Car-Related Costs Higher in Distant Suburbs, Study Finds

The costs of driving a car rise dramatically, the farther you get from Southern California’s urban cores and may partially offset the lower housing costs of the distant suburbs, according to a new study released Thursday.

A survey, billed as the first to compare automobile costs in different cities, found that people who live near shopping areas, jobs and good public transportation in Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties spent $2,000 to $4,000 less than the average.

The study showed, for example, that some areas of Los Angeles average less than one car per household, indicating that large numbers of people depend on public transportation, while some communities in the region average nearly four cars per household.

Researchers for the Washington, D.C.-based Surface Transportation Policy Project and Chicago’s Center for Neighborhood Technology conducted the study.

The researchers are advocates of growth and environmental policies aimed at reducing urban sprawl. They draw their statistics from a variety of conventional federal and regional data collection agencies.

The region’s lowest annual auto costs per household were in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Long Beach, Glendale and Pasadena, where households spent $3,200 to $5,000 a year on cars.

According to the study, some households in the Antelope Valley spent the most--$7,600 to $12,300 a year.

Households in Newhall, Oxnard, Camarillo, Irvine and San Bernardino were also on the high end, spending $7,400 to $10,000 annually on cars.

City officials accepted some of the study’s findings but challenged the notion that increased driving costs offset the significantly lower housing prices in distant suburbs.

“We are probably the most affordable area in Southern California, and people are willing to make the commute to live here,” said San Bernardino spokeswoman June Durr. She cited a survey showing that the average cost of a three-bedroom home in San Bernardino is $90,000.

Durr said a major goal of the city administration is to spur business expansion so that more residents can find well-paying jobs at home and avoid higher commuting costs.

In Palmdale, City Manager Bob Toone conceded that the wide open spaces of the Antelope Valley contribute to transportation costs.

But although they might offset some of the savings on home purchases, he said, it is hardly enough to deter buyers.

“The average house up here is selling for $120,000. What is it in Los Angeles? $350,000? You have to buy a lot of gas to make up for that difference,” Toone said.

Annual household expenditures on transportation were calculated by combining research data on the cost of vehicle purchases, car-related expenses such as insurance and repairs, and money spent on public transportation.

In Southern California the study found that transportation expenditures ranked second in a typical family’s budget, behind housing and ahead of food.

“The amount of money we spend on transportation has been increasing dramatically,” said Gloria Ohland, with the Los Angeles office of the Surface Transportation Policy Project. “People constantly talk about the cost of housing, comparing prices from one community to another. We are doing that with cars.”

Ohland’s organization is a chief supporter of a federal program offering mortgage breaks to home buyers who can show that they will save significantly on transportation costs if they buy houses close to public transit or their jobs.

Called “location-efficient mortgages,” the financial instruments have had limited success in the Los Angeles area.

Using a complex statistical formula, Ohland’s group calculated the average amount households could save by relying less on cars.

Ventura County’s 10 cities, from Thousand Oaks to Ojai, all ranked in the bottom two-thirds among Southern California cities in such projected savings, based on research released with the study.

But driving costs can vary widely in the county. Living in the neighborhoods along U.S. 101 in Camarillo, for example, costs about $8,155 more in driving expenses than in more walkable downtown Ventura, the study found.

Bill Fulton, president of the Ventura-based Solimar Research Group, which studies metropolitan growth, said Ventura County’s rankings are contingent on three factors: how compactly built the cities are, how close homes are to jobs and shopping and a city’s overall wealth.

He said it’s not surprising that poorer communities such as Santa Paula, Oxnard and Ventura show more projected transportation cost savings than affluent communities such as Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, where families usually have at least two cars and are able to drive as much as they please.

“The rankings reward poverty in a sense, because poor people can’t afford cars and they take the bus,” Fulton said.

He explained Camarillo and Ojai’s high driving costs by saying those cities are true suburbs--affluent communities far from jobs. Although Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley are wealthy, they are much closer to jobs in the San Fernando Valley and other parts of Los Angeles, he said.

Another part of the study found that the L.A. metropolitan area--defined in this case as Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange counties--ranked 15th nationally in percentage of expenditures devoted to transportation overall, with households shelling out an average of $7,224 in 1997 and 1998.

The national survey found that people in the Houston-Galveston-Brazoria region of Texas spent the most during the two-year period, $8,840, followed by Atlanta, $8,513, and Dallas-Fort Worth, $8,717.

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Times correspondent Jenifer Ragland in Ventura County contributed to this story.

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The Cost of Driving

A national transportation study found that suburban residents spend more on gas and vehicle maintenance and drive greater distances running errands than drivers in older, urban areas.

Source: Surface Transportation Policy Project