The Inner Monologue

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There’s a tidy, seductive meme making the rounds again:
Most Americans would be better off selling their car, using ride-sharing for commuting, and renting cars for longer trips.

It feels modern. Efficient. Environmentally enlightened. The kind of advice that plays well in a tweet, a podcast clip, or a consultancy slide deck.

It is also—outside of dense urban cores—mostly wrong.

Not wrong in a philosophical sense. Wrong in the arithmetic sense. The unforgiving, boring, spreadsheet sense.

The Meme’s Core Claim

The argument usually goes something like this:

• Cars are expensive when you include depreciation, insurance, fuel, maintenance, and parking
• Ride-sharing lets you pay “only when you use it”
• Rental cars are cheaper for infrequent long trips
• Therefore, most Americans would save money by ditching ownership entirely

This logic works beautifully—if you quietly assume most Americans live in Manhattan, Boston, or downtown San Francisco.

They don’t.

Suburban Reality, Not Urban Fantasy

A typical suburban worker—meaning the majority of American commuters—drives something like 12,000–18,000 miles per year. Many commute 10–20 miles each way, five days a week, plus errands, family obligations, and weekend trips.

Take a very ordinary example:

• 13 miles each way
• 26 miles per workday
• 240 workdays per year
• 6,240 miles per year just to get to work

That’s not extreme. That’s normal.

Now apply the meme’s advice.

What Ride-Sharing Actually Costs

In real suburban markets—once you include base fare, per-mile charges, per-minute charges, booking fees, and occasional surge pricing—ride-sharing averages about:

$2.00–$3.00 per mile

Sometimes less. Often more. Rarely sustainably lower.

For a 6,240-mile commute, that works out to:

• $12,500 per year (optimistic)
• $15,600 per year (realistic)
• $18,700 per year (traffic, surge, bad luck)

That’s just commuting. No groceries. No kids. No dentist. No “I forgot something.”

But What About Parking?

Ah yes—the favorite counterpunch.

“Parking is expensive,” the meme says. “You’re forgetting parking.”

Let’s include it.

Say parking costs $250 per month, or $3,000 per year—which is genuinely painful, but not unheard of.

Now compare.

Driving Yourself (With Parking)

All-in cost of driving—fuel, maintenance, depreciation, insurance—often lands around:

$0.50–$0.75 per mile

For 6,240 commute miles:

• $3,100–$4,700 driving costs
• +$3,000 parking

Total: ~$6,000–$8,000 per year

Ride-Sharing Instead

• $12,500–$18,700 per year

Even with expensive parking, ride-sharing is still roughly 2–3× more expensive than owning and driving a car for commuting alone.

The math doesn’t wobble. It doesn’t depend on ideology. It just sits there.

Where the Meme Quietly Cheats

The meme survives by quietly shifting contexts mid-sentence.

It starts by criticizing car ownership writ large—including suburban lifestyles, family obligations, and regional sprawl—then switches to urban usage assumptions when doing the math.

That bait-and-switch is doing a lot of work.

Ride-sharing makes sense when:

• You live in a dense city
• You drive very few miles per year
• You can walk, bike, or take transit for most trips
• Parking is brutally expensive
• You don’t need spontaneous mobility

That describes a minority of Americans.

For the median American household, especially outside city cores, ride-sharing is not a cost-saving replacement for a car. It’s a premium service masquerading as a frugal hack.

Rental Cars Don’t Save the Meme Either

The “just rent for long trips” add-on doesn’t rescue the argument.

Rental cars:

• Require planning
• Add friction
• Often cost $70–$120/day all-in
• Still require getting to the rental location

They work well for vacations. They do not replace daily, flexible mobility.

What This Meme Is Really About

This isn’t actually a transportation argument. It’s a values argument dressed up as math.

The meme reflects a desire for:

• Fewer cars
• Denser living
• Lower emissions
• Less sprawl
• A more European or urban future

Those may be worthy goals.

But you don’t get there by lying about the numbers.

The Honest Version

A truthful version of the recommendation would read something like this:

If you live in a dense urban area, drive very little, and can structure your life around walking, biking, and transit, you may save money by not owning a car and using ride-sharing occasionally.

That’s not a meme. It doesn’t fit in a tweet. It doesn’t feel revolutionary.

But it’s real.

Cars Are Expensive—Ride-Sharing Is More So

Yes, cars cost money. They always have.

But pretending ride-sharing is a universally cheaper alternative is like claiming restaurants are cheaper than groceries if you never cook.

It works—right up until you actually try to live that way.

For most Americans, the car isn’t an indulgence. It’s infrastructure. And replacing infrastructure with premium on-demand services is not frugality—it’s outsourcing at luxury rates.

The meme sounds smart.

The spreadsheet says otherwise.

And until the spreadsheet changes, the advice shouldn’t.