Breakdown

My commuting breakdown for 2008 (1/1 to 10/31):

Total 5,437 miles
Bicycle 40%
Transit 35%
Drive Alone 19%
Carpool 6%

I commute ~6,300 miles a year. So if I were a standard Elk Grovian I would do all of this solely through private, single occupant automobiling. Because no one can work in Elk Grove as there aren't any jobs that pay the median living wage, they are forced to commute at least 30 miles a day elsewhere. Assume a population of 125,000, 60% of them work, and 92% of them drive alone 30 miles a day, 50 weeks a year...that's over a half billion miles just commuting. Tack on another 50% for recreation and other utility trips and Elk Grovians drive ~1 billion miles each year.

Now with gas at two fifty, the long forgotten oil crisis of a few months ago has been superseded by a credit crisis. Both were incredibly cheap and abundant for most of this decade, fueling our special compound growth formula to finance the construction of more suburbia and fuel the [un]happy residents on their longer and longer commutes between the home and work and home again via strip shopping malls so they could spend money they didn't have on things they didn't need. This is the Elk Grove of today -- a badly designed suburban wasteland of cheap foreclosed bank owned homes, filled with cars owned by finance companies, strip malls owned by outsiders, and half-started aborted tract parcels owned by bankrupt developers. No one who lives in Elk Grove owns anything in Elk Grove.

But Elk Grove still drives its 1 billion miles each year, crisis or no crisis. Imagine the collective savings if even a fifth of Elk Grove did even a fifth of my commuter breakdown. How much less the city would have to pay to expand roads and perform road maintenance, how much less citizens would have to spend on motorized personal transport, how much less the fire department would have to respond to accidents, how much less insurance companies would have to pay for their less obese, better fit clients, how much less time Elk Grovians would have to sit in congestion when they did drive...