The price of gas feels like it’s gone up lately—or maybe I just paid extra attention to the numbers filling up the tank last time. $3.50 a gallon? 26 miles a gallon local driving? Hmm…

I never really think about what it costs to actually drive. I—and I think probably the typical suburbanite—look at the price of gas as an abstraction except when I’m actually filling up. We even call it “pain at the pump.” True, that’s where you spend the money. But you use the gas everywhere except the gas station. You’re “spending” gas money with every mile you drive. Which, if you take the average fuel efficiency of local/highway I get in my car (about 30 miles a gallon), one single mile costs almost 12 cents at $3.50/gallon.

There’s something interesting about this to me. Twelve cents is so little that mentally it rounds down to zero. But when you’re driving any real distance, the miles add up fast. So that “zero” cost can suddenly balloon into real money, seemingly out of nothing. Didn’t I just fill up the tank last week?… I always get this feeling as I see my gas meter reaching half: I don’t drive that much, it shouldn’t be going down! The way mileage costs add up is sort of like the way the weight of feathers add up. It’s like how a bar of soap slowly, slowly gets used up. No wonder gas costs frustrate people. We aren’t taught to understand it the way it works.

I took a look at how many miles away my favorite sushi buffet, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, is: 38. So even at the best highway mileage my car gets, that’s a gallon. And a gallon back. Seven dollars just to get to the restaurant! (I drive a toll-free route on the occasion that I go there—not too often really.)

But I definitely just go to a further-away supermarket because they have slightly better produce prices, or I don’t like the quality of the onions or potatoes, or whatever. And all those extra miles add up fast. If the next store is five miles away and back, that’s an extra dollar of gas. To save 50 cents a pound on a vegetable that I’m…buying a pound of? Nope, no savings. But it’s so damn easy to just say, “Eh, I already bought the gas, now I have to use it.” It’s so easy to pretend you didn’t spend that money filling up the tank. Until the next time you have to do it.

I understand to someone who lives in a city, this sounds a little self-indulgent. Or to someone who grew up, or is, poor enough to have to count miles. But I’m trying to describe something that I’ve never really heard described, certainly not growing up. It is more abstract than money: it’s that the casualness with which we just hop in the car and go somewhere is at odds with the expense—and the risk—of doing so.

I saw some annoying social media post the other day about how car insurance really works, or whatever, and the guy goes, “so you’re stuck with a bill of thousands of dollars? You didn’t understand the stakes” (or something).

I bristle at this sort of social media post—“bristle” is putting it nicely—because I think it’s entirely reasonable for people to expect that a system they basically have no choice in being part of will have their backs. That it can’t be that randomness will simply bankrupt some people for existing in a society where the car is mandatory to participate in normal life. Why are there “stakes” in getting to the grocery store from your home? In getting your kids to school? The cost of driving a mile, once you see it is, is only the smallest of the costs we’ve embedded into mobility because of car dependence.

I dislike very much this cold, calculating, bloodless attitude of certain professionals who don’t seem to understand that accurately describing their field is not an excuse but an indictment. What sort of place do we live in where the certainty that car crashes will happen is laundered into ruin for some unlucky people?

Now I’m talking about traffic engineers.

As Charles Marohn put it in his searing book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer—I’m paraphrasing—we have engineered a land-use and transportation system where the costs of an ordinary human mistake are far too high.

You can’t unsee that insight. You can’t unsee the extent to which so much money, property, and life is destroyed because the car is the assumed, or the only, mode of transportation in most of the country. When you think about this enough, you don’t really want to get behind the wheel very often. And when I realize my favorite supermarket is more than a dollar away, I just want to say, eh, keep it. I’ll go to my closest supermarket, and I’ll walk.

Related Reading:

That Damned Elusive Parking Spot

Parking Puts It On The Map

Closer And Further Away

The Train Not Taken

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