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Wednesday 11 May 2011
Americans Work 2 Hours Each Day To Pay For Their Cars

Imagine you could work 500 hours less every year. That works out to be an extra 12.5 weeks of vacation. Alternatively, imagine you got paid for an extra 500 hours of work each year, without having to work those extra 500 hours. That would work out to be an extra $11,000 every year for an average American making $22 per hour.

500 hours a year - or 2 hours each day - is roughly the equivalent to what the average American worker will work in order to pay for their cars (the average is between 1.46 hour/day and 2.90 hours/day depending on which data is used).

This is a substantial amount of time and cost in order to have the “freedom”, or as I like to call it “imprisonment” of automobile ownership.

Furthermore, Americans on average sit in their cars for 48 minutes each day, and commuters in larger cities spend far more than this in their cars commuting to work. Here in Toronto, the average round trip commute time is 80 minutes – the worst among 19 cities studied last year (the study includes transit riders as well as motorists).

The United States has the highest rate of car ownership in the world, at 779 motor vehicles for every 1,000 man, woman and child. At 563 motor vehicles per 1,000 people, Canada has a 38% lower rate of car ownership than the United States – and Canada’s rate of car ownership is nothing to boast about.

Across the Pacific, China had only 128 motor vehicles for every 1,000 people as of 2008. Even at this very low rate of ownership, by 2010 we saw a 100KM traffic jam just outside of Beijing due to China’s massive population. Clearly there isn’t enough space to accommodate automobiles in the long run.

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