Tag Archives: car clowns

checking in with Mr. Money Mustache

Leave a reply

I first became aware of Mr. Money Mustache thanks to his legendary Car Clown post, which I highly recommend to everyone. I’ve almost certainly posted about it before, but since it is legendary here is a taste:

Yet these intra-city trips are commonplace. When I see a car ease into a parking spot, I always run to assist the driver with getting out into their wheelchair, but I am stunned to find that they usually have working legs after all! People drive to the school to pick up and drop off kids. To the grocery store. To the restaurants. To the gym. To each other’s houses. Back and forth on Main Street to show off. Every road sees plenty of cars and personal trucks, some of them in dangerous numbers. And inside, every vehicle is equipped with a La-Z-boy recliner, upon which a tragic clown sits, pushing the soft-touch pedals, turning the power-assisted wheel, and talking on some sort of Clownophone.

The clowns have to wait in line when the traffic light turns red. They have to bumble though the parking lots and wait for each other to back out of parking spaces, because their machines are so bulky that two cannot pass each other in a space less than 20 feet wide. They line up at special events and fight for places to park on the streets. Then they line up at the gas station and the car wash and the oil change shop. And the machines make them fatter and poorer every time they use them.

And we haven’t even addressed the most clown-like invention of them all: the drive-through (or ‘drive-thru’ as it they spell it here, which is suitable because “thru” is not even a word, just as drive-through services should not exist). The clowns actually sit for several minutes in a self-imposed traffic jam, engines idling, just so somebody can hand them some shit through the window of their car!

I am 1000% on board with car-dependence being a root cause of many social, environmental, and health problems plaguing U.S. cities. Now, his proposed remedy for Car Clown-ism was for people to ride bicycles on public streets. In my opinion, riding bicycles on most public streets in the United States is way too risky. I don’t blame the (potential, frequent) victims, the riders themselves, for this. I blame cowardly engineers, politicians, and public officials who cling to 50-years-outdated street designs when modern safe designs are well known. And to a lesser extent poor construction, maintenance, and enforcement.

Anyway, I chose to ditch my car and live in a walkable community starting in 2004 and have never looked back. I estimate it has saved me $300-700 a month every month since then, which I have either saved (in B.C. – before children) or spent on other things (children, mostly). And I have very few regrets, other than maybe spending less time in nature than I might have liked, but I don’t think living in a car-dependent suburb would have changed that much.

Back then (April 2013), MMM was posting up a storm, with 10 posts or so a month. His post this month (September 2026) is his first since April, so the heyday of the blog has past, but I will always have fond memories. Whether I agreed with every single thing or not, it was an entertaining, inspiring blog. Thanks MMM!

Culdesac Tempe

This is basically just a real estate development with no parking. It’s on a light rail line, and the main idea seems to be to embrace micromobility (bikes, scooters, autonomous taxis) for people to get around. It doesn’t seem hugely pathbreaking to me, but I think what might make it seem pathbreaking to suburban Americans is that the bikes, scooters, human beings, and cars are not in conflict with each other. This is so simple, and yet so pathbreaking. It’s also pathbreaking because it’s in greater Phoenix. We assume this can’t be done in American cities because when we choose to devote most of our space to car maneuvering and car storage, there is not also room for the bikes, scooters, and human beings.

what Americans pay for their cars

I am not a member of the 1% by any means, but one key to my personal financial stability has been not owning a car for the last 21 years. People shell out enormous amounts of their income to buy, lease, maintain, repair, replace, and park personal vehicles. And that doesn’t count what you are paying in terms of your home value, property taxes, and gas taxes to maintain all that car focused infrastructure out there. Nor does it count injuries and deaths due to crashes (well, to some extent you pay for that through your car insurance and health insurance), and certainly not the costs of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes due to the opportunity cost of driving relative to spending that same time on some form of physical activity. Finally, people and nature are paying the costs in terms of air and water pollution and heat in more abstract ways (pain, death, knowing ecosystems are being destroyed) if not in dollars.

And of course, for many communities people choose to live in, that personal vehicle is absolutely necessary to get to jobs, school, and put food on the table. I’m just saying where you choose to live is a choice, at least in the longer term. If you want to live in a less car dependent community, you may not be able to change your situation overnight but you could set a goal to change your situation say within 3-5 years. Anyway…

This Jacobin article (which is an unapologetic socialist magazine?) has some interesting facts and figures on what Americans are spending on their private cars.

The country just crossed over a critical threshold last month: 5.1 percent of car owners are at least ninety days delinquent on their loans. This is almost touching the record high of 5.3 percent, reached during the nadir of the Great Recession in 2010. Young people are unsurprisingly hardest hit, with 7.5 percent of car-owning Gen Zers delinquent. The trend for all is upward for the past eight quarters — and expected to continue.

Auto insurance rates are up 56 percent in the past five years; car repossessions are also at post-Recession highs, at 1.73 million so far this year; and car repair costs popped 32 percent in the past two years alone, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s new tariffs. In 2023, a Federal Reserve Bank survey found that car repairs won out over rent, mortgage, health care, and food as the cost that Americans were most concerned about.

Consumers have responded to all this pressure by extending the terms of their loans to decrease their average monthly payments. Yet interest rates have kept rising. The average American is forking over between $550 and $750 a month on their car note, a number that used to be a monthly rent a decade prior. Today 20 percent of all newly originated car notes are over $1,000 a month, and you’d be mistaken to think that only the top income quintile is represented in that number.

$500-1000 per month is a lot of money, and I think that is just the loan payment.