The expression I’m exploring here is ”albatross around the neck’. I think that it very well illuminates the role of cars in people’s lives.

“The word albatross is sometimes used metaphorically to mean a psychological burden (most often associated with guilt or shame) that feels like a curse. It is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).” – Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albatross_(metaphor), retrieved 2024-06-16.

For very rich people, who can afford to buy a new car every one or two years, a car is probably not an albatross. But for everyone else, who cannot buy a new car as often, or who can never buy a new car, they are an albatross.

• A car loses about 20% of its value just being driving off the car lot, and about 15% per year thereafter. What other major investment do people make that loses value so rapidly? If you own a vehicle and claim it as a work vehicle, you can deduct this depreciation. For individuals, no such luck.
• People focus on the cost of gas, pushing from their mind all the other ongoing expenses of registration, taxes, routine maintenance. But gas is only about half of the cost of keeping a car.
• Cars always break down more frequently than expected, and always cost more to repair than expected. For lower income people, these unplanned breakdowns often push them over the edge.
• The availability of cars and the roadways built specifically to support them (only in part paid for by gas taxes), encourages people to work and live further apart. But the CNT H+T Index says the real cost of decisions about housing and work are the sum of housing and transportation. The further away from everything one lives the less housing costs, but the more transportation costs. The ‘drive until you qualify’ expression focuses on housing costs and ignores transportation costs, but transportation is a significant portion.
• Cars crash, whether it is the driver’s fault or someone else’s, the damage occurs. We’ve all seen crash damage that doesn’t get repaired because the cost of repair is more than insurance pays out, even if you have insurance, and many people don’t.
• Cars fall apart. Stand on a corner and you will hear cars with loose wheel nuts rattling, loose exhausts rattling or making unwanted noise (not talking people who intentionally make their cars louder), hubcaps and trim and bumpers long gone. Older cars are belching exhaust, older cars are barely making it up hills, and many can’t even go on the freeway because they can’t keep up.
• When cars are at the end of their life, they are a piece of junk for which there is no profitable recycling. If you want your car recycled, it is going to cost you money. Or you can let it sit in your front yard, or backyard, or garage, or the street in front of your house, as many do, rusting away and leaking toxic fluids. It is a liability to you and to society.
• People who drive cars are routinely late because what they plan in their mind is a free-flowing trip, but that is not what usually happens. So they are late, and they drive too fast to try to make up for it. See ‘cars crash’ above. This is probably worst for school drop-off and pick-up.
• Because cars allow people to travel longer distances to lower priced (and usually but not always lower quality) stores, locally owned businesses disappear, and we are left with chain stores and big box stores. One of the reasons restaurants and bars and coffee shops and entertainment are scarce in the suburbs is that many people drive to the central city, where such things are available. Good business for those of us who live in the central city, but bad for the suburbs. When was the last time you saw a quality locally-owned coffee shop in the suburbs?
• When I view areas where the unhoused are living in their vehicles, I am amazed at some of the high-end vehicles I see there. Whether they are still running or permanently broken down, I don’t know. But every instance makes me wonder if buying a vehicle they could not afford, payments and maintenance, is what pushed them over the edge, into homelessness.

What have I forgotten? You people out there who own cars but wish you didn’t can add to the list in comments.