A Car Named Haig

from an article by Ted Johnson
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I nicknamed the car Haig, after Reagan’s Secretary of State.
(It was General Alexander Haig, old people will recall, who contributed to the “vital national interest” rationale for military action in order to protect America’s access to all the world’s yummy oil. …)
https://www.commutebybike.com/2011/12/28/a-car-named-haig-driving-seen-decreasingly-as-compulsory/
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And now my tangent:
[B’ Spokes: When I moved to NYC in the 80’s they had a diabolical scheme in "the vital city interest" to get me to leave my car at home and take mass transit. This scheme was simply to offer a discount on tokens purchased in bulk. And once you pre-purchased a bunch of rides you were likely to use them. So each morning I would look at my car and look at my mitt full of tokens and think "I really should use some of these up." and the car would stay home.
This is much the way the lure of a car works, you prepay for everything so you dissociate all those prepaid costs with the trip you are about to embark on as it’s already paid for.
But let’s imagine for a moment something different, a car where you pay just for the miles driven and nothing is prepaid beyond your current trip. So on your 18th birthday the state would deliver your free car to your door with a slot for dollar bills. If you want to go somewhere you simply put in a dollar per mile* for the trip you intend to take and off you go.
Under this scheme a trip to the local store just a mile away for a loaf of bread would cost you $2 (there and back.) We use a car for short trips because it is "so convenient" which doesn’t look so convenient under this scheme. Under our current scheme we prepay that $2 through, car payments, insurance payments, fill the tank payments and repair and maintenance payments and we then dissociate all those costs with this "simple" trip to the store done over and over through the life of the car. But non the less this is what we pay one way or the other for the convenience of using the automobile for everything under the sun for our own personal transport.
But more to the point I want to highlight is that policies around motoring in the United States could be simply put to keep the cost per mile driven as low as possible for each user. We spend trillions on wars just so we can have access to "cheep" oil but then talk about cutting social security to help pay for those wars so we can have cheep gas. On the state level we talk about cutting education, recreation and mass transit budgets to help pay for roads.
The result is we "need" more road capacity then we have the ability to pay for. We "need" more money spent for the benefit of personal auto travel then what we have the willingness to pay for. This alone should say volumes about our policies and the need to get the cost per mile traveled by personal automobile to reflect more accurately the true costs incurred by driving or reduce demand for auto travel to what we can afford.
Reducing demand will happen through high gas prices (eventually), congestion and traffic delays due to accidents are other factors that are already at play that will reduce demand proved that there is a choice of travel mode.
So it is becoming increasingly important that alternate transportation be given it’s fair share of due consideration.]
* The dollar per mile figure comes from here: https://commutesolutions.org/external/calc.html

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