http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/texts/energy_and_equity/energy_and_equity.html
"In his book 'Energy and Equity', Ivan Illich ... examines the efficiency of the American automobile. His conclusions are both amusing and horrifying. The average American male, he finds, spends approximately four of his sixteen working hours either driving his car, parking it and searching for it, or earning the money to make the payments on it, maintain it, and replace worn parts, buy gasoline and oil, and defray the costs of a driver's license, vehicle registration, and insurance. These sixteen hundred hours spent annually on behalf of the car enable to owner to drive an average of 7,500 miles, which works out to 4.7 miles per hour, regardless of individual driving speeds. The ramifications of this end-product analysis would fill a dozen books, but one thing is clear: the fast, luxurious, personal style of transportation offered by the automobile does not really liberate anyone from the true costs of travel. It merely provides an elaborate way of concealing some of the heavy payments that we make to maintain the illusion of an effortless life-style."
from "The Arrogance of Humanism" by David Ehrenfeld, 1978, pp. 60-61.
ENERGY AND EQUITY > IVAN ILLICH
I. THE ENERGY CRISIS
II. THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC
III. SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION
IV. NET TRANSFER OF LIFE-TIME
V. THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF ACCELERATION
VI. THE RADICAL MONOPOLY OF INDUSTRY
VII. THE ELUSIVE THRESHOLD
VIII. DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILITY
IX. DOMINANT VERSUS SUBSIDIARY MOTORS
X. UNDEREQUIPMENT, OVERDEVELOPMENT, AND MATURE TECHNOLOGY