We're paying a fortune to go nowhere.

Car dependency is a costly lifestyle that Americans rarely calculate.

Pre-pandemic, Americans drove about an hour a day in their own car.

Half of those trips were 3 miles or less. A third of the trips were only 1 mile! Gallup has been reporting that the work-from-home and hybrid work is trending towards permanent. 

• 90% of remote workers want to maintain remote work.

• 40% of white collar workers are still working fully remote. 

• 76% of remote workers say their employer will allow people to work remotely going forward.

Those are commuters that drove themselves to work and back every day. It’s important to pay close attention to the white collar travel behavior, because their flexibility will continue to increase as technology improves. Fast internet means easy cloud computing and video meetings. 

Shifts in the future of work have everything to do with how we get around.

AAA puts out reports on to help people understand the cost of car ownership. Minivans and SUVs cost $10,000 annually to own. Even small, fuel-efficient sedans cost $7,000 a year to own. 

There are some valuable things I learned working as a traffic engineer. The most important realization was that the way professionals analyze traffic, the way roads are built the U.S., the way future roads and sidewalks and bike lanes are planned -- it’s pseudo-science.

Americans were convinced early in the 20th century to abandon human-scale design in favor of car-oriented design because of great storytelling campaigns by automobile and oil companies. Marketing was the agent of change.

Happiness. Safety. Freedom. Beauty. These were the subjects of the auto industry stories, and they’re now embedded in American culture as truth. The reality is that we don’t drive very far. We pay a ton of money to go nowhere.

The path to save Americans a fortune each year requires a ton of marketing. Car dependency is not a calculation we’re taught to make.