Feh…that must be according to Metropolitan Statistical Area. I live in the MSA of Buffalo-Niagara Falls, in a town of about 2,000. Technically I live in an “urban” area, but one would be hard-pressed to call it that in reality.
No bus comes within a half-mile of here, and the one that does comes and goes about three times a day. Even when I lived in a fairly built-up area near LA, it was impossible to find public transport to work.
I lived in England for seven years, never owning or even thinking of owning a car, and I never had a problem getting anywhere. Believe me, that would be unthinkable back here in the States.
Would you say that a 2000-mile car journey is typical, or atypical, for a vacation?
I say it’s highly atypical. To the extreme, actually, and not bearing at all of the point I was making.
I get your point: you don’t want to pay any more. At the same time, you don’t give my point credit: hard decisions are going to have to be made, and they only get harder as time passes. Alternately, suggest an alternative for replacing or greatly reducing the fossil transportation economy that does not involve you paying any more.
That would have been about what our family holidays involved when I was a kid - either to relatives in Ireland, or camping in France; either way 300-500 miles there and the same back, plus two weeks of driving around exploring etc etc.
And lots of the urban areas built after WWII have little to no decent public transportation. I challenge anyone to come to Albuquerque and get around just using the bus system for normal life; getting to work, shopping, etc. It can’t be done.
Plenty of public transportation here. Before that I lived in Boston and same thing.
But what I really came in this thread was to report that gas prices on the Bronx/Yonkers border tonight were 2.29 for regular to 2.49 for hi-test. FWIW.
Yeah, and you’re in New York. Massive parts of the infrastructure were built before cars were really around and definitely before the boom and sprawl seen after WWII. Many Western cities boomed after WWII and were designed for cars. Combine that with the ability to go 60 or more miles with absolutely nothing in-between cities or towns.
Sprawl and the designing of everything around cars is the real problem. In many cases, neighborhoods are designed with nothing but houses now. Good urban planning would place homes near jobs, mixing residential and commercial areas as much as posible, to allow people to walk and bike where they need to go. There are test cities being built in the US where this is being demonstrated, everything works smoother.
There needs to be a way to allow people to get equity on apartments. This would kill one of the major economic reasons for the sprawl: the huge tax breaks and savings you get in a house versus an apartment where you are throwing your money away. Everybody should be able to own the space they are living in. We shouldn’t still have feudal lords owning the land with the peasants paying for the priveledge of living there with nothing to gain for it. People living closer to work either wouldn’t need to drive as far, or could more easily use public transportation, whihc would be more efficient with more people living closer.
Yes, you’re right, that’s unfair. Instead we’ll fuck over the urbanized 4/5ths of the population by continuing to encourage the trend toward ever-larger SUVs. I figure that by around 2010 Ford may have come up with a truck big enough to make houses unnecessary; you can park it outside your workplace and save yourself the drive.
It will probably be called something beginning with an E. Earthshaker, possibly.
Why should gas prices be more in line with the rest of the world? Oh, well, it just might get us to stop using more oil per year than the next 15 nations combined; if that doesn’t matter to you, and the extra $1.85 makes more of a difference in your life than, say, a breathable atmosphere, then please disregard.
I live about 25 miles from work right now, and I can’t afford to move closer. Rents are far too expensive for what I earn if I did move closer, and there is no housing at all within a couple of miles of my work.
It’s pretty normal for my family and other folks I know to put between 2000 and 3000 miles on their vacationing for a week. There’s the trip to your destination, the trip back home, and then all the running around you do while you’re at your destination that comes into it. The miles rack up fast.
Uh, no, you obviously don’t get my point. I cannot afford to keep on paying more and more at the gas pump when gas prices are on their way to doubling and my salary’s gone up by only 2% in the same amount of time. Whether I want to or not is irrelevant, because it’s being priced out of my range of possibility.
Car manufacturers (like Toyota) are already researching and developing ways to reduce the amount of fossil fuels used. They were doing this without the price of a gallon of gasoline being over 2$, and so far as I know, they’re doing it without the government robbing me blind to pay for it.
But those are long term solutions that do nothing to keep people like myself able to go to work every day now. We should be using our oil reserves to keep people moving while other technologies get developed. However, you seem to think that increasing the price of gasoline indefinitely and adding on another $2.50 in taxes to it would be lovely, since it would punish those people who ‘use too much gas’ in your opinion and fund the kind of research you want.
It would put me out of a job because I’d no longer be able to afford to go to work. Why are you so on about forcing every driver in America, whether they can afford it or not, to pay for research you want funded?
That’s great for new cities. It’s really not going to help people where I live. What are you going to do, come in and bulldoze their homes and rebuild it the ‘new’ way? The people who live here already have jobs, and are already traveling to them. I don’t really see any way to do this to my neighborhood.
Apartments are OK, but they don’t even compare to a house for having personal space and privacy. Not hearing your neighbors walking around on the floor above you, having your own yard or patio or deck for relaxation, these things are rare with apartments. Hell, I wouldn’t want to own an apartment.
I guess it could be economically efficent, but at what other costs? What about people who would be miserable in the shoebox lifestyle? Quite honestly, aside from not being able to afford living closer to work, I wouldn’t want to. The closer I am to work in my free time, the less it feels like free time.
How surprising that a country with a population as large as the US uses more fuel that countries with much tinier populations. Nice of you to only give the overall usage and ignore the size of population.
Does it matter to you at all that if we continue to increase the price of gas there will be people who cannot afford to work because they can’t buy the gas to get them there? What are you going to tell them when they have a choice between buying food for a week or gas for a week?
As for breathable air, anything with pollen in it is not breathable for me, so I’d rather have some smog. (That was a joke, in case you didn’t get it, but it’s true that I can’t breathe ‘fresh’ air with all that pollen and shit in it.)
I’m sorta in the same situation as catsix. I love where I live. 2 acres, best views on the planet. I’ve been improving the house for about 10 years. Lots of sweat and blood. It’s worth oh, about $200,000.
I drive 25 miles to work. I just checked the paper. The cheapest house in the town I work in is listed at $400,000.
There’s a ONE bedroom condo available for $168,000. No thanks, couldn’t stand living in a condo anyway.
Last time I checked, gas prices in Canada were about 80 cents/Litre. That converts to… 3.20 a gallon, more or less. Even growing up gas was, at its cheapest, about $2.40/gallon. (Don’t bother with the whole exchange rate thing. As far as I can tell after living in the US for a year, most consumables in this country are more expensive than in Canada on a penny-to-penny level)
So, if you’re bitching about high gas prices, you’ve got a hell of a long way to go. And gas prices will only rise, because oil pumping production is expected to hit a peak in the next 5 years and then decline. And did I forget to mention that China is rapidly consuming more gasoline than ever before, and its rate of consumption is rising?
The Suburban American Lifestyle is about to die after a tumultuous century of existence, unless another easy fuel source (not hydrogen, because the main source is natural gas) comes about.
Until then, suck it up. You’ll either have to move into the city like evolution intended, or do without frivolities like that DVD Player.
I work 12 hour shifts. I carpool to work. It takes us anywhere from 2 to 3 1/2 hours to make the distance by car. (Much less on the return trip)
Although the trip is all through urban areas, public transportation is NOT an option. Oh, how I wish it were. It would be possible to get there by a combination of trains and/or buses, but that would literally add 2 hours each way to the commute (minimum, 5 buses, 2 transit districts).
I’m looking for a job closer to home, but it ain’t looking good. These prices are hurting.
I read the OP and thought, this guy’s not too bright.
The US should raise taxes. You seem to have this weird idea that oil is never going to run out, and that it’s not harming the environment. I’ve got news: OIL IS GOING TO RUN OUT AND IT IS HARMING THE ENVIRONMENT
What are you going to do when there’s no oil left? You wont’ be able to go to work then either! So how about a raise of prices now, then when it does run out, you’ll have alternatives. And youwill be able to get to work. But no, you’re too busy trying to shove the burden onto someone else, your children and your children’s children, and make excuses.
Are you lobbying about the lack of public transport? No. For you it’s all oil oil oil. It’s not “Hey, Mr. Bush, how about an increase on public tranport availability?” It’s “Hey Mr Bush, how about you lower the tax on petrol and legalize a very harmful substance?”
The moment you people realise the shit you got yourself into, it’s going to be too late.
I don’t think anyone can criticize you on this. Car pooling is a good idea. Because it’s better to have a five seater car with 5 people in it, then have a 30 seater bus with 5 people in it.
The horrible thing is, 5 seater car, one or two people. That’s not what it was designed for. So I sit on the bus of a morning, being held up by a 100 meter line of cars, holding only 40 people, while I sit in a 8 meter long bus holding 40 people.
But whatever you do, don’t carpool in a SUV
UK prices are £4.50 a gallon. In real terms, that’s twice as big as it was 10 years ago. Our society hasn’t collapsed. Those of you arguing that the US society is fundamentally different to the UK are missing the point, confusing cause and effect. We know that public transport is better in Europe. You need to think about why that is! Could it be, possibly, that high petrol prices make public transport a more economically viable alternative?
Your society has evolved in the last 50 years to be critically dependent on the car. You can either artifically keep oil prices down and consume ever greater quantities of it until, finally, it runs out and you’re all absolutely fucked. Or you can seek to change your society to make it less dependent on the car, whilst simultaneously researching alternative fuel sources. As a pleasant bonus, this will also reduce emissions and help stop the planet becoming so much junk.
You put a lot of faith in these “solutions” that are being developed by carmakers. But people already have the option to buy high-efficency vehicles, they just choose not to. The CRX HF got 59 mpg in the 1980’s for crying out loud - better than almost all of the cars for sale in the US, regardless of technology. If the market wanted that, they’d still be for sale. What’s the current CAFE of cars actually sold…?
That works as long as the production curve is higher than the consumption curves. How long will that last, exactly? Plus, that completely and totally ignores the Middle East influence and foreign dependence and trade gap issues, the CO2 production issue, the resource consumption of something that can be used for other petrochemicals issue…
I didn’t say it would be “lovely”, nor did I say “indefinite”, nor did I say it was intended to “punish” people. Thus, these would appear to be mischaracterizations.
Consumption-based gasoline taxes are nothing new. Everyone in America can already claim that they are forced against their will to fund some program or another.
I made a rant here, being hyperbolic about $2.50/gallon in taxes, and I admitted it was a rant. I also said up above:
I don’t know why you are taking such offense at my posts. Do you think you really need to get so upset with me?
