Costs and Sevices of Cars

I enjoyed our class discussion today, talking about something with which we all have some familiarity, cars. Our exercise included an analysis of the services that cars provide for us as well as the the costs associated with the widespread use of cars. I think that this is an important time to be thinking of these two sides of automobiles as we as a nation are poised to spend billions of dollars from the future to pay for our obsession with these vehicles. As we search for sustainable solutions to transportation, I think it would be prudent to seek to reduce all the costs associated with cars, rather than just focusing on addressing a couple of the big, more obvious problems. At this point in time we have the opportunity to tackle all of the interrelated issues centered around a car society. We do ourselves a disservice if we throw a huge amount of money at one aspect of the problem, while leaving the other high costs of automobiles to be addressed by future generations and future solutions. Here is our list of services and costs of cars in our culture:

Services
Transportation
Trade of goods
Privacy/Independence
Flexibility/Convenience
Enjoyment/Leisure
Shelter/controlled climate
Access to Employment
Jobs
Status
Storage
Community

Costs
Purchase cost
Upkeep costs: repair/maint./insurance/registration
Festering Cyst of Pollution: carbon emissions, particulate pollution, toxic chemicals
Accident danger
Enforcement of laws
Road rage
Road and infrastructure upkeep
Learning curve/technological obsolescence
Negative status symbol
Oil dependency
Fuel costs
Manufacturing pollution/energy use
Heat production/inefficiency
Community degradation
Noise pollution

Our current sexy car technologies at the car shows demonstrate proposals that address only a couple of the costs, oil dependency and some of the pollution factors. They don't work to resolve any of the other costs associated with cars. If we are going to pay immense amounts of money to address the energy costs, wouldn't it also be a good ideas to roll some of the other costs into that spending at well?