This morning, after dropping my own car at its mechanic for a regular check-up, I walked the mile back home, against commuter traffic.
What I found startled me. The roads are still mobbed. By my count 9 in 10 cars carried just a driver. Many were still SUVs and other low-mileage vehicles. With prices over $4/gallon, most people have not changed their habits at all.
Gas prices aren’t high enough.
I know there are people who insist they’ll give up their SUVs when you pry them from their cold, dead hands. I don’t expect everyone to car-pool, or take mass transit to work. But the freeways around Atlanta were still jammed this morning, and traffic accidents meant it took a full hour to drive from the exurbs into the I-285 Perimeter, at a 10 mph crawl.
Had we not let energy prices fall as they did at the end of the last
decade (I clearly remember paying 85 cents a gallon in the late 1990s)
the recent spike might not have happened. Demand would have been lower,
and supply disruptions would not have mattered so much. Worse, they
created ingrained habits of waste that take a lot of money to do away
with.
But you would think $4/gallon would be an incentive. If your car gets
15 mph and your commute is 30 miles each way, you’re paying $1oo/week
to get back-and-forth to work now, assuming you don’t get caught in
traffic on one or more of those commutes.
In economics we call that an incentive. Plop someone in beside you and
you save nearly half that cost, losing some in getting between their
building and yours, their house and yours. Plop in two people and the
savings are at least 60%. That could be $60 more each week in your
pocket, even without changing cars. Use their compact car for the
commute instead and the savings are even greater.
There are lots of simple ways for you to increase your gas mileage,
starting with keeping your tires inflated, your engine maintained, and
not driving like a bat-out-of-hell. Maybe that’s $5/week. It adds up.
And what about the house? Is it insulated as well as it can be? Can you
check? You can now save a lot more money with insulation than you could
before.
What most people are doing, so far, is saving a bit around the margins.
They’re cutting other things besides gas. They’re not going out, not
going on vacation. The roads around Atlanta are not nearly as crowded
on the weekends as they were. The problem is that this becomes a drag on the
economy, causing a cascade of unemployment.
We’re not yet talking about doing some harder things, like moving
closer to work. A smaller house closer to town not only saves gas, but
time. I’ll bet I use one-fourth the gas living in Intown Atlanta as people who
choose to live out in Covington and drive downtown.
Don’t want to move? Press for telecommuting. Or here’s something sprawl
lovers will love. Satellite offices. Increase telecommuting and use of
satellite offices and you take millions of cars off every road, every
day. That’s money you could use on a new big-screen TV. Or a nice
artery-clogging steak.
Why aren’t we doing this? Why aren’t we taking high gas prices as the opportunity they are?
I don’t know. But it all tells me prices are still too low.
