***** The New York Times April 28, 2002, Sunday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 6; Page 34; Column 3; Magazine Desk HEADLINE: THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 4-28-02: ECONOMICS OF: TRANSPORTATION; The Price of Going the Distance BYLINE: By Stephanie Mencimer
Gas prices jumped 23 cents a gallon in March, the biggest one-month jump in a decade or more, and the Bush administration is nervous. After all, Americans are famously crotchety when it comes to paying another few cents a gallon. But this oversensitivity to gas prices seems misplaced. In fact, gas prices have remained remarkably low over the past 20 years, even with the recent spike. Had they kept pace with inflation since 1982, the price of a gallon of gas today would be about $2.45 -- about a dollar more than consumers now pay.
But despite bargain-basement gas prices, transportation costs have shot up more than 50 percent in some parts of the country over the past decade. According to a report by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, in a single year, Americans spend five times as much on transportation as the federal government spends on all road building and public transit. And in most parts of the country, people now spend more on transportation than on medical care, education, clothing and entertainment -- combined. In fact, in at least seven American metro areas, residents spend more on transportation than they do on housing, and the rest of the country is close behind. Take Houston, for instance, where the average resident drives 38 miles per day and devotes 21 percent of his household expenditures -- $9,722 annually -- to transportation. That's 32 percent more than he pays for shelter. And that's not because Houston's housing is cheap. It isn't; Houston residents spend 3 percent more than the national average on shelter. Oddly enough, gasoline accounts for a mere 17 percent of these expenses. All the rest comes from the car itself: repairs, insurance, financing and so on. The average new car today has a price tag of $26,000. But the real culprit behind skyrocketing transportation costs is Americans' quest for cheaper housing. New suburban houses may look cheap on paper, but getting to them is not. A car is the price of admission to suburban life, which tends to offer few public-transit options. Teenagers with busy schedules can turn the driveway of a family of four into a facsimile of a Honda dealership.
Cars are proliferating so quickly in the suburbs that they now threaten the very lawns that make those areas so desirable. In places like Fairfax, Va., where both public transportation and affordable housing are nearly nonexistent, immigrant families have recently taken to paving over most of their yards to accommodate seven or eight vehicles. It's no wonder that when the cost of living gets to be too much, people talk about abandoning the house to take up residence in the backs of their station wagons. Without the car, there can be no house. Still, rarely do you catch people complaining about car payments. Instead, Americans are content to gripe about the only part of commuting that's still cheap: the gas.
Stephanie Mencimer ***** -- Yoshie
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