Author Elly Blue provides a surprising and compelling new perspective on the way we get around and on how we spend our money, as families and as a society. Bikenomics(Microcosm Publishing, 2013) starts with a look at the real transportation costs of families and individuals, and moves on to examine the current civic costs of our transportation system. This excerpt, from chapter 1, “The Free Rider Myth,” explains that car-free cyclists are not free-loading off of the transportation system, in fact, it’s quite the contrary.
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Share the Road
“Bikes don’t pay for the roads.” You see it again and again. It appears on editorial pages, in blog comments, and shouted from car windows, often accompanied by the accusation: “Freeloader!” or something ruder.
The bicycle freeloader myth is a strong and pervasive economic belief. It’s implied in rules that require cyclists to stay off certain roads, or ride in a manner that does not affect car traffic. And it’s enforced through media headlines, police standards, and the behavior and discourse of cycling advocates and detractors alike.
But is it true?
When you take a trip on a bicycle, you do not pay for gas, and thus you pay no gas tax. You do not stop and pay tolls (and you are generally not allowed on toll roads). You do not pay a license or registration fee, part of which goes toward paving, maintaining, and policing the roads you ride on. Most car insurance companies do not cover bicyclists, so often you do not pay for that either. And you do not pay for parking. No doubt this all seems terribly unfair.
Of course, though there are many people out there who solely get around car-free, chances are good that any given person out riding a bicycle on the road also owns a car, or rents one from time to time. When they do so, they pay all the same fees, fines, and taxes as an everyday motorist does, and just as grudgingly.
But here’s the thing: Cars don’t pay for roads, either.
The idea that roads are funded by user fees paid by people who drive is one of the great myths that buttresses our entire way of life. While the veneer on that myth has been crumbling for some time, we have only recently been forced to begin to look hard at it. And the difference between riding a bicycle and driving a car is surprisingly vast—but not in the way most of us imagine.
What if I told you that by driving a car you become a freeloader, a drain on the economy? That people who bicycle instead are subsidizing a road system that they are largely not welcome on? In order to break even on the cost of roads and pay for every driver who uses them each year, we would need 54% of commuters using a bicycle as their sole means of transportation.
It’s not great news for most people. After all, driving a car is extremely expensive; and if you live in the U.S. a car may be your best or only way to get to work and otherwise go about your life. Unfortunately, it is also true. Driving is one of the most heavily subsidized things we do on a daily basis.
Cars pay for about half of the cost of our roads, all told. That’s it. Half.
So where does the rest of the road funding come from for all that asphalt? We all pay it—whether or not we drive.
Most of what we pay for the roads is not paid directly, but through our taxes.
Every time we pay sales tax on a purchase, property tax on our homes (directly, or indirectly through our rent), or income tax on what we earn, a portion of that goes directly into our transportation system.
A portion of all of these taxes are paid into a general fund, which is where most transportation money comes from. But the real costs of building roads end up being much higher over the years than what the budget can afford. A growing amount of road costs are paid for with borrowed money. We must eventually pay off these loans through our taxes, with interest that can amount to two, three, or more times the original cost of the project.
Worse, this funding gap increases every year. With the economy dragging, we drive less … and as fuel and material costs rise, construction grows more expensive.
Roads are enormously expensive to build and maintain. If you look only at the highway system, the user fees paid by drivers come much closer to paying for them than half, though the system still operates at a loss. But if you look at local roads, on which most of our daily travel happens, the gap is even wider. The cost to maintain local roads is, on average, more than 6 cents per mile for each car each year. How much of this do drivers actually pay? Less than a penny. What does this mean for bicycling? While people do not pay to ride bicycles on the road, bicycling also costs almost nothing—less than 1% of money spent on transportation infrastructure in the U.S. goes to anything bike-related, and bicycles do not contribute significantly to other road-related expenses like potholes, crashes, or congestion.
People who ride bicycles also pay taxes, which means they often pay more into the road system than they cost it. By one estimate, a car-free cyclist would overpay by an average of $250 a year—a few dollars more than the amount that an average driver underpays. While cyclists represent all income levels more or less equally, the half who ride for transportation alone and do not own cars are on the lower end of the income spectrum. For them this is the very definition of a regressive tax—like the lottery, a program by which the poor subsidize the better-off.
By that measure, to pay for the cost of keeping one driver on the road, you need someone else who is not driving—that is, paying taxes but putting minimal wear and tear on the system. But two thirds of people in the U.S. drive and most of the rest travel in cars and on buses as passengers. It’s a recipe for debt, yet there is a constant demand for more roads to be built so that more of us can drive farther and more often.
Despite a growing number of bicycles on the roads, there are not nearly enough to balance out this equation. But even if motorists were to double the fees they pay—and if those fees were indexed to inflation—it would still not be enough. Our road system is in bad shape, and we have not been able to spend nearly enough on it in the last decade to keep it even in minimally good working order.
That’s just the beginning of the story, though. Roads, economically unsustainable in their own right, result in towering externalities, costs or benefits attributed and paid for elsewhere, indirectly. When you take these costs into account—from health to safety to local economies to global energy—by the most conservative estimate, the cost to keep each car on the road is 30 times the cost of each bicycle.
Yet not a month goes by without some clever politician deciding that the best way out of our transportation funding crisis is to license and register bicyclists. Every year it is up to weary bicycle advocates to do the math once again to show that there is no way for such a scheme to break even on its administrative costs, never mind the cost of accommodating a sudden increase in cars on the road and passengers on transit.
The humble bicycle, long a scapegoat, may yet prove our salvation from a transportation system running at a deficit.
This is not so far-fetched as it might seem at first glance.
Take Copenhagen, where forty years ago the incursion of cars and roads looked very similar to that in today’s U.S. cities. But today, 84% of the city’s residents regularly ride bicycles. Each mile traveled on a bike earns the city, by one analysis, 42 cents. That same mile driven in a car costs the city 20 cents. Bicycling rates there have begun to decline in recent years, and city leaders are scrambling to make bikeways more comfortable and convenient. They know they can’t afford not to.
In the U.S., we can’t afford not to either, but it’s harder for us to see—bicycling hasn’t grown into normalcy in the same way. But when you consider that almost 70% of our car trips are under two miles—a forty minute walk or a twelve minute bicycle ride—change seems more feasible. More than two thirds of people in the U.S. say that they wish they bicycled more often, and an increasing number are doing so. The barriers are real, but can be overcome cheaply and quickly. And the benefits multiply and spread into every aspect of our economy and our lives.
Reprinted with permission from Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save The Economy by Elly Blue and published by Microcosm Publishing, 2013.
