Costs of cars - health costs

medical express: "A Japanese study compared bus/train commuters, walkers/bikers and drivers and adjusted for other factors such as age, gender, smoking, and others. Compared to drivers, public transportation users were:
44 percent less likely to be overweight;
27 percent less likely to have high blood pressure; and
34 percent less likely to have diabetes."

Direct subsidy to cars - for roads only - calculated at $1,100 per household.

City Observatory: "The report documents that the amount that road users pay through gas taxes now accounts for less than half of what we spend to maintain and expand the road system. The shortfall is made up from other sources of tax revenue at the state and local level. This subsidization of car users costs the typical household about $1,100 per year – over and above what they pay in gas taxes, tolls and other user fees."

Report: The Price of Driving Doesn't Match the Cost of Driving

Planetizen: : ""Puncturing the widely held myth that cars pay their own way makes this report required reading for those thinking about transportation finance reform," writes Joe Cortwright."

In the US, the yellow school bus is #autosprawlsubsidy

The Economist: "Fort Wayne expects to lose $2.5m from its school-transport budget in the coming year (and is forbidden to spend money from other funds on buses, or to charge fees for school transport). Local officials further reduce funds for schools by offering tax breaks to attract businesses, and by diverting property taxes to economic-development schemes. Four other school districts in Indiana have served formal notice that they may scrap bus services."

In the US suburbs there is no public transit. Outside the housing development, suburbs are unwalkable. But "good schools" are one of the main attractions of sprawl. So, for safety, with few exceptions, children have to ride a yellow school bus. Now, there is no money left. Sprawl subsidy is unsustainable.

Half of corporate profits directly stolen from the biosphere

CleanTechnica: "It estimated annual environmental costs from global human activity at 11% of global GDP (2008). The world’s 3,000 largest publicly listed companies were responsible for about one-third of this environmental damage. The proportion of company earnings possibly at risk from natural capital costs in an equity portfolio weighted according to the MSCI All Country World Index exceeds 50%."

Welfare for #autosprawl is draining government budgets

The Economist explains: The global addiction to energy subsidies | The Economist: "IMF number-crunchers reckon that if the subsidies were cut, global carbon-dioxide emissions would fall by over 20% and government revenues would increase by $2.9 trillion, or 3.6% of GDP."

The high cost of cheap auto insurance

The Stranger: "The Seattle-based Transportation Choices estimated that between 1994 and 2003, car crashes cost King County $8 billion (PDF). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have the yearly cost of traffic accidents in Washington state at $665 million. Even more staggering are the numbers in a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It found, among other things, that the annual cost of car crashes in 2010 was $871 billion. And who pays for a lot of this? The public, of course. It also is telling that the solution AAA recommends is increasing safety on roads rather than increasing access to safer modes of transportation. (One study found that "transit travel has about a tenth the traffic casualty (death or injury) rate as automobile travel."[PDF].)

As if subsides for car insurance and oil companies were not enough, the brilliant "parking professor" Donald Shoup estimated just over a decade ago that parking spaces in the US yearly receive somewhere between $127 billion and $374 billion in subsidies. My point: Socialism has got nothing on American cars."

Information technology companies getting in on the sprawl and congestion gravy train

Desperate attempts are being made to preserve the #autosprawl system. The latest scam is that IT companies are saying they can computerize traffic control and reduce congestion.

This will be another big waste of money. Watch this blog for more on this.

#Freetransit "too expensive" but fossil-fuels get USD $10M per minute

The Guardian: "Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund."

More numbers on the cost of welfare for cars and sprawl

New studies measure the true cost of sprawl, and it's more than you think : TreeHugger: "Two new studies demonstrate the true costs of sprawl, and attempt to show that if new development was built at higher densities and with proper public transit, billions of dollars could be saved."

Oklahoma City takes down bus stop, puts up 24 million dollar parking garage. #autosprawlsubsidy

Examiner.com: "Downtown Oklahoma City recently removed a covered steel beam formal bus stop. Now simply a concrete slab, which appears just behind the sidewalk in the video on the right. This stop is on a triangle, which is owned by Oklahoma City.

...The building on the right in the video is the City Municipal Building. City Hall. This stop is at Robert S. Kerr, Couch Drive and North Walker Avenue, across from the Norick Library. On the South, is the brand new, 24 million dollar 10 story Arts District parking garage, which was constructed under the same group who technically is responsible for the regulation and process of city transit services and bus stops, all of which is under Oklahoma City Municipal government."

More numbers on car welfare - 20 to 70 cents per gallon

CityLab: "This national refusal to increase gas taxes—which have gone unchanged at the federal level since 1993—has two enormous impacts on everyday life. The first is that drivers no longer cover the cost of road and bridge maintenance, as the gas tax originally intended. UC Davis scholar Mark Delucchi recently estimated that drivers fall short in this respect by 20 to 70 cents per gallon. General taxpayers have made up the resulting budget gap in recent years, whether they drive or not."