It doesn’t matter what costs you are looking at.

The point of the study is to demonstrate that increasing the fuel efficiency of cars will not save a significant ammount of money for those that own cars.

What you are asking for is irrelevant to that.

So, the lowest “average” transportation cost is $7,460? I could see how if I was dropping $350-$400/mo on a brand new car, possibly paying for some parking, I could blow that kind of money on a car in a year. But, that seems pretty darn high to me.

Especially if you consider there are a lot of young people, college students, seniors and hippies living in San Francisco, tooling around on $45/mo Muni passes, I just don’t see how this study has any credibility whatever, unless it is somehow adding the government’s cost and dividing that up per capita . . .

Even then, if you look at a per-capita GDP of around $42k in California, spending 1/8 of that on transportation within an urban infrastructure sounds reasonable enough to me. That the cost-effectiveness of transportation infrastructure in rural areas crawls past 1/4 per-capita GDP, likely requiring subsidy from urban taxpayers, is hardly a shocker or a new idea.

But it would be nice to clarify just what costs we are talking about here.

Sincerely,
-daniel

This is misleading because the ratio given is for single family homes, not apartment units. 3,400 single family homes are not being built in San Leandro’s TOD. Almost all the new housing units will be apartment units. Right now the City of San Leandro permits up to 1.5 parking spots per apartment unit.

The Alameda is a 100 unit complex for low income residents that will come with 109 parking spaces The San Leandro TOD includes a 200 unit market rate complex, The Crossings, that will have 290 parking spaces. Both projects have approved.

Will then the TOD actually reduce car use? Under the TOD, the wealthier get more parking. These folks are more likely to get in their cars each morning and drive off to San Ramon or Fremont for work as they are to walk to the BART station and ride to their job. TOD residents will commute to where the jobs are, whether by car or public transit. The most rapid new job growth in the Bay Area over the past 20 years has not been in the downtowns of SF and Oakland serviced by BART.

Two more market-rate apartment complexes are planned as part of the San Leandro TOD. The too may have almost 1.5 parking spaces for each unit. This is called TOD because of its proximity to BART. The reality is that these developments continue to promote the use of cars and will bring even more cars into the center of San Leandro than is present today.

I can’t even fathom having to spend $15,000/yr on getting around.

I agree that public transit combined with bicycle infrastructure is a much healthier, less expensive (and, given the expenses involved, more likely) way to revolutionize American transportation than converting the entire present fleet of cars in the US to electric. It will, however, require denser land use patterns and transit and bicycle infrastructure created on the double.

But it doesn’t mean electric cars don’t have a positive role to play. Every car in America doesn’t need to be replaced because Americans have twice as many cars as they need. I know families that have four cars, one set aside for a teenager who is still too young to drive! However, there are those who, for various reasons, will insist on a personal vehicle and will still have the money to pay for one. I would much rather see those folks in small electric cars than in large, pollution-spewing SUVs. Electric engines are so much more efficient than internal combustion engines that even if the electricity is powered entirely by nasty, horrible coal, the environment is still a big winner.

Oil is amazing stuff. One gallon of gasoline contains the energy of over two weeks of human labor. (And it costs only $3.00?) Squandering it on grossly inefficient internal combustion engines to propel 5000 lbs of metal to the grocery store and soccer field is probably the worst use we could put it to. (Okay, stripping off mountain tops for coal is another bad use.)

http://carfreeinbigd.blogspot.com/2009/01/investing-in-rail-better-job-creation.html

http://sf.streetsblog.org/2009/02/19/a-decidedly-dim-view-of-electric-vehicles/

Thank you for finally stating the obvious! Electric cars are not going to save the car culture.