"Something's gotta give"

Thinking on the ol’ “situation” here in god’s green Philadelphia, I can’t help but think: is anyone happy?

I’m pretty sure no one is out here thinking “boy gee golly, I sure think we got a good system here.” Right?

But there’s also not much in the way of positive change in any direction. That’s not to knock all the genuinely brilliant work that Philly Bike Action and the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia have done—quite the contrary! I’m flabbergasted by the slow, corpse-like progress the city seems to make despite the incredible efforts of those groups.

When you see crash after crash after crash after crash, after politicking after politicking after politicking after politicking, it’s hard to still feel optimistic.

And so, my schtick here becomes: “something’s gotta give” is the closest phrase I’ve seen to accurately describe the feeling around transportation and safety in the city.

And yet, it really feels like something has already given: hundreds, thousands of lives. On top of asthma, injury, and just general cost and quality of living.

The average cost of owning a car in the United States hit $11,577 a year in 2025. That’s gas, insurance, maintenance, depreciation, financing—the whole pile. Nearly a thousand bucks a month just for a hunk of metal to make your street looks worse.

In Philadelphia specifically, car insurance premiums have risen 70% since 2014. Seventy percent! That’s insane. Like you can’t shrinkflate your way to 70%. That’s how the insurance companies say “y’all are driving like genuine, statistical psychopaths” politely. The average Philly driver now pays around $2,782 a year just for the privilege of having insurance—and that’s before you put gas in the tank or replace the brake pads or pay bridge tolls, parking, and medical bills for the lung cancer you’ve given yourself and your children.

And here’s a fun detail: Philly’s insurance rates have gone up twice as fast as the suburbs over the last decade. Twice. So the place where you’re most likely to need a car alternative is also the place where owning a car is getting the most expensive the fastest. That sucks.

Meanwhile, median home prices in Philly cracked $265,000 in early 2026—up 6% year-over-year. Rents aren’t exactly giving anyone a break either. And every time someone proposes new housing, the first question out of the crowd is still “where are they gonna park?”—which, as we’ve covered, is a tragically ill-informed question.

When you mandate parking, you make housing more expensive. When you make housing more expensive, people stretch further to cover rent. When they stretch further for rent, they can’t afford to live close to work. When they can’t live close to work, they need a car. When they need a car, they need insurance, gas, maintenance, and a parking spot. When they need a parking spot, someone demands the next building include a garage. And the next building costs more. And the rent goes up. And the car gets more expensive.

Something’s gotta give? Brother, something gave. It was your wallet, and my hope.

There’s this persistent idea that cars are the cheap option, the practical choice—as if it’s an investment in your ability to make money. To some extent, the logic holds: if you can’t get to work on time, you can’t make money. But if the money you’re making now needs to cover an extra $10k every year, is the car still a net positive? In a city where the median income is $36k before tax, that answer’s a hard no, fella.

But then we’re out here draining SEPTA funds while their trains are on fire, burning money on roads and cops that won’t police them, and acting like SEPTA’s just destined for failure. Why would you choose a future where you don’t drive, when all you’ve seen is SEPTA fail?

You drive because SEPTA’s bus frequency on your route is a joke. You drive because there’s no protected bike lane between your house and your kid’s school. You drive because the last time you waited for the 23 bus in January, it was 14 degrees and the shelter had no walls, roof, or general physical form. I get it. The alternatives aren’t good enough yet—and that’s a policy failure, not a personal one.

But the response to that failure can’t be “so let’s keep building for cars.” Because the car side of the equation is failing too, and frankly it’s failing worse. It’s just failing more quietly, one insurance premium hike and one $60 tank of gas at a time.

And one dead family, one asthmatic, one lung cancer, etc., at a time. Not great, Bob.

Think about what we’re actually doing here. Housing costs are crushing people. Car costs are crushing people. And our response, as a city, is to keep building the kind of infrastructure that requires both to be high.

Every surface lot we protect is housing we don’t build—which keeps rents up. Every parking mandate we slap on a new development adds $30,000-$60,000 per space to the construction cost—which gets passed to renters and buyers. Every lane we widen for cars instead of dedicating to buses is a transit investment we didn’t make, which keeps people car-dependent, which keeps traffic awful and keeps insurance companies charging whatever they want, because what are you gonna do, not drive?

This is the part that should make you furious. Not at cyclists. Not at bus lanes. At the system that has convinced you that spending $11,000 a year to move yourself around is normal, and that any alternative is radical.

You know what’s radical? Spending two thirds of your take-home pay on a car and an apartment, in a city with two subway lines and one of the oldest street grids in America, because we refuse to let anyone build a duplex without a two-car garage.

Every person who switches from driving to transit, biking, or walking saves themselves thousands of dollars a year. But they also save you money—because they’re one fewer claim in the insurance pool, one fewer car competing for your parking spot, one fewer vehicle wearing down the road your property taxes fix.

And every building that goes up without a parking mandate is cheaper to build, which means cheaper to rent, which means more people can afford to live close to where they work—which means fewer cars on the road, which means better traffic for the people who still drive.

We’ve been over this. The premise of this whole newsletter is that driving sucks because everyone has to drive. The economic version of that premise is just as true: driving is expensive because everyone has to drive. Insurance is expensive because the roads are dangerous because they’re overloaded with cars. (You know what’s never damaged a car by running into it? A pedestrian.) Housing is expensive because we waste buildable land on car storage. Gas is expensive because demand stays artificially high because we’ve designed a city with no viable alternative.

Cut any one of those threads and the whole knot loosens.

Stop asking “where are they gonna park?” and start asking “why does everyone have to drive?”

Stop treating $2,782 a year in car insurance like it’s weather—like it just happens to you. It happens because of choices. Policy choices. Zoning choices. Infrastructure choices. And those choices can change.

Demand better transit funding. Support housing without parking mandates. Back protected bike infrastructure that gives your neighbors a real option. Not because you personally want to bike to work in February—but because every neighbor who does is saving you money, saving you time, and saving you a parking headache.

The system we’ve built is bleeding people dry from both ends—housing and transportation—and then asking us to be grateful. Cars and low prices don’t mix. They never have. We just spent fifty years pretending they did.

Let’s make driving suck less.