I think, however, that if you compared vehicle sales of the last three months with 2006 that you’d find that the average MPG of cars to be higher now. Perhaps it’s just (another) media fiction but there were reports of SUVs becoming forlorn on the lots.
Given the higher population density wouldn’t you expect the MPG of European cars to be lower than American cars? Shorter drives should mean that it’s easier to afford a gas-guzzler. However, the opposite is true: European cars get much better mileage (or kilometerage, if you will) on average.
I don’t dispute that at all. Of course the changing price of oil will affect consumer behavior. No one doubts that. I pointed out in my first message that gas consumption has been dropping fairly steadily in the U.S. as oil prices have risen.
What I’m arguing is the assertion that if the U.S. had always had high gas prices, it would look like Europe - that this would be a powerful enough force for us to radically alter our infrastructure and cities and kick off the widespread adoption of mass transit and kill the evil suburbs.
We spend 4-6% of our GDP on energy. Our societal organization just isn’t driven by energy prices. No one decides to locate a city closer to another one just so it will be cheap to travel there. They locate the city where it can do the most good, and energy costs are just a small part of the equation.
Gas guzzlers are either big vehicles which suffer all the problems I mentioned, or very fast sports cars, which Europe does buy in large numbers.
Cars evolved differently in Europe to be sure. But they evolved under pressure from many different factors. Roads are smaller, parking space more expensive, congestion greater. So cars are small. Once you set the parameter on car size to ‘small’, you either get good gas mileage or high speed. High speed is not desired by everyone and not that usable in congested cities either. So the cars evolved to just be really nice. High quality materials, good engineering. Good fuel economy is pretty much an unavoidable consequence of the environment in which the cars operate.
In the U.S., cars travel longer distances, at higher speds, over poorer roads in many cases. They’ve evolved to be big, powerful, and heavy. Cheap gas certainly helps.
But what you’re not getting is that the relationship between mileage and the infrastructure may be backwards: Europe didn’t get tightly packed cities and efficient mass transit because gas was expensive. The tightly packed cities and high population density drove the development of smaller cars and stimulated the development of mass transit. The small cars part of it is a side effect.
You didn’t get my reference to Gimlidid you. Well it happened a long time ago.
Sam, if you reread the quoted passage you referenced you’ll note that I acknowledged the full tax of 7.2 cents per liter in four years and dimissed it. Seems to me you’ve got your gallons and liters mixed up and to add to the confusion you’ve erroneously implied that the tax is percentage based. It isn’t. The 30 percent I assume you derived by multipling and rounding off 7.2 times 4 .
Well the incident was initiated by a confusion over liters and gallons during the fill up of fuel, and I thought it would be amusing for you to make the connection
I agree that high energy prices have little–if anything–to do with population density; Europe just has a lot of people packed in a relatively small area. However I disagree that Europe’s high density is the reason for their high MPG cars. For example, density wouldn’t explain the higher percentage of diesel vehicles compared to the US. Coupled with the changing habits of US car buyers in the last few months I think it’s fairly certain that the high fuel prices in Europe have resulted in much higher fuel efficiency. That’s what the OP is pointing at.
The low percentage of diesel vehicles is the result of far more stringent EPA standards for particulate emissions, which until recently made it very difficult to build diesel cars and sell them in the U.S.
But there’s no question that people will see more efficient cars if gas costs more. That’s a no-brainer. I even said that in an earlier message - that Canada tends to choose slightly smaller cars than the U.S. even though demographically and geographically we’re quite similar. The difference is that we have higher gas prices. But the arguments being made before were much more sweeping than that - that higher gas prices would cause a transformational effect in society itself, and Europe was held out as an example of how high gas prices had caused cities to organize more efficiently and for mass transit to be more effective.