Paying for driving

Most drivers in the US know what driving costs them, by adding up their bills: filling the gas tank, insurance payments, loan payments, servicing. AAA tracks these costs over time and estimates those costs for a new car in 2025 to be at $0.77/mile.¹

A study published this week in Transportation Research Part A puts a price on un-priced driving costs: crashes, air pollution, climate damage, noise, and the land taken up by roads and parking.²

A screenshot of the journal article webpage

Academic papers like this rarely punch through to a mainstream audience without their findings being re-stated for a wider audience, so I have done so through 3 visualizations below.

Private vs. public costs

Averaged across the world’s cars, those public costs come to $0.89/mile. Road construction is part of that figure, and fuel taxes and registration fees already cover about half of state and local road spending,³ so if those are excluded then what remains is $0.76/mile.

A new car costs its driver 77 cents a mile, mostly depreciation, fuel, insurance, and repairs. The driver does not pay another 76 cents a mile, 49 cents of it from crashes and the rest from air pollution, climate damage, noise, and other costs.

Crash costs dominate

While drivers pay for their cars, the “socialized” costs of driving are dominated by the costs from crashes. The study values road deaths and injuries worldwide at $3.98 trillion/year, which is twice the paper’s estimated driving costs from air pollution, climate damage, and noise altogether.⁴

Worldwide, crashes cost $3.98 trillion a year, split between deaths and injuries, about twice the $1.98 trillion from air pollution, climate damage, and noise.

Or visualized another way:

Driving in the US costs $2.15 trillion a year beyond what drivers pay, or $8,350 per passenger vehicle: $5,400 from crashes, $1,430 from air pollution, $980 from climate damage, and $540 from noise and other costs.

The authors of the paper argue for shifting these costs that the public are forced to pay back onto the driver’s bill through congestion pricing, road use charges based on distance and vehicle weight, and an end to subsidized parking.

Feel free to share these data visualizations as you see fit.

A note on “land costs”: the paper massively undervalues the land under American roads.

It takes its road-land figure from a US study by Guerra, Duranton, and Ma, then scales it down to the world’s average income. That US study puts the land under urban roads alone at $206-$370 billion a year, 5-9x what this study’s method assigns to every road in the country.

Correcting that one line adds $150 billion to $300 billion to the US total above, before counting parking, rural roads, or any rise in land prices since 2016.

What that land is worth is a subject for a separate post.

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