ownership rates in DC have to do with anything besides DC? If you’re going to do a post like this, can’t you be bothered to dig up national car ownership rates by income?
January 2nd, 2009 at 11:18 am
better transit won’t help you if you want to take a job in Reston, or Houston. A car will.
Ever been to Reston? There’s no reason that one shouldn’t be able to get there via transit (actually, you can: I believe there’s regular bus service to Reston center from West Falls Church).
In any case, I suspect that the poor people in Ward 8 would get a car if they could afford one. They can’t. At this point, they are in a transit-starved neighborhood, they don’t own their homes, and they don’t have cars… and it’s not even worth owning their homes because there’s little prospect of their land becoming valuable because there’s no access to transit or local amenities. How could you help the poor? I guess you could hand out cars to them, but that’s not as much of a “public benefit” as improving transit and the overall quality of life.
January 2nd, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Matt’s post also shows how transit isn’t actually more expensive than cars, when you account for all of the costs. Cars require much more additional personal costs, buying or leasing a car, insurance, maintenance, repair, time, etc. So, if you create better transit, that for example in an urban area could enable a family to downsize from two cars to one car, this would overall save money. I would even go as far as to say that the cost of a second car is a “hidden tax” for an auto-oriented transportation/land use policy.
January 2nd, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Perhaps subsidised car ownership for the poor would accomplish the same goals of helping them? (i.e., insurance premium rebates, rebates on the first $150 of gas, rebates on the car mortgage, etc, to apply to the primary car in the household)
If you add up the costs it’s actually probably cheaper this way and a lot easier to administer than try to buy busses and build tramways
January 2nd, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Frankly, I just don’t see the economic benefit. Cars are by definition much more convenient and thus economically time-efficient. You can get from point A to B in one go, as opposed to a) walking to the bus station b) waiting there for a bus c) get on the bus d) potentially going through a connexion to light rail or another bus e) waiting for the connexion f) taking the connexion e) walking from connexion to the final destination.
Of course, if we were talking about places like Manhattan, then this calculation is completely out of the window. But in the majority of American cases, where finding parking is not a near impossibility and the roads actually run, cars a definitely faster and thus are economically more productive. Maybe not as environmentally efficient, but definitely economically more productive.
January 2nd, 2009 at 12:29 pm
I think, if anything, this demonstrates the secondary point that it’s pretty futile to talk about “the poor” in this country. When you limit your sample to urban areas, yes, poor people are less likely to own cars. But that’s an observation about the urban poor. There are plenty of poor people in the country who don’t live in metro areas, and just about every one of them owns a car. Matt’s observation is a useful one for strictly urban policy; for national policy, less so.
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Cars themselves are not that expensive – especially if you can do a lot of the repair work yourself. It is the legally mandated insurance that costs.
If we must require insurance (of any kind) let us also require insurance companies to sell the minimum at no profit. They can make as much profit as they want on anything over the minimum, but the minimum – no profit. You don’t get to use the government to force me to give you money.
Weirdly, people will call taxation ‘theft’, but the required insurance is ‘free market’?
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:55 pm
I should say – a cheap used car is not that expensive to purchase and maintain compared to the price of insurance (and gas – though now gas is cheap again…)
BTW- living in Portland, OR, I don’t need a car at all – a good public transportation infrastructure is (1) less expensive for the users, and (2) less expensive for local government to maintain and produce than tens of thousands of parking spaces!
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:59 pm
How do the poor people in the wards with very high non-vehicle ownership and poor transit get around?
With difficulty.
Generally speaking, Ward 7 and 8 residents who don’t own cars wait a long time for a bus, then transfer from that bus to the Metro (if they’re lucky) or another bus (if they’re not). When time is of the essence, they may try to cab it, but many DC cabbies avoid those neighborhoods.
January 2nd, 2009 at 2:04 pm
But in the majority of American cases, where finding parking is not a near impossibility and the roads actually run, cars a definitely faster and thus are economically more productive. Maybe not as environmentally efficient, but definitely economically more productive.
First, Matt tends to talk about transportation policy in the context of urban areas or walkable small towns, so that his argument doesn’t hold up in rural Montana is not a killer objection.
Second, if cars are not as environmentally efficient, then it’s hard to say with certainty that they’re more efficient economically — there’s an externality involved that isn’t being taken into account, and you’d need to know the size of that externality before you could make that statement.
January 2nd, 2009 at 2:33 pm
then it’s hard to say with certainty that they’re more efficient economically — there’s an externality involved that isn’t being taken into account
Correct. I am doing this on an empirical basis, however. There is a broad correlation between car ownership and economic productivity, however, even if we were to limit ourselves to purely Western, developed, rich countries. The thing is, the car gives a lot more of a economic flexibility. While it might be utile to commute, say, via light rail to work say, within a 30 min. radius, the car allows you to drive a lot further to work. This, of course, enlarges the economic scope of an urban conurbation.
I think this is a complex issue with lots of solutions for lots of scenarios. At the same time, I am disinclined to favour public transit, if just for the purposes of equality. Part of the American Dream, I think, is built on the vision that everyone, rich or poor, should have a house and car. A lot of people like to quote LA as a disaster in urban planning, but what they don’t realise is that the average person is still able to afford a more generous existence there than in NYC. I liked Boston a lot, but I don’t actually know anyone from Boston who uses the Charlie card (they drive cars).
January 2nd, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Car ownership subsidies more helpful and cheaper than mass transit…
Ladies and gentlemen, Stephen Myles St. George! Your newest candidate for stupidest fucking guy on the internet!
January 2nd, 2009 at 2:46 pm
SLC, AB, MQ — Matt’s entire post is specifically about urban auto-oriented policy ideas like congestion pricing and higher meter rates, so of course he’s going to be talking about the urban poor who work in urban areas where such policies are going to be considered. He’s not talking about the poor in other kinds of places because they’re not relevant to the topic he’s trying to discuss, you freaking morons.
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Saying that any tax on cars is good is overly simplistic. For example, having people pay for on street parking is not a tax at all. The taxpayers pay for those streets, and when on street parking is free, essentially taxpayers are paying for the drivers parking. Also, if registration covers less than the cost of traffic police in the city, than taxpayers are paying for the traffic police, despite the fact that the traffic police would not be required if there were no drivers, so (if we lived in a truly capitalist society) drivers should have to pay enough in registration or tolls for all of the traffic police. However, drivers do not pay fokr any of that. In the end, people who do not drive, and do not need nor want eight lane highways, end up paying for a significant amount of our roads, traffic police, signage, etc… This is called socialism. However, socialism in itself is not always bad, afterall we have a terrific Interstate Freeway System thaht is almost exclusively socialism, with very few toll roads. What is bad is when socialism is used to support those who are rich, while punishing those who are poor. Socialism should help everyone equally, or if it must help one group more than another, help the poor more than the rich. Our American socialism all too often helps out the rich (e.g. financial bail outs) while punishing the poor (e.g. our racist criminal justice system).
One way that a car regulation truly harms the poor is Washington D.C. safety inspections that force poor people to repair banged up bumpers and paint scratches that happen on old cars, but haven’t yet happened on new cars. Poor people can’t afford to buy a car that has no dents, or rust, even when they can find an old reliable little four banger that gets 40 MPG and can get them to their job (which often is not on public transit because public transit doesn’t hit a lot of the factory jobs in the mid-Atlantic region).
Moral of the story; we do subsidize cars, and we should be careful how we do that. Nothing is black and white.
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Note also that there is an air quality impact from forcing the poor to own cars: They will tend to own older cars, which tend to pollute more.
January 2nd, 2009 at 4:17 pm
neff, maybe you missed the part where SLC asked a question based on reading “dozens of posts” by Matt, including but not limited to this one. My point stands, that Matt’s extremely sheltered and limited lifestyle blinds him to the realities of life in other parts of the country, and that a lot of his posts on these topics can usually be summarized as “Why don’t more people want the lifestyle of young, wealthy, city-dwellers who don’t have children?” So take your freaking moron and shove it somewhere, dick.
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:04 pm
There is a broad correlation between car ownership and economic productivity, however, even if we were to limit ourselves to purely Western, developed, rich countries.
Yes, but here you run into the beloved old chestnut, “correlation does not equal causation.” Car ownership may improve economic productivity, or it may be that the more economically productive members of a society can afford to own more and better cars.
Secondly, there’s a world of difference between saying something is economically more productive and saying something is economically more efficient. (Come to think, that’s a keystone of modern economics, being at base a subset of David Ricardo’s “comparative advantage” argument.) The American steel industry in the 70s was by many measures the most productive in the world, but its future was decided by its efficiency. I won’t dispute that for most people automobile use leads to more productivity than mass transit in a large majority of the land mass of the United States, but in cities, inner-belt suburbs, and “Main Street” style small towns that increased productivity is often reached in a very inefficient manner.
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Sorry son, that would be you.
There are numerous light rail and subway projects in the US in which it would have been infinitely cheaper to buy and maintain a fleet of chauffeur driven limos than to build and maintain the light rail system on a per passenger mile basis. The LA subway is the most notable example of this.
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Clearly, a lot of the commenters have never taken a small-town or rural bus. Who rides it? Poor people!
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Part of the American Dream, I think, is built on the vision that everyone, rich or poor, should have a house and car.
Maybe America needs some new dreams. Houses are wasteful (even if you have a large enough family to justify the square footage, townhouses still do the same job cheaper) and lawns are even worse; both contribute to the kind of low-density sprawling hell where you need a car just to reach the 7-11, which is even *more* wasteful.
Density is all kinds of free win – it’s not only a more efficient use of space and construction resources, but it allows things like laundry rooms, convenience stores you can walk to, and public transportation, which save even more. (Having a dozen restaurants within easy walking distance doesn’t exactly save me money, but I like it anyway.)
*And* you save all that time on yard maintenance, which has got to be the dumbest industry ever invented. Anyone who actually wants to live like that can damn well pay the societal costs for it; they’ve guzzled down public subsidies for their wasteful lifestyle long enough, I say.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:45 am
Houses are wasteful (even if you have a large enough family to justify the square footage, townhouses still do the same job cheaper) and lawns are even worse;
I actually agree with you on the lawn part. Sidewalks usually are sacrificed when it comes to large, diffused lots, and frankly, I’ll trade lawn space for square footage and better amenities any day. However, there is an inherent good in larger square footage, I must insist, whether townhouse or single-detached. (I suspect you wouldn’t mind Vancouver city-suburbanism, i.e. 2200 square foot house on a 33′x122′ lot, with a mere 6-foot distance between sides of houses.) Frankly, I ll be happy to have a large open patio (must be large) rather than a lawn, but a large square footage remains a must. Kids need their rec rooms, the family needs the office/study, master bedroom suite, preferably kids bedroom suite too, I mean, dammit, it’s just nicer to live in a nice spacious room rather than a Manhattan-sized room. No family should be forced to live in a 1200-square foot place.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Kids need their rec rooms, the family needs the office/study, master bedroom suite, preferably kids bedroom suite too, I mean, dammit, it’s just nicer to live in a nice spacious room rather than a Manhattan-sized room. No family should be forced to live in a 1200-square foot place.
This is why communities should be built where the living room is extended into the streets, thus giving your children more than enough room in which to play and mingle with the other children in the neighborhood. It’s funny because I’ve found inner-city communities to be a lot more vibrant than most affluent suburban neighborhoods. On a good day, residents can actually be seen walking on the streets coming from work, going to the store visitng friends and other neighbors and so on. In a lot of affluent neighborhoods, on the other hand, they’re like ghost towns, with an occasional jogger.
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