by Randal O’Toole
Editor’s note: This is part 2 in a series “Portland’s War on Cars” from a new Report by the Cascade Policy Institute, The Portland Transportation Disaster: The High Cost of Anti Auto Planning in Portland. Read part 1 titled, “Portland’s War on Cars: Losing the War on the Automobile.”
Portland and Metro planners of the war on the automobile implicitly assume that driving poses a net cost to society and that other forms of transportation, including transit, bicycling, and walking are more sustainable and more equitable. None of these assumptions are true.
The automobile provides enormous benefits for urban residents and for society in general. Autos give people access to higher-paying jobs, lower-cost consumer goods, better housing, and recreation and social opportunities that are denied to people dependent on slower forms of transportation.
There are good reasons why more than 95 percent of all passenger travel in the Portland-area is by automobile. The average Portland-area resident can reach ten times as many jobs in a 60-minute auto trip as in a 60-minute transit trip and more than 60 times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto trip as in a 20-minute transit trip.
Automobiles are the most economical form of travel for most urban-length trips. In 2024, American spent an average of 36.4 cents per passenger-mile driving, and subsidies to highways added another 1.6 cents. Transit agencies charged fares averaging 30 cents per passenger-mile, but subsidies to transit were more than $2.20 per passenger-mile. Transit costs six times as much as driving.
Auto owners can reduce their costs by buying used cars or new cars that cost less than average. The average cost of a new car today is around $50,000, but many sell for less than half of that. Another way to reduce costs is to carry more passengers: on average, cars carry about 1.5 occupants, so driving with two or more people saves money over transit.
The convenience and economy of automobiles democratized mobility. Before Henry Ford’s mass-produced cars, only the wealthy were truly mobile. Black auto ownership enabled the civil rights movement, and the rise of two-car families fueled the women’s rights movement. Low-income Portlanders understand this and are just as likely to get to work by automobile as high-income ones.
Finally, cars are cleaner than transit. The average car emitted less than 200 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile in 2019, and probably even less today. The average light truck emitted 235 grams per passenger-mile, but in 2024 Portland transit produced 265 grams per passenger-mile.
It is time to stop the war on the automobile that does more harm to Portland-area residents than it is doing good for the environment, social justice, or anything else.
Read the full report, The Portland Transportation Disaster.
All numbers cited in this commentary are from or calculated from the U.S. Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, or Census Bureau data. For more information, see O’Toole’s full report, The Portland Transportation Disaster.
Randal O’Toole is an Adjunct Scholar at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization. He is a transportation and land-use policy analyst and the author of several books, including American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership and Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need. He writes from Central Oregon.
