you also have decent public transportation as an alternative
Gee whiz, you Yanks are so naive!
Most of the western world pays 6-8 bucks per gallon. *
And have you noticed something weird?–the world hasn’t come to an end.
The weird thing is that Americans have a fetish about gas prices. Any mention of the phrase “the price at the pump” sends politicians and the press into a frenzy, predicting imminent disaster and elections lost due to angry voters.
The price of gas is a problem that always gets blown up out of proportion.
Americans don’t mind paying $100 for a routine blood test, but they scream violently at paying an extra 50 cents for gas driving to the doctor’s office.
Jon Stewart once said on the Daily Show:
Unlike European cars, American cars all have lots of cup holders. Because you need a place to put your five-dollar frappacinos while you complain about your 2 dollar gas.
- (in this list prices are dollars per liter. You can multiply by 4 in your head to get approx price per gallon. Japan,France,Germany,Italy,etc…all pay more than $6. On a list of 140 countries, 101 have more expensive gas than the US)
Most of the western world (individually) would fit inside Texas, too. The western world has no freaking clue just how big this country really is. So yeah, we bitch about high gas prices, because we have to drive quite a long way for things, and there is no way to change that fact. We are too spread out, and mass transit can’t fix the problem. So gas prices mean a great deal to us.
<major snip>
Seriously, they are getting higher because we’ve succeeded in having the Chinese folks replace their bicycles with automobiles. Maybe we should replace our automobile trips with bicycle trips.
How long? Most Americans do 99% of their driving back and forth to work, maybe 40 minutes each direction. Just like the rest of the world.
Yes, America has massive fleets of big-rig trucks that burn gas driving millions of miles a year, transporting Chinese-made products to American cities.But the rest of world also pays for transporting Chinese-made products, and the total distance from China to , say, Houston is less than from China to Europe.
This is somewhat of an overstatement, AFAICT, although there is a kernel of truth to it. America is definitely much bigger and much more sparsely populated than most European countries (although not bigger than Europe as a whole, certainly).
But I don’t think it’s true that we absolutely need to drive as much as we do because we need to go so much farther. Sometimes we do, but not always. The Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey found that about one-quarter of all trips are less than 1 mile long, while 40% are under 2 miles and over half are less than 3 miles. Those are walkable or bikeable distances for most individuals, but the vast majority of even such short trips are made by car in the US these days.
So at least in a lot of cases, the problem isn’t that we can’t possibly use any mode of transportation except cars because we simply have too far to travel. Much of the time, the distance we’re traveling could be quite feasibly be covered by foot or on a bike. The trouble in those cases is that our infrastructure is almost totally geared towards automobile use; even a short trip requires a car if there are no usable sidewalks, bike-friendly roads or bike paths, etc., where you need to go.
Better infrastructure to support non-automobile modes of transportation (biking, walking, public transit) certainly wouldn’t eliminate the American need for cars, but it could significantly reduce it.
But, if I understand correctly, the only reason you pay such high prices for gasoline is because your government taxes the hell out of it. I don’t see the need for such punitive taxes for a necessity.
And your point about $5 coffee is well-taken, but at any time I can tell Starbucks to go to hell and not buy their coffee. I need gasoline, unless I want to sell my car and ride a donkey to work…
Well, there’s the argument that they serve to make automobile users bear a fairer proportion of the real costs of our gasoline dependence, including externalities like health impacts, environmental impacts, and military/foreign policy expenditures aimed at sustaining the oil supply.
But I think the chief reason gas is taxed so highly in most other Western countries is just to discourage increased consumer dependence on automobiles. Public transit, walking and bicycling are generally more efficient and lower-impact than private automobile transportation. When you have lots of cars driving around, especially in densely populated areas, you need to spend more money on roads, you need to spend more money on parking facilities, etc. etc. And you end up with lots of complaints about negative effects on property values and quality of life (that is, everybody wants to drive and park and buy gasoline easily and conveniently, but nobody likes sitting in traffic jams or looking at parking lots or gas stations).
Having individuals going everywhere by car tends to be very convenient for the individuals but a significant pain in the ass for municipalities and states. So most developed countries slap car users with high gasoline taxes, to counterbalance their incentive to drive more.
Your need for gasoline is based on choices. For example, one can choose to carpool, use public transportation or move closer to work. For workers employed by businesses with many branches, significant gas savings could be realized if a few employees simply swapped branches so both workers have shorter commutes.
Even if we carpool, ride a bike, or walk to work. These savings are minimal. Our entire economy is based on buying, let’s say, fresh veggies from your supermarket.
Now, ride your bike, walk, or drive an electric car there, but the fact that you have gajillions of fresh selections at the local store means that they are trucked in.
Go to Best Buy and buy a laptop. Did they manufacture that at the store? No, they made it in China, flew it here, and shipped it to the store by truck.
Your personal fuel use from driving to work, or driving vs. biking to wherever you go is minimal. It simply helps white liberals feel that they are making a contribution to fossil fuel depletion.
Unless you can be self-sustaining on your own farm (not possible with increased population) then we are ALL contributing to increased oil use in lieu of an alternative fuel source…
Conservation is bullshit. It only delays the inevitable…
I live in Maryland as well. I sure as hell haven’t been paying 2.65 for months now. Today I paid 2.77 for regular.
Sorry, but this simply isn’t true. As this article notes,
And oil use amounts to about 40% of total US energy consumption. So passenger vehicles alone (i.e., private automobiles) account for about 16% of the total energy use in the US.
With numbers like those, it is nonsense to suggest that “personal fuel use” by individual passenger automobiles is in any way insignificant or “minimal”. It’s a substantial chunk of our total energy use, and accounts for almost half of our oil consumption.
Of course, we can’t possibly eliminate all (or probably even most) personal automobile transportation, even if we wanted to (and I don’t think we should). But significantly reducing our personal dependence on automobiles would indeed make a noticeable reduction in our national fossil-fuel use.
Dear Brits:
God, it’s like listening to a fat girl whine about how she has to diet while skinny bitches who eat pizza are eeeevvil.
Cut it out.
Love, Americans
Dear ForumBot
Go <inappropriate response for GD snipped> and the gas-guzzler you rode in on.
Kindest regards,
Pretty much anyone who isn’t American.
Of course, the problem is that when US cities decide to spend money on transportation, it usually goes to improving or expanding roadways. Around the time I left Northern Virginia, they were beginning a multi-year, multi-hundred million (perhaps multi-billion; I can’t remember) project on 95 to help it handle more traffic. And it’s stupid, because it won’t help the traffic situation; it will just encourage more people to drive. It would have been much better to spend the money on something else.
So basically, Americans make auto-friendly and public-transport-unfriendly decisions with their tax dollars, and then bitch and moan when gas gets expensive. Cry me a fucking river.
Signed,
Sophistry and Illusion who, though compelled by fell circumstance to return to the US, is buying a condo across from the bus station so I can ride to work.
“It will just encourage more people do drive”? This presumes that there are some significant quantity of people in these areas of the US who have cars, are willing to use cars, and only refrain from doing so because congestion is so bad. I don’t think such people exist. If people want to drive cars, they do, and increased congestion just makes them curse more. If people prefer public transport by preference or principle, they’ll use it even if the roads are as wide and empty as oceans. So, no, you’re wrong, widening and improving roads will improve the traffic situation, and therefore is not stupid.
Whether it would have been better to spend something else is another matter; it’s entirely possible that the money could have been spent on improving non-car transport instead and still have improved people’s lives as much or more per dollar. But you’re not going to prove that by lying and saying that it’s impossible to reduce congestion.
And, yes, many transportation departments in america favor improving things for cars over putting public transportation in place. Of course, there are also many places in america where things are so spread out that public transportation is not reasonable. (Tuscon, AZ comes to mind.) It’s also much cheaper and less impacting on the citizenry to widen a road here and there than to rip everything out to lay in a proper subway. This is not to mention the difficulty in trying to convince independence-and-freedom-of-movement-minded people to use alternative transport. Each TransDep is going to approach this on a case-by-case basis, and while it’s easy to criticize from your armchair as if all situations were the same, it’s hardly impressive.
Signed, begbert2, who has never ridden a city bus, and so far as I know there isn’t a bus system here that would get me from my home to work or the store and back anyway.
Actually (I’ll find a cite for this eventually) when construction on I-95 in and out of D.C. made congestion there horrible, there was an increase in ridership for the Metro and commuter rail. People will do what is convenient. Unfortunately, US cities pour money into making driving convenient and biking, riding the bus, etc., inconvenient (or not an option at all).
Sure, but you didn’t say “if we trash the roads, use of cars will decrease”, you said, “if we improve the roads, more drivers will magically appear and maintain the current levels of congestion, so that the driving experience will not have been improved by the improvements to the roads.” Entirely different statements, which have entirely different truth values.
It is therefore still not accurate to denigrade efforts to improve the roads as being “stupid”. No matter how much easier it would be to argue that americans are stupid if that were true.
It’s not a matter of magic. It’s a matter of people having a choice between public transportation and driving (as they do in D.C.). Many choose to take public transportation because driving in and around D.C. is a pain in the ass, particularly during rush hour. If you make it less of a pain in the ass, more people will abandon public transportation in favor of the roads, until the equilibrium pain-in-the-ass point is reached again.
Okay, your next task is to sell the idea that there are areas in the US that are in that sort of disequilibrium in their normal states, such that widening and improving roads would pull people away from public transport. it’s not quite fair to assess TransDept decisions on the temporary conditions that occur in the middle of carrying out their decisions, rather than the conditions that they are facing when the decisions are actually being made.
Right now, in my town, there are a number of roads under construction. It’s annoying, and if I were hypersensitive to that and there was any semblance of a viable public transportation alternative available, I might consider it on a temporary basis. However, prior to the construction, the circumstances were nowhere near bad enough that I would have considered public transport, even if it was available. Out here in the sticks, we don’t usually wait for the roads to become impassable before trying to improve them, see. We take pre-emptive measures and stuff, improving the roads to meet expected demands, and not letting the roads get so bad as to drive people off of them.
I can easily understand that this may not be the case in all regions; traffic really does suck in the big cities I’ve been to, and -suprise surprise- the big cities are where we’ve made some progress in public transportation. But can you make an argument that in the areas where we don’t spend much money on public transport, that there are enough people who are avoiding cars purely out of frustration with road conditions to make any difference whatsoever?
If not, then doing contruction projects that widen and improve the roads will not entice more drivers out of the workwork, since there are none left to entice; they’re all already driving cars. And if that’s not the case, then your argument remains invalid.
Now, if you were arguing that TransDepts could encourage alternative transportaion by destroying the roads cars drive on, then that would probably be a supportable argument. However, such actions would almost certainly be explicitly in direct opposition to the TransDepts’ stated official duties, so you can’t really expect them do to such things.