I had been and car person for a long time – if you knew me, I would have been one of the most car fanatical people you have met - but, it has long subsided now. If you are a car person, you just have that blinding love for those four-wheeled machines and it would almost be like buying your favorite car is kind ah like your life’s ambition. As I said earlier, I am over that phase now and now I am starting to see things more objectively.
When thinking about personal vehicles in an objective (non-emotional) way, I am seeing them as just redundant, especially in modern cities. If you see in a purely objective manner – wherein the function of cars is just to transport you from point A to point B – you will see it too. Decades of marketing have practically made cars into something more personal. Ok, I Agree, not just marketing, it has some merit to it.
To speak more precisely, I would call it optionality; the thing that makes vehicles feel personal. Let’s say optionality is the ability that the car gives you to make your decisions on what you want to do with it in the future. To put it more simply, it is the freedom that the car gives you when owning one, rather than renting. This optionality is what makes the cars seem personal.
If you take this optionality out of the equation, buying cars would simply be the worst possible economic decisions one can make. The utilization time of any personal automobile is no greater than 10 percent (at the highest, over a fairly long duration, say a month). This practically means, if we don’t own vehicles, we can run with 5 to 10 times fewer vehicles overall, in a city, probably even fewer. And in addition to that, they take up a lot of real-estate, they make the roads crowded, they pollute like crazy – for both manufacturing and operating -, and they are extremely hard to dispose of.
MIT (the ORIGINAL) has recently conducted a survey that says that during the COVID times, people valued the optionality of their car at 3300$ per month, whereas on normal days it was 933$. What it basically implies is that when crazy things happen – COVID -, the optionality value of cars is much higher. And right now, people are valuing their cars more than their buying costs. One problem with this research is that I don’t believe in surveys. They are the shittiest way of collecting data. What people believe doesn’t matter, what matters is their actions. But the conclusion of that research is undeniably true as I found when I looked up the figures that say about people’s actions.
The entry-level car sales figures are rising at a much faster rate than the population growth rate twenty-five years back, assuming average people buy their first vehicle at 22-27 years. Yes, it also says about the economic growth, but it also an undeniable truth that the love of vehicles is not fading. The COVID made matters even crazier; the entry-level vehicle sales skyrocketed. One thing is clear. People want to buy personal vehicles and this desire is not anywhere close to quenching.
But it is not whether we wanted vehicles that I want to find, it is whether we need one. Answering that question, I can talk out of the experience. I am doing a public transportation commute of around 25 km a day for 2 months now. First, I will take a Yulu (First mile-last mile docked scooter system in Bangalore) for 3 km and then a bus for 9 km and then a walk for 750 m, one way. It takes 40 to 60 min, one way. If you own a vehicle, my journey will take a total of 25-40 min. Financially speaking, however expensive public transportation maybe, in the period of the lifecycle of a vehicle (4 years), owning a vehicle is certainly going to more expensive. So, from a purely economic standpoint, the rational choice is to use public transportation.
But something more subtle is against the public transportation systems. Optionality. Let’s say you are coming from your office riding your motorcycle and you see an interesting restaurant. You have the option to go to the restaurant without any direct increase in costs. That is simply not the case with any form of public transportation yet. One, you are completely not in control when you are riding a metro or a town bus. Two, the taxis like Uber and Ola does not give that freely. Three, even if your city has some sort of first last-mile system – like Yulu or Bounce - like Bangalore, it does not feel quite the same. These services charge you per minute of usage. When I am traveling from the bus stop to my place, if I wanted to stop at a snack shop, I usually don’t. Even if I did, I want to get back as soon as possible. It is not that money matters a lot (1 Rs per minute waiting-charge is not too much in the grand scheme of things), but having that feeling that money going out of my pocket every second I am using it feels uncomfortable.
This is a major problem. In the end, most decisions we make are not rational. We are emotional creatures. This is a major flaw on that end. Cities need lesser personal cars to be more efficient, whereas government needs more tax money from vehicles. There are a lot of contradictions here. So, the chances that government will raise taxes on cars to dissuade purchasing cars is low. As of now, there is no good way to dissuade people from purchasing vehicles because the alternative does not feel as good. Unless we have that emotional alternative, personal vehicles are not going anywhere.
To say it in a “sort of’ Dark knight style, personal vehicles are not what we need, but they are what we think we deserve. You can live without it. just a little bit less comfortable.
Comments