It's circular logic to assume the externalities are ridiculous, therefore we must price cars into the realm of ridiculousness. If you want your argument to be more than cheering against cars, you should actually calculate the externalities and you should do so for competing modes of transportation. Heck if you're talking about noise pollution, someone dribbling a basketball is far more distracting to me than the white noise of cars.
Also note that you are only calculating the costs of cars to others, not the benefits. Cars allow workers to spend less time commuting and be more productive at work, which benefits strangers. They allow people to travel farther to make purchases. They encourage the purchase of larger objects that can't be carried by hand for long distances. Their gas taxes help pay for the roads that people walk and ride bicycles on. Their tolls pay for the maintenance of bridges that bicycles and trains travel on.
I'm a fan of congestion pricing, but the purpose of congestion pricing is to reduce congestion, not to be a sin tax on driving. If people time shift their driving, that's fine.
You only need to visit a busy Manhattan street corner during commuting times to immediately realize how inapplicable those calculations are. They’ll be hundreds, if not thousands, of people waiting to cross but they only get the light 25% of the time. The rest of the time and most of the space is devoted to a tiny number of people in cars each taking up a huge amount of space and time per person.
What would the charge per car have to be to cross that street corner to possibly equal out all the time being wasted by all those pedestrians (times their hourly rate) waiting for those cars? I have to imagine it would be in the thousands of dollars per intersection or more.
There aren’t very many people in the world whose time is so valuable that it outweighs hundreds of other people’s, especially given that a random person trying to get to work in Manhattan him or herself is likely to be decently productive on average.
Interesting point. We don’t even need to talk about basketballs. I find buses in New York to be a lot noisier than personal vehicles.
Even if you take into account the multiplied factor of personal vehicles that would otherwise (possibly) be on the road, the sounds would be much more spread out.
When I’m having an al fresco meal in the city, I never notice the cars. The snarling and snorting buses interrupt conversations.
> It's circular logic to assume the externalities are ridiculous, therefore we must price cars into the realm of ridiculousness.
You're missunderstanding me, I'm just stating the possible conclusion that makes this an interesting argument (that it's ridiculously high and no one would pay it except on rare occasion) before the logic (look at all these externalities).
> you should actually calculate the externalities
That sounds like inviting lots of nitpicking debate on the internet. I invite you to though. If you do so in good faith and come up with a number that is reasonably low, well congrats, you shouldn't find the argument convincing.
> you should do so for competing modes of transportation.
True - I haven't personally because I think it's intuitive that they are far lower, if you disagree feel free to include them in your version of the calculation.
> you are only calculating the costs of cars to others, not the benefits.
I struggle to think of any positive externalities for personal cars. Everything you list are benefits to the owner except tolls. Tolls naturally don't count because that's the mechanism by which we ask them to pay for their externalities, to count them as a positive would be double counting.
If you think there are some compelling ones, again, feel free to include them in your version of the calculation.
> a sin tax on driving
Pricing in externalities is not a "sin tax". A sin tax would be "being lazy (driving) is a sin so we're going to tax them for driving".
Instead of nitpicking, we can just look up the actual calculations.[1] They're on the order of 20 cents per mile traveled. Half of that is crashes, which insurance already covers. Most of the rest is congestion costs. Air pollution and global warming costs are actually quite low compared to the harm caused by crashes and congestion. Noise is also a rounding error.
Of course this is aggregate data. Congestion costs are higher in cities and higher during peak driving hours, so it makes sense to have dynamic pricing for that.
This matches my intuition that cars are much more massively subsidized in city centers (where they should be heavily discouraged) than in suburbs (where they're mostly fine).
I also think roads have way higher value than other land, because they connect spaces. Think of it this way: you can build 99% of a wall, and I can still cross from one side to the other, but if you build 100% of a wall, I can't. So that last 1% of a wall has significantly higher externality cost than the first 99% of a wall.
Similarly, the existence of a road makes it impossible to cross a street without waiting. It's the last 1% of the land necessary for going from one part of a city to another, and so it's way more valuable than the price per acre would suggest.
Your study also doesn't include infrastructure costs, and also costs in inconvenience to pedestrians.
Your study also estimates congestion cost based on the assumption that 10% of travel is under congested conditions, but in Manhattan this is closer to 100%.
All your study's costs are conservative estimates.
In conclusion, I completely agree with the overall conclusion that car usage in most of the US has relatively low externality costs. I just massively disagree that car usage in a superdense city center like Manhattan also has relatively low externality costs.
The study your citing doesn't say what you are claiming it does.
> It is also important to recognize that the five external costs calculated in this analysis do not encompass all possible external costs associated with vehicle ownership and use. For example, noise pollution imposes significant costs.
Not only does it not even attempt to put a total cost per mile - which I read as the main reason why you cited it. It directly contradicts you when you say "Noise is also a rounding error".
It specifically excludes some of the biggest costs
> Based on his review of the transport-cost literature, Litman (2002) believes that the largest external costs of automobile ownership and use relate to land use impacts [...] However, these costs are, to a large extent, indirect. In other words, they are a result of auto-oriented travel patterns and will not vary much by vehicle type, make and model. Thus, they are not examined here.
Another quote to make it extra clear that this study really doesn't say what you are claiming it does
> Many other external costs associated with driving exist, and many of these have been characterized at an aggregate scale, rather than by make and model. For instance, [...] disposal costs. Water contamination [...]. However, like the noise and land use costs described above, these other costs are difficult to distinguish by make and model. Thus, they are not covered here
A quote explaining what the study is about
> While certain studies have analyzed other types of external cost, beyond the five quantified here, these studies have been aggregate in nature, focusing on passenger vehicles as a whole, or cars versus light-duty trucks. In contrast, this work looks at likely variations across specific makes and models.
If you can find any studies that take the context of Manhattan (or anywhere else in the first world with similar population density really) I'd be happy to look at them. The study you're looking at doesn't do so.
So while I assume that it's a perfectly valid study it really doesn't apply.
I could use that same logic to refute a study showing public transportation is cost-effective as long as that study wasn't done in San Francisco. It would be an obviously incorrect argument in that case, and that is also true in your case regarding cars.
The study's numbers are far more connected to reality than your made up numbers. You are making an isolated demand for rigor.[1]
I'm not making an isolated demand for rigor, because I'm demanding everything we do does not include clear systematic biases in one direction. I'm making a global demand for the most minimal amount of rigor you could possibly use and not necessarily arrive at incorrect answers.
Your study has a clear systematic bias (edit: Actually it doesn't even say what you claimed it did, but if it did it would have a clear systematic bias), that most costs scale with population density, and it was done studying an area (the US) with a much lower population density than the area at hand (manhattan). Assuming your study is entirely correct, its answer is incorrect when applied to the problem at hand. You would have to be an idiot to rely on it because the only way it is "right" is by being incorrect by the right amount in the right direction by sheer chance.
Likewise, if you tried to apply a study about public transportation done in the middle of the Sahara Desert to San Francisco, I would call you an idiot.
Also note that you are only calculating the costs of cars to others, not the benefits. Cars allow workers to spend less time commuting and be more productive at work, which benefits strangers. They allow people to travel farther to make purchases. They encourage the purchase of larger objects that can't be carried by hand for long distances. Their gas taxes help pay for the roads that people walk and ride bicycles on. Their tolls pay for the maintenance of bridges that bicycles and trains travel on.
I'm a fan of congestion pricing, but the purpose of congestion pricing is to reduce congestion, not to be a sin tax on driving. If people time shift their driving, that's fine.