Electric cars an excuse for more #autosprawlsubsidy

Business Insider: "The California state Assembly passed a $3-billion subsidy program for electric vehicles, dwarfing the existing program. The bill is now in the state Senate. If passed, it will head to Governor Jerry Brown, who has not yet indicated if he’d sign what is ostensibly an effort to put EV sales into high gear, but below the surface appears to be a Tesla bailout."

Rush hour pollution may be more dangerous than you think

phys.org : "The first in-car measurements of exposure to pollutants that cause oxidative stress during rush hour commutes has turned up potentially alarming results. The levels of some forms of harmful particulate matter inside car cabins was found to be twice as high as previously believed."

#Autosprawl has been subsidized by deferring maintenance

Resource Insights: "The trouble with infrastructure is that it breaks down and needs to be repaired, it wears out and needs to be replaced, and it gets destroyed and needs to be rebuilt. All that requires energy, resources, labor and money."

The US has extensive infrastructure supporting autos and sprawl. Farmland has been turned into suburbs. This spreading requires a lot of expensive pipelines, bridges, and roads. The repairs of such things have been deferred, while home builders and oil companies took profit. Now, the bill is due and there is no cheap oil to borrow against.

Unsafe pipelines, another externalized cost of sprawl

Boulder Weekly: " There are — according to data miner and anti-fracking activist Shane Davis — 60,000 miles worth of potentially explosive flowlines in Colorado, including many miles running under neighborhoods just like Firestone. That’s enough pipelines full of explosive materials to circle the Earth nearly 2.5 times. And that’s just the flowlines in Colorado that the COGCC is sort of in charge of regulating. (I’ll explain that comment shortly.)"

Texas oil booms characterized by pollution and waste

processhistory : "Mirroring the industry’s lawless oil towns, for much of the twentieth century, Texas’ oil industry regulation was minimal. In the 1920s and 1930s, gushers spewed oil across the desert. In West Texas, most oil was located on top of subsurface salt domes, which once tapped, spewed salt brine water across the desert. Oil storage tanks and drilling slush pits—used to collect chemicals, mud, and other debris produced during drilling—were unlined, often leaking into surrounding ranchland. Legislators critiqued such practices as gratuitous waste of a precious resource."

Economic calculation of EROEI. Are you including health costs and cleanup? What abut permanent damage to ecology? These are the uncounted costs of autosprawl, while profits is extracted from the oil well to the cul-de-sac.

World fossil-fuel direct subsidy [not externalities] at 3.8% of GDP

Motherboard : "For the last year in his model, 2010, Stefanski found that the total global direct and indirect financial costs of all fossil fuel subsidies was $1.82 trillion, or 3.8 percent of global GDP. He also found that the subsidies meant much higher carbon emissions released into our atmosphere."

Cost of sprawl: sleep deprivation

CityLab: "That research, which recently led both the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics to urge later start times at American schools, shows that teenagers need at least nine hours of sleep a night, and that during puberty the body starts producing the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin at 11 p.m.—a full two hours after adult bodies do. And teens keep pumping the stuff out until around 8 a.m.; perhaps not surprisingly, virtually all American teenagers don’t get nine hours of nightly rest."

In the US, suburban school students have their own bus system. This expense benefits the sprawl profiteers, builders, developers, oil, cars, DIY stores, and such, but is paid for by tax payers. In addition, to make these buses work, students must give up sleep.

When people tell you that #freetransit is too expensive, these are just some of the egregious costs of #autosprawl that can be listed that would be relieved by ending the autosprawl system.

Global fossil-fuel subsidy calculated to be $1.8 trillion

Motherboard: "So what's the damage? It's pretty colossal. For the last year in his model, 2010, Stefanski found that the total global direct and indirect financial costs of all fossil fuel subsidies was $1.82 trillion, or 3.8 percent of global GDP. He also found that the subsidies meant much higher carbon emissions released into our atmosphere."

World urban traffic congestion costs "hundreds of billions"

eurotransportmagazine: "The International Energy Agency expects urban growth demands to double road and rail travel by 2050, causing significant strain on public transport infrastructure. Furthermore, in cities around the world, rising congestion is costing hundreds of billions and affecting the health of the public. This is obviously a cause for concern, and puts sustainability and the liveability of cities as a focal point when deciding upon future transportation projects."

Free emissions! The biggest subsidy

https://www.co2.earth/monthly-co2

Millions spent on road salt, another car cost externalized from profit

Public discussion coming on road salt, transportation commissioner says | KGW.com: "The Oregon Department of Transportation said it knows salt works wonders melting ice, but  there are concerns because it would ultimately get washed into our storm drains which flow to a sewer treatment plant to be cleaned before going into the river.
ODOT is now studying whether the tons and tons of salt that would be needed would corrode those old metro-area pipes. Can treatment plants handle it? Or will fish suffer?
"It affects the roads, the steel in the bridges and the concrete and it affects your car. With this storm, how many times would we have to lay down salt?" asked ODOT spokesman Dave Thompson. "How many tons of salt would we have to lay down? That would affect a great deal of infrastructure. All that salt stays on the road or washes off into the environment. It's not picked up, it's now part of our environment. Is that what people want?""