Originally Posted by
rybin
Must be a trip to have lived through the first one, and then see all this...
Anyways, I feel you. I used to walk 5-10 miles to get where I needed to if I had no alternative (when you're broke you find a way), so biking that distance sounds easy. A lot of people in the US seem to have problems with any "inconvenience" from what I can tell though, so i also doubt most would do much to change their lifestyles
Originally Posted by
downtube42
I live just outside Portland, OR, where city folks come to open up the throttle on their tuned Subarus and the country folks come to make noise with their pick-ups. You'd think fuel was free. I don't think $10/gal would make a dent in this behavior. Maybe at $20/gal it would start to drop off? People are pretty wrapped up in expressing themselves on the road.
Originally Posted by
rybin
True, people in the Bay Area, in California, or a lot of the cities honestly, are very attached to their cars and use them for expression. A lot of people out where I am can't afford a decent house, but do have the money for some nice things, so they put what disposable income they do have into a nice car that they really personalize. It would take pretty high gas prices to stunt that
Wait until they cannot get gas at any price, like it sometimes was in '73 (good grief, I'm old!) People were coming out to find holes had been punched in their gas tanks so people could steal the gas. Lines at the stations were miles long, with many cars running out of gas in line. The owners would push them up to the station, only to see them put out the "NO GAS" sign. Things got ugly. A friend of mine worked at a gas station then, and his job was to sit on the trunk of the last car in line they figured they had enough gas for with the NO GAS sign. (BTW, you were only allowed 5 gallons at a time, and could only buy it on even or odd days, depending on the last number of your license plate. They were regulary stolen, too.) He was assaulted on more than one occasion. Eventually, he would hide 'his lil' friend' behind the sign, if you get the Scarface analogy.