A nationwide oil change
With gas prices headed toward $5 a gallon, more than half the population has, in a matter of a year, become marooned in the suburbs. The economics of housing combined with the lunacies of city planning have left most Americans stranded, miles away from their places of work, schools, stores and medical facilities. The physical plant of the U.S. for the past 60 years was designed on a premise of cheap energy. This has left much of our population locked into homes and communities they now can ill afford to leave in the morning, come back to at night, heat in the winter or cool in summer.
America is saying bye-bye to the Hummer. GM is ditching its great ape of an automobile, which gets about 10 miles a gallon. Ford is cutting back on its production of the fabled F-Series of pickup trucks. The jobs of the people who made these giant vehicles also are being discontinued. “This is a fundamental change,” said Ford CEO Alan Mulally. There are more than 200 million private, gas-powered conveyances in the U.S. Almost all of those cars get poor gas mileage, but even at $5 a gallon, it will not pay to trade them in to buy a more efficient car. At current replacement rates, the better part of a decade will pass before the current generation of gas guzzlers is retired to be replaced by more efficient cars, if — and it is a big if — there will be enough of them at the right price.
People are not going to be switching to public transportation because we have no public transportation. The exception is in a few — a very few — of the biggest cities. The figures bear the statement out. An average family will take 3,090 trips to work, play etc. in their cars in the course of a year. In the same year, they will take 58 rides on public transportation. What can people do? Some will bicycle, but since the streets and highways are not designed to protect cyclists, it’s unlikely bikes become a major way to travel. For now, there is little choice but carpooling on a heretofore unknown scale. A number of carpooling Web sites are popping up. We may be near the end of cheap long-distance travel, with young people looping around the globe and families flying 1,000 miles to Disneyland. Jet flight might revert to a former era, when the few and the rich went first class and everybody else is crammed in coach. And it remains to be seen if an untraveled America will be a more isolationist, provincial America. The jump in oil prices has hit too fast for us to do anything but improvise. There has been no planning, no steps taken to prepare the society for the shock. The price of oil continues to rise, but at some point, it is going to go down. It will not stay down, however, and next time it spikes, we had best be ready.
Nicholas von Hoffman writes regularly for The Nation and is a columnist for the New York Observer.
