"Mr. Goodwrench Knows..."

A string of recent articles and comments reminded me of this tagline from a series of General Motors' ads in 1989:

"It's not just your car, it's your freedom."

Let's take a look at that "freedom" for a second:

• According to AAA, the average cost of owning and operating a new car in the US is over $1,000/month, as of August, 2023--up over 13% from the previous year.

• That new car will be parked ~95% of the time.

• When it's not parked, it (hopefully) occupies the majority of your attention, and (certainly) precludes a whole range of more productive or restorative activities (e.g., working, planning, catching up on correspondence, entertainment, rest & relaxation, etc.).

75+ years of car-oriented development have made automobile manufacturing and the associated support industries represent from 3-5% of US GDP. It's also made a lot of otherwise worthless land valuable, and helped define American culture.

It's also left us in a difficult predicament:

• Under-funded public transit, stuck with out-dated, inefficient services, essentially requires most of us to own a car.

• If you need to own a car--or even if you just think you need one--you're going to get one. And once you do, it only makes sense to use it as much as you need, to amortize the cost of ownership over as many miles as possible--unless you want to pay $1K+/month and leave it parked even more than 95% of the time.

• There's been little if any innovation in mass transit services. Lyft and UBER certainly disrupted the cab industry with tech-enabled convenience, but remain too expensive to fully replace the private automobile for everyday use.

So what are the alternatives, and how do we get there? A good start would be if employers realized, through more comprehensive accounting, the cost to them of tolerating/enabling the prevailing system.

As an employer, every car in your parking lot represents:

• $1,000+/month of after-tax salary, when commute programs are tax-advantaged

• 2x as much additional real estate, compared to someone who uses an alternative mode

• Up to 15 hours/week of frustration, stress, and lost productivity

I've been lucky enough to consult with several large tech companies that provided services to get folks to and from work. (Enjoying these benefits is in fact what motivated me to create CommuteSource, with the goal of expanding such services beyond the giants of tech.) These services are very expensive to operate--because they're exclusive!

In my next post, I'll detail the alternatives we can develop by pooling demand across companies.