A divisive study has laid bare the true price of Australia’s huge number of private cars, finding they cost the country at least $316 billion a year – and the public foots half the bill.
University of Queensland researchers say they are the first to fully quantify the “car economy” across five states, and expose a whopping annual estimated cost of $158 billion to the wider public.
The huge public bill is the total of everything from congestion to the cost of car parks and roads, emissions, pollution and collisions.
“Cars impose all these costs on society,” said Associate Professor Dorina Pojani of the university’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning. “People think of automobility, and they just think of the actual car that they drive. But automobility is a whole system.”
Pojani said she was motivated to investigate the cost of Australia’s car use after robust discussions with her students, who were adamant that drivers paid their way. “They’d say: ‘Yeah, but drivers, we pay lots of fees and taxes, and for fuel, etc.’”
The study, though, revealed drivers directly paid only half the annual cost of the vehicle economy (49.82 per cent, or an estimated $157.48 billion) in fuel, parking, tolls and buying vehicles.
The wider public, including people who, like Pojani, don’t drive, bore the remainder of the cost (50.18 per cent, or an estimated $158.64 billion).
The public cost outweighed the private cost in all states except NSW.
“To this day, I just never got used to cars,” said Pojani, who grew up in communist-era Albania when private car ownership was banned. She now lives in Brisbane.
The direct cost to drivers includes expenses such as buying vehicles and paying for fuel, parking and tolls. Drivers also help foot the public bill.
Most people living in cities have a choice to drive or catch public transport. The same can’t be said for trucks, which are necessary to move food and other goods around Australia, Pojani said. They were excluded on that basis from the study, which looked at cars and light commercial vehicles only.
But the point of the research wasn’t to cast blame on drivers, for many of whom cars were also a necessity, Pojani said. Instead, the study used a Harvard University-tested method to encourage Australian governments to “put their money where their mouth is” on sustainability.
“If [governments are] going to subsidise transport, they need to subsidise the right kind of transport, which is public transport, micromobility, meaning bicycle lanes, bicycle parking,” Pojani said.
“My hunch is that the whole car industry knows that they’re getting a pretty good deal in Australia. The figures are clear.”
The subsidisation point rang true for Melbourne resident Luke Sapwell, who supports his tax dollars going to the likes of schools, although he doesn’t have children, or hospitals, even though he’s healthy.
The difference with cars was that, for many, driving is a choice, the 34-year-old finance broker and business owner said. Sapwell doesn’t have a car, works mainly from home and relies on public transport and shared e-bikes to get around.
That was until his local council, the City of Yarra, voted last month to tear up a deal with US-headquartered hiring company Lime, ordering e-bikes off the area’s streets in inner Melbourne.
“Having half of car user costs being borne by other people – that’s unfair,” said Sapwell.
“The least vulnerable people in our community can afford to use cars.
“So really, I just cannot even comprehend why we would be further disadvantaging vulnerable people in our community by taking away such an obvious mode of transport [share bikes] that has minimal impacts on the environment.”
National Roads and Motorists’ Association spokesman Peter Khoury said the University of Queensland research had a fatal flaw. While it analysed the costs of Australia’s car economy, it was silent as to its benefits.
“You wouldn’t let your kids set up a lemonade stand without doing a cost-benefit analysis,” Khoury said.
“The benefit to 100 years of investing in infrastructure for the combustion engine has helped basically carry Australia to one of the best standards-of-living nations on the face of the earth.
“Bureaucrats are not going to look at a report that quantifies the cost without quantifying the benefit.”
Different approaches could quantify the cost of Australia’s car economy differently, Pojani said. But, even if there was a margin of error, the researchers were talking about billions of dollars.
“We’re not talking about pennies,” Pojani said.
The researchers’ findings were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
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