At first glance, this post doesn’t seem to make much sense, especially since yesterday I wrote an article about how nearly 75% of people stated that they would alter their summer travel plans if gasoline were to get up to $4 per gallon.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that if gas prices were to hit $4 per gallon, many people would be forced to rethink their travel plans, but I’m a bit skeptical of whether or not $4 gas would really affect 75% of us as much as we’d like to believe.
For example: if I were to have asked the exact same group of people three or four summers ago if $3 gasoline would affect their travel plans, I probably would have gotten a similar response to what I received when I asked about $4 gas.
However, we now know that not only has travel not gone down as gas prices hit and surpassed the $3 mark, but the amount driving we did actually went up!
The other day I was reading my hometown paper, The Washington Times, when I came across an interesting article by Ben Lieberman in which he stated that even if gas were to hit $6 per gallon in the United States, it wouldn’t be enough to dissuade people from using their cars to get places.
Lieberman had two main arguments for his stance, both of which were very valid:
- $6 gas in Europe hasn’t discouraged or reduced driving
- It’s simply easier to drive, even if it costs more
It’s this second point that I find the most interesting. According to Lieberman’s article:
“Joel Schwartz of the American Enterprise Institute believes that ‘despite the costs of owning and operating an automobile, people choose automobiles the world over because no other form of transportation comes anywhere close to providing comparable speed, flexibility, privacy and convenience.’ Even at $6 per gallon, many Europeans – whose per capita incomes are lower than those in the U.S. – are willing to cut back on other things than cut back on driving.”
So, for as much complaining as we do now and how much more we’ll do as gas prices rise throughout the summer, all we’re really doing is wasting our breath because it doesn’t appear that these higher prices are really going to change our habits much - if at all.
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Europeans do two things: 1) they drive small cars (like the SmartCar) and therefore they get way better gas mileage than Americans get and 2) they walk almost everywhere, which doesn’t use any gas. Even if the amount of fuel being used in Europe has increased recently, it doesn’t mean that the $6 gas hasn’t discouraged driving or that $6 gas wouldn’t reduce gas usage here in the US. It may not reduce DRIVING, but I guarantee that it would decrease gas usage (via better gas mileage).
I think that for many people who are on a budget, they are driving less. The people in the McMansions in my neighborhood with large incomes may have the luxury of not being concerned about gas prices, but people who don’t make a lot of money do pay attention and adjust. To save money and help the environment, I bike to work, darpool more, take the bus and metro more often and have limited some of my weekend activities that involve driving.
I lived in England for a couple of years. What I found was this: the English do drive smaller cars, but they also overwhelmingly drive cars with diesel engines. These cars get about 1.5 times the mileage as our cars do, which when you do the math shows that they are only paying a small percentage more than we are. I estimate that they are paying about the same amount to travel a mile as we are at $3 to a gallon gasoline.
I dont live in England or have all that great of a job,I WILL stop driving all together!