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Notes -
I think you don't get the benefit of the default.
Ok, I guess first it's worth establishing what we're comparing driving to. I think it's fair to say some mix of public transport like trains, buses, and subways, as well as walking and cycling. If you take public transport you have to typically walk a little bit, as it won't go directly to your destination.
Also, I'm not trying to argue that driving a car isn't desirable for the occupants. Of course it's convenient, private, and comfortable. And I don't disagree with Urquan that a lot of people choose cars because they prefer the risk of an accident to the risk of being a victim of crime.
So to start, let's compare the space requirements. Every bit of land in a city has a value -- if you use it for something transportation-related, you can't use it for something else. As a thought experiment, if you had to surround every building with a 50ft wide no-mans-land buffer, it would clearly make any city or town larger and therefore add time to every trip through it, without adding any value (with the exception perhaps reducing noise pollution if you live next to a club). Proximity creates value.
Walking often requires sidewalks -- one could imagine a city with no sidewalks, but typically we don't want roads inches away from front doors and storefronts anyway, so it doesn't really take up much extra space. That said, if your roads are narrow enough, you can leave these out (example of random residential Tokyo street).
Buses require depots to store them, as well as stops. Clicking around google maps for any major city with a good bus system shows that these take up minimal space, about as much as a Walmart + parking, if that.
Commuter trains probably require the biggest footprint of any public transport. 860,000 people commute into London on the train daily (2006 figure). If they all drove instead *and carpooled 2 people per car), assuming a 2.4m x 4.8m parking space (old, smaller standard), you'd need 4953600 m^2 of parking, or 2.2 km^2 of just parking spaces. And since a parking lot needs a substantial amount of space for the cars to drive around, it would probably be more like 3 or 4 km^2. For a train station footprint, let's take Waterloo station, (the biggest), which as far as I can estimate would be about 0.25 km across if it were compressed into a square, for 0.0625 km^2. There are 14 terminal train stations in London -- if they were all the same size, they would take up 0.875 km^2. But many are smaller, and a train station is not just bare warehouse for trains, it has shops and places to eat as well. There are also lots of smaller train stations which are just a blip on the train line that barely takes up more space than the train itself.
And finally, a subway takes up very little useful space, of course. For driving, the Big Dig in Boston would be comparable.
Now, when providing car parking, you can build up, or down! But since car parking takes up so much space per-user, parking structures often have to be paid in order for them to make economic sense, or they're subsidized by the city. I have little objection to car parking when the driver pays enough that it doesn't need subsidies. Often, though, planing laws just mandate that each business provides a certain number of parking spaces. We all pay for this both in the form of things being further apart, as discussed above, as well as businesses having to pay taxes on land area only used for cars, that they then pass on to us.
I want to emphasize -- I don't think cars are the devil. I do think that bending over backwards to accommodate driving at the expense of other forms of transportation, and the general livability of cities, is a problem.
Another externality is accident deaths. Cars kill more than other forms of transportation -- and not just the people in the car. If we take what the DOT estimated for the value of human life in 2023, $13.2 million, times 0.54 deaths per 100,000,000 million passenger miles for passenger vehicles from the previous link, that's $7.128 million per 100m passenger miles. We could cut that in half if we want to say that half the car deaths are due to the own fault of the driver and so shouldn't count as an externality. This is probably over-estimating because there are a lot of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, but under-estimating in cases where there is more than 1 occupant of the car. (It's easy to get into the weeds quickly) This is $3.064 million per 100m passenger miles, or $0.03 per passenger mile. Every 33 mile trip statistically does around $1 in economic damage solely from the possibility of causing an accident. Just looking at the graph of accidents, the externality from other types of transit is less than 1/10 of that. As for walking and cycling, I'm assuming that deaths caused to others is generally negligible -- it would be hard to kill someone with a bike crash even if you were trying.
Other externalities, such as noise, are messier to compare. Obviously walking and cycling are very quiet, subways are too if you're not actually down near them. Trains and buses can make more noise than cars, but there's the factor that they're not on literally every street, and they're not constantly passing by. Train horns can carry a long way though. Subjectively, I've found cities with lots of cars to be substantially louder than cities that don't prioritize them.
Pollution is similar. For trains and buses, I'm not sure. Trains do probably generate a lot of brake dust, and diesel trains pollute. It may depend on electrification, etc. Electric cars are apparently about as bad as gas ones due to tire wear and braking though, so I imagine buses and trains may be the same, though electric trains aren't heavier than diesel ones since they get their power from overhead lines. Biking and walking create negligible pollution, unless you count the visual pollution of lycra-clad cyclists.
Anyway, that's my impression of the externalities of different modes of transport, back of the envelope. It makes sense to drive everywhere, if you don't count what driving does to everyone else. Just like it makes sense to catch as many fish as you want without considering if the stock can support it.
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