Brought to us via the infamous Ran Prieur; Ivan Illich examines the true efficiency of a car-based society.

The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

Yeah. It took a few years of experience for me to figure out that for myself, economically speaking, my car was pretty much a waste. Originally, the primary reason I bought it was to get to work easier. Then, I spent so many of my money-hours paying it off that by the time I was almost done, I lost my salaried job and had very little savings to show for it! Even though I rarely drive it now (the last time I put gas in was the beginning of June), taxes and insurance fees continue to be a burden. There are "fun" aspects to owning a car, but they seem to get less and less fun with time.