201 / The true cost of owning a car is just astounding

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

– Simone Weil

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Featured artist: Stephan Schmitz

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Welcome to Issue 201!

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In The Insane Cost of Cars, Berlin-based Youtuber Marton breaks down the true cost of owning and running a car, and it managed to surprise even me. The whole video is worth a watch but below are some of the key numbers, which I think are by and large representative of most Western countries. (He also shares his calculations in a detailed spreadsheet that includes sources.)

In Germany, a Volkswagen Golf typically costs the owner €7,657 per year to own and run. This includes depreciation, petrol, taxes, maintenance and so on. Based on a conservative study from a few years ago, if you own and use a car of that size over 50 years, it comes to a total cost of €403,179. If we stretch that to 60 years and apply a more realistic inflation rate of 2.5%, that small Golf will incur a lifetime cost of €1,579,583! On a medium income, that’s 30-40% of every euro earned, ever.

Using his home town of Berlin, Marton then shows how alternative ways of transport compare. You could buy an unlimited, yearly ticket for both the local public transport network in Berlin and for all regional rail services covering the entirety of Germany, and buy a brand new e-bike every year, and it’s still cheaper than owning a Golf-sized car. (It’s not a perfect comparison, of course.)

When you look at how taxpayer money is spent, it gets even more absurd. On top of what the owner pays personally, a car of this size also costs German society €4,600–5,200 per year, because the owner’s taxes and fees don’t cover the cost for building and maintaining roads, parking, offsetting the cost of accidents, pollution, etc. So whether they own a car or not, every tax payer in Germany spends about €5,000 per year propping up a system of car dependency.

Even the smallest vehicle class costs a resident of Berlin around four to five times as much as it would to make public transport completely free for everyone in the city. In fact, if you look at the subsidies the city of Berlin spends on free curbside parking (€1,005 per car per year), that money alone would cover the cost of completely free public transport in all of Berlin.

Of course, not everyone lives in cities and not every city offers public transport and active transport (walking & cycling) the way Berlin does. But that’s not really the point. The key takeaway here is that most of us vastly underestimate the true cost of car ownership – as individuals and as a society.

The industrial complex behind private car ownership relies on notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘empowerment’ to sell their products. In reality, the average worker is forced to spend 30–40% of their income and a substantial amount of their tax money on owning a car, only to remain trapped in a system of dependency that delivers terrible outcomes for our health, our environment, and our cities.

Breaking that cycle of dependency requires more of us to view the alternatives as desirable – if not for health or environmental reasons then at least for our own economic benefit. That’s why, paradoxically, drivers who heavily rely on their car to get around should also be the most fervent advocates for developing or expanding car-free alternatives. – Kai

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Worthy Five: Adam Willems

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Five recommendations by religion and fintech reporter Adam Willems

A question worth asking:

‘Why are things defined as they are?’ The health of our economy being conflated with stock-market performance serves the interests of the wealthiest, who get to shape national economic policy in their image. (Ditto for how ‘secularism’ means ‘Christianity’ in educational contexts, for instance.) Words have meanings and political consequences.

A video worth watching:

This conversation between sociologist Dr. Eve L. Ewing and author Ta-Nehisi Coates is not exactly TikTok length at 98 mins, but it’s informative throughout. Hard to summarise, so just click through.

A Twitter account worth following:

This account tracks edits to online New York Times articles. (A record for the paper of record.) What phrasing gets changed, and what political goals do those tweaks support?

A book worth reading:

Abusing Religion by Dr. Megan Goodwin. A fascinating – and, in my opinion, compelling – history into why certain groups get called ‘cults’, and how that perpetuates certain harms.

A newsletter worth subscribing to:

I love Max Read’s Read Max. Incredible writing on technology and modern life.

 

Books & Accessories

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Pleasure Activism →

The politics of feeling good

Is it possible to connect activism with the things that make us feel good? In this collection of essays, editor adrienne maree brown explores what she calls ‘pleasure activism’, “a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. [The writing covers] a wide array of subjects – from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs – creating new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.”

 

Overheard on Twitter

A friend told me the new term for Mansplaining: Correctile Dysfunction. I died.

@chrissyfarr

 

Food for Thought

The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake →

Read

The success of the nuclear family had a disastrous impact on how we relate to one another. This is a fantastic longread that shows why the modern-day notion of a ‘happy family’ in the West has eroded our most essential social support networks. But there is hope in a new kind of kinship that replaces the role relatives play in traditional families. “If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.”

The Insane Cost of Cars →

Watch

As I write in my introduction, this well-researched and insightful video builds one of the most thorough and convincing cases against private car ownership. So many of us underestimate the true cost of owning and operating a motor vehicle. Seeing it in such detail and in contrast to alternative options is simply astounding.

The Car-Replacement Bicycle (the bakfiets) →

Watch

A great complementary video to the above if you still need convincing of just how much of a game changer cargo bikes are – in this case the Dutch bakfiet, a two-wheeler with a cargo box. From the economics, the health benefits, the ease of use to the fact it is changing the face of our neighbourhoods for the better – you can’t watch this and not be hopeful that in a few decades from now, at least in some parts of the world, we’ll look back at the age of car-centric design and just shake our heads in disbelief. “[A bakfiet] costs less than just the options on a new car. ... That means you could literally buy a [high end version of the bakfiet], ride it for a year and throw it in the garbage, and you could do that every single year, and you’d still come out better financially than buying a car.”

 

Aesthetically Pleasing

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Mona Caron is a Swiss-born, San Francisco-based artist, using muralism, illustration and photography in both her art and ‘artivism’. I love her Weeds series: “This is a series of paintings of urban weeds, created as a tribute to the resilience of all those beings who no one made room for, were not part of the plan, and yet keep coming back, pushing through and rising up.”

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Did you know that Muji offers complete house packages? It’s a vertically stacked, modular system that allows moving of walls and even ceilings. The staircase simultaneously acts as a lightwell.

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In his Microsculpture series, British photographer Levon Biss “adapted traditional techniques to create a photographic process that revealed the minute details of insects in a resolution and scale never seen before”.

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Under 22/22, designer Fran Velasco releases a free font three times a month until year’s end: “The premise behind the name is to release 22 fonts before 2022 comes to an end. Starting on May 20, new fonts will be available on the 10th, 20th and 30th of each month for a period of 10 days until a new one replaces it.”

 

Notable Numbers

47

Compared to 2021, cycling levels in England rose by 47% on weekdays and 27% on weekends in the five months to the end of July.

86

Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss, with agriculture alone being the identified threat to 24,000 of the 28,000 (86%) species at risk of extinction. The global rate of species extinction today is higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years.

482.37

A non-scientific study showed that top celebrities have emitted an average of 3376.64 tonnes of CO2 in just their private jet usage in 2022 so far. That’s 482.37 times more than the average person’s annual emissions. The average miles travelled per flight was just 66.92 miles.

 

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The Week in a GIF

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Key phrases

Older messages

200 / Four years of DD! 🎉

Monday, August 8, 2022

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. –

199 / Housing for people, not profit

Monday, August 1, 2022

Perseverance – a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success. – Ambrose Bierce Alexandra Dzhiganskaya Dense Discovery Dense Discovery Welcome to Issue 199! View/share online → This

198 / War-life balance in Kyiv

Monday, July 25, 2022

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. – Bertrand Russell Featured artist: Irina Kostyshina Dense Discovery Dense Discovery Welcome to Issue

197 / On leisure travel and experience obesity

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Change – real change – comes from the inside out. It doesn't come from hacking at the leaves of attitude and behaviour with quick fix personality ethic techniques. It comes from striking at the

196 / Towards internal accountability

Monday, July 11, 2022

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. – Thomas Sowell Featured artist:

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