Building on a year of efforts to deregulate fuel-efficiency standards and cancel grants to build out transportation options, the Environmental Protection Agency repealed a critical finding that helped regulate emissions. While concerning, this is ultimately another uninspired move in a decades-long line of failed attempts to wring more savings out of cars.
The Trump administration has targeted transportation investments since day one, beginning with the issuance of Executive Order 14154: Unleashing American Energy. With the justification that the targeted projects and regulations are burdensome, ideologically motivated, and expensive, the administration has used this directive to outright cancel or hold up infrastructure funding for transit, walking, and biking projects, delay electrification projects, and, prominently, roll back efficiency standards.
Last week, in the greatest culmination of this effort yet, the Environmental Protection Agency repealed its endangerment finding. The finding, which had stood since 2009, determined that greenhouse gas pollution puts people at risk by worsening the impacts of climate change. As a result, greenhouse gases emitted from vehicles were considered harmful and should be regulated. The endangerment finding led to limits on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and helped spur technologies that help drivers avoid wasting gas (and gas money). The EPA now argues that repealing those very rules will reduce regulatory burdens on industry and lead to more than a trillion dollars in consumer savings.
While the EPA administrator is claiming credit for the action as the “Largest Deregulatory Action In US History,” it’s in line with what has happened at other federal agencies over the past year. The Freedom Means Affordable Cars initiative from USDOT, which kicked off in the fall, led to a major reduction of the CAFE fuel economy standards (though these standards have been de facto unenforceable since the penalties for breaking them were reduced to $0 following the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill”). Taking the administration’s headline claims for savings at face value (though their own official analysis says the move will increase consumers’ costs), they say the move could save consumers $1,000 off the price of a new car. Even if that assumption were true, cars still cost, on average, over $50,000 new and $25,000 used. $49k and even $24k still represent a massive amount of money to most households, and costs don’t stop with the sticker price. Insurance, maintenance, and gas all pile up, and unexpected but inevitable car crashes can potentially undo anybody’s best-laid financial plans. Cars are inherently expensive to own and operate, and with car-dependent infrastructure and land use, people do not have real alternatives.
We’ve spent years and billions chasing all kinds of savings for cars. It’s not working.
While the slogan Freedom Means Affordable Cars might be an apt mantra for this administration, it’s just another example of the United States’ bipartisan tradition of searching for the smallest savings for drivers, even when it does not save actual time or money.
Here’s an example: you might hear that congestion leads to huge, quantified costs for regional economies and on people’s wallets, and conversely, you might also hear about the enormous benefits assigned to expensive projects that would supposedly relieve that congestion. These costs and benefits are all based on the idea that there’s an opportunity cost to your time commuting. While time is certainly valuable, there’s a point where making public investment decisions based on time savings eventually fails to make sense. People don’t make career choices based on whether or not their job is 25 minutes or 27 minutes away, but engineers greenlight multi-billion-dollar highway projects using that logic. By assigning economic value to the theoretical seconds in time savings motorists might get from highway projects, and multiplying that across the thousands of commuters each day, every year, engineers come up with financial justifications for projects, all without having to consider how other alternatives might increase travelers’ real access to destinations.
The last 70 years of U.S. transportation policy have been about spending billions to try to fix traffic by shaving seconds off your commute, but in its singular focus on the mobility of cars, our investments have only served to ultimately waste the public’s time and money with projects that fail to meet their goals. Even if those time savings could result in economic productivity as it is sold, it remains impossible to improve congestion by expanding highway networks. In fact, despite using the latest, largest federal transportation bill to invest billions more into highway expansion, traffic congestion has continued to grow unabated to the worst it has ever been.
Thankfully, however, congestion is not everything. According to the University of Minnesota’s latest Access Across America study, access to jobs via all means of transportation actually increased in 2024, “despite the fact that congestion worsened in 47 of the top 50 largest urban areas,” demonstrating how just measuring congestion only tells half the story. The transformative highway investments that built this country and provided auto access to nearly all destinations have already been built, and they do their job of getting people where they need to go every day. But by chasing diminishing returns to reduce congestion, at enormous and increasing costs to build roads, we just play out the sunk cost fallacy. Instead, tracking performance for improved access to more affordable modes of transportation, like walking, biking, and transit, could help provide people with real opportunities to make the choice to save.
Despite USDOT and the EPA’s efforts over the past year, and the decades worth of attempts from state DOTs, millions of Americans will spend countless hours this year stuck in traffic, suffering the consequences of billions of dollars wasted on projects designed to wring marginal time savings in car-dependent infrastructure that has hit a point of diminishing returns. If people’s only reasonably option to get to work is to drive, they have no choice but to get a car—it does not matter how fast, marginally cheaper, or how fuel-efficient that car is.
Freedom means actual choices, not just affordable cars.
Real freedom is, and always will be, defined by one’s ability to make meaningful choices in their own life. Despite this, most people lack the basic freedom to determine how they get around in the United States, especially when compared to the array of options available in other places. Just about everyone needs a car to meet their daily needs in the United States, and the industries that sell vehicles, car insurance, gasoline, and repair services know this and charge accordingly.
Not everyone has the ability to own and drive a car. Up to a third (or more) of Americans are non-drivers, and if you’re not a non-driver today, odds are that you will be one day in the future. Thanks to the longstanding underinvestment in smart land-use and transportation options, the most affordable choices remain out of reach for most Americans. But making transportation investment decisions that reduce car ownership by even a fraction of a percent over the next two decades could save American households trillions in avoided car-related costs. Real savings—meaning real, avoided purchases—and real freedom might actually be realized when our limited funds are dedicated to transformative investments, like building out world-class transit, that would actually help save people money.
Header photo credit: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
The post Freedom means actual choices: You won’t get cheaper transportation if there’s a monopoly on mobility. appeared first on Transportation For America.
