How Google’s Driving Costs Misses the Train

A fun critique of the estimated driving costs that you get from Google Maps, from Alex Steffen.  The costs of driving are largely (mostly?) systemic, and external to the individual, and predicated on an assumption of car ownership, and a mile-for-mile interchangeability between driving trips and walking/biking/transit trips, which is empirically wrong.  People who don’t rely on cars for transportation do the same things in far fewer miles (3 to 9 times fewer, depending on the urban fabric they are embedded within).