If you drive, you pay charges like the gas tax, registration and license fees, and parking meters, that are supposed to cover the auto-related costs to the public of providing the transportation system. But driving is a subsidized activity because, in spite of these payments, the car does not even come close to paying its own way. To tally up the real bill, analysts must calculate the many car-related costs, including: road building and maintenance; police and emergency services; pollution of air and water; congestion; the effect on the trade deficit of massive petroleum imports; and more.
The Sierra Club's John Holtzclaw, one of the foremost transportation analysts in the environmental community, compiled five major efforts to calculate the total subsidies that support automobile usage. Auto subsidies in the U.S. are almost certainly greater than the entire defense budget; the five estimates ranged from $378 billion to $730 billion per year. The average subsidy ranged from $1,040 to $4,630 per vehicle beyond charges paid by drivers, amounting to $2.20 to $10.70 per gallon of gas consumed. (From Moving Lightly, Living Lightly, December 1993; newsletter of the Sierra Club Urban Environment Committee and Transportation Subcommittee, 730 Polk Street, San Francisco, CA 94109, 415-776-2211. Note: This issue is a great resource with a compendium of book reviews and a list of over 100 grassroots Sierra Club activists from 34 states and the issues they work on.)
The costs of suburban sprawl constitute a subsidy borne by the public that encourages developers to buy cheap land on the fringes of town. The Urban Land Institute estimates that it costs $48,000 per housing unit to provide roads, water, utilities, sewer, and schools to sprawling subdivisions 10 miles from town, twice as much as more compact neighborhoods adjacent to town. (The Costs of Alternative Development Patterns. James E. Frank, The Urban Land Institute, 1989.)
The more you look, the more auto subsidies you find. While citizens cannot deduct legal costs when accused of misdeeds, corporations can, even when they admit they are guilty. For example, after Exxon agreed to pay $1 billion in compensation for the Valdez oil spill, they saved half that much on their taxes. Dawn Erlandson, green tax reform specialist at Friends of the Earth, reports that, "under the current tax code, civil damages, clean-up costs, legal fees, and even the value of the (spilled) oil that devastated Prince Williams Sound are tax-deductible."
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