In recent years the automotive industry has tried to elevate its new product line onto a more spiritual level. Toyota kicked it off in 1999 by proclaiming that if you “confine the body, you shrink the spirit.” More recently Honda proclaimed its ”˜Fit”™ the “God of Efficiency.” With the introduction of its “Genesis,” Hyundai gets biblical with terms like “revelations” in describing its new car. A new Honda stirs “dreams ”“ the most renewable resource.” All very poetic but hardly a realistic assessment of the emerging role of America”™s personal vehicle.
In most of the nation owning a car is an essential part of growing up. Many an American teenager, upon reaching 16, abandons the familiar yellow bus he has ridden since he was 5 years old, now dubbed the “loser cruiser,” and drives himself to school in a car thoughtfully provided by his parents. The early childhood conditioning to regard the car as an entitlement is pervasive. Paying for a parking space that may have been previously free is frequently viewed as a personal affront. The recent donnybrook over New York City”™s congestion pricing plan was an excellent example of the public”™s sense of entitlement to drive wherever and whenever without cost. No matter that Manhattan is the ultimate pedestrian-friendly city, being increasingly impaired by drivers determined to overrun the place.
All of these rights are going to change, of course. It”™s in the stars, friends. Gas at $4 a gallon and sure to go much, much higher will do what no laws could affect ”“ put a brake on the entitlement mentality. The process will be painful.
A perfect storm
The underlying costs to the entire nation of all this driving is rarely examined. Just for starters, consider the fact that approximately 45,000 people die every year from vehicular accidents. And that doesn”™t even count those who are injured or maimed in those accidents, many of them pedestrians. Then there is the lost money imbedded in the 38 hours per year every driver spends in traffic and the accumulating air pollution that produces. Add to that the astronomical cost of building and maintaining roads and bridges, an expenditure the nation is clearly falling alarmingly behind, as witness the fall of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis. Add to the cost of driving the need for police enforcement of laws governing the roadways, the liabilities, the emergency services, etc. Well, the list is boringly long and quite disheartening. Of course, car drivers do contribute some revenue offsetting these expenses but it falls woefully short of the actual cost to the general public.
In spite of soaring gas prices, and they really are soaring lately, people have short memories. When gas drops back a few pennies the thinking is that the worst is over and the public forgets about buying that fuel efficient vehicle and SUV purchases tend to edge back up again. The current agony over the housing crisis had to have been exacerbated by the public”™s drive to find a large, yet affordable house in exurbia, which would be utterly dependent on the car. Now many of those houses, far from villages, may be unaffordable and the cars needed to reach them may be unaffordable to drive. A perfect storm.
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Food for thought
The cost of a barrel of oil is playing around $123 at this writing and it is causing a universal call for energy independence, dominated by the national concern that the car culture continue unabated. Of course, no one has bothered to give any details about how that might be accomplished. However, a recent book called “Gusher of Lies” by Robert Bryce gives some pretty persuasive arguments (many of which you would have previously read in this column) as to why this is an impossibility. For starters, let”™s look at corn ethanol, the alternative fuel that was supposed to initiate this nation”™s drive to get off the dependence on Middle East oil. Though there are some policymakers who disagree, it is pretty hard to claim that the soaring corn prices, because of the demands of the growing ethanol industry, have not kicked off a pretty serious global food shortage. Farmers, seeing the money to be made by growing corn, stop planting wheat and/or soy, and go full bore into corn crops, even pulling land that has been fallow into production. The ripple effect on the global food supply has been alarming. The story is far more complex, of course, but the effect of the manic production of corn ethanol, subsidized by the federal government, has been devastating to many people. The worst of it is, it does not in any way solve our dependence on foreign oil. A gallon of ethanol has three- quarters of the energy that a gallon of gas has. In addition, to produce a gallon of ethanol requires enough fossil fuels to wipe out any possible reduction in greenhouse gases.
Removed from reality
Other efforts to get this nation energy independent depends on the usual alternatives ”“ wind, solar, geothermal, etc. But the federal support for these alternatives in no way matches any genuine commitment to reduce the nation”™s addiction to oil. Currently, corn ethanol, nuclear power, drilling in Alaska, oil shale and tar sands are where the federal dollars are being spent. No concerted effort has been made to get the automobile industry out of the spirit world and make an efficient car, one that gets 40 plus miles per gallon.
Then there is the gas tax, getting a lot of attention lately. It is the clearest illustration of how far removed from reality the American public has drifted. Two out of three of the presidential candidates are in favor of the pandering to the American driver, as if they don”™t enjoy enough benefits. The gas tax is actually a joke ”“ 18 cents on a gallon, when it should be at least a dollar to be able to fund the infrastructure damage that all that driving has caused. With a country that continues to sell pieces of itself to China because it has no self-discipline to live within its means, eliminating an income stream seems the height of insanity. When will we wake up?
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