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."
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."
