Prof. Ragaei El Mallakh’s Jan. 20 letter criticizes William Safire’s proposal to increase gasoline taxes as contradicting Mr. Safire’s “free-market approach.”

However,  an analysis of direct governmental subsidies to the automobile reveals that most state and local governments would have to raise gasoline taxes by at least 40 cents a gallon to cover the costs of police and fire department services to the automobile, the very expensive trains necessitated by all that concrete surface, the elongation of sewer, water and public lighting systems, etc.

In most suburban communities, at least 40 percent of police work is directly related to automobiles, as is one-sixth of fire department runs – prying people out of wrecks, washing down the pavement after a wreck, etc. None of this is covered by gasoline or weight taxes.

The cost of drainage is significantly increased by the roads and parking lots required for the automobile – peak storm-water flow can be increased by as much as 10 times by paving terrain that previously held storm water or released it slowly. Drain construction is usually about 40 percent of the cost of road building. Most drains are financed out of the local property tax. Occasionally, the Army Corps of Engineers has to solve downstream flooding problems caused by too much pavement in a river watershed.

The cost of constructing sanitary sewers is twice as high in the automobile-oriented suburb as it is in a transit-oriented urban community. This is because automobiles require everything to be spread out. Some suburban communities devote as much as 4,000 square feet of paved road and parking surface to each automobile.

Even the total cost of roads is not paid out of gasoline and weight taxes. Most local governments need to finance road maintenance and repairs out of general revenues. Some have allowed them to deteriorate.

Harder to measure, but nonetheless real, are the costs to society of:

• Longer food chains as farms on the metropolitan fringe are displaced by sprawl.

• Structural unemployment because new jobs in suburbia are inaccessible to job seekers without automobiles.

• Premature obsolescence of street-car-era neighborhoods whose compactness cannot accommodate automobiles.

• The oil-crunch-induced world-wide stagflation [of the mid-1980s], caused in part by a fourfold increase in U.S. oil imports in the nine years after domestic oil extraction peaked in 1970. (This was just a preview of the turn-of-the-century crunch when world oil extraction starts its decline. Oil extraction in the Soviet Union, the world’s largest extractor, is already declining.)

 A “free-market approach” to automobilization would’ve made for a different world.

JAMES A. BUSH

Detroit, Jan. 25, 1985.