CNN Story

About half the public saw gas pump prices a financial hardship in April - now it's two-thirds.

 

A week or two ago, I read an energy analyst who said oil will not go above $60/barrell, because it was some sort of psychological threshold.

I expect to hear the same sort of idiocy about $100/barrell, in about a year.

So a fair question is: how much will oil have to cost, before people start to GET IT ??

 

Maybe when the Toys R Us has REAL Hummers - not the toy.

 

I also heard the price per gallon that would have an impact on our society's fuel consumption was $2.00, then I heard $2.35, and now they are saying $3.00. It was interesting, they expected a huge jump in mass transit riders, but I know in the bay area, they saw an increase of .5-1% depending on what form of transportation.

Im not sure that we will ever really get it.

 

If people see fuel prices as a hardship, people get it.

However other more powerful economic forces, such as the house payment, existing car payments, other taxes, insurances, necessary utility bills, etc. prevent people from going out there and changing their transportation method.

Mass transit just isn't particularly feasible in most places in the U.S. For the most part, the only successful mass transit systems are those that are underground or that have been built aside from surface roads (the subway in NYC, the El in Chicago and a few other projects), but most still rely on busses and surface roads, take too long to get people to where they want to go and don't charge enough to pay their own bills. Where I live we have a bus system which is hemorrhaging money. Why? Because there aren't enough riders, the bus routes and schedule are inefficient and frankly the city is too small and the distances between businesses and residential are too large for it to really work. When I drive home at night, going West, which is just about where everybody lives, the westbound buses have very few riders in them, 2 or 3 at most. If you see 5 or 6 people on a bus it was a good day for that bus. The same can be said for mornings where people are supposedly going to work. Eastbound busses, have no more than 4 or 5 people on them.

If I were to try to use the bus, it would take me at least 45 minutes to get to work. It takes me 8 minutes or less to get to work right now. And I can listen to my own music, have the a/c on just how I like and I am entertained by the energy screen on the car.

 

Makes you wonder why mini-busses aren't more popular. Kind of like short school busses, but for adult transit. It seems that the smallest city busses you ever see are designed to hold at least 30 people still, but like you said, often times have only 5 people on them. You could use a GM full-size van frame at maybe 1/3 of the up front cost and probably 50% of the operating cost and still seat at least 8 to 10 comfortably. With smaller, cheaper mass transit, you could then operate, say, 50% more of them and improve ridership by offering more routes and more frequent pickups.

 

.......And we have little to say about the Government taking ~15% of each and every paycheck. We've all heard the billions of pork attached to the latest energy and transportation bills.

I wonder which bill is more costly to us consumers? Fueling our cars or a bloated and overly complicated income tax?

 

MDI, the company that makes the AirCars in my sig also have plans to build busses that can be scaled up, or down depending on the number of riders at that time of day.

Each car is self powered and has it's own climate control (operated from the driver's location) and follows the first car by re-playing the same actions as the driver performs as they come to the same position. Radio signals communicate between vehicles as well as between electrical components within each car to minimize wiring bulk, only a power wire is required to run to each component. The effect is a vehicle that can be driven like a train on the road with up to 4 cars total, and no mechanical linkage between them. The projected cost of running and leasing (to own) these for a city is less than the cost of diesel fuel to operate a normal city bus. They can also be adapted to overhead wire trolley systems and would be able to leave the 'track' on air power alone, as well as be able to refill other air vehicles.

 

I was told a story once that if you dropped a frog into a pot of boiling water it would immediately jump out.

If you put a frog in warm water, and steadily increased the heat, it would eventually boil to death. Why? Becaue the frog progressively alters what it considers "normal" temperature, and makes an adjustment and learns to live with it. Eventually, the water will boil, but the frog never gets that profound signal to jump out.

So it goes with gas prices. Our household uses 40 gallons of gas on an average month. At $2.00, that's $80 / month. At $3.00, it's $120. Turn it up slow enough, and it's difficult to detect an extra 2-3$ / month. Even at a $5 / month increase over 8 months, it's difficult to detect. If tomorrow gas was $4.00 a gallon, you'd see people trading in their cars that week. Do it slowly, and people learn to live with a new "normal" gas price.

We're being intentionally socially engineered when it comes to gas prices. If we had access to oil company offices, we'd see this plan taped up on a conference room wall (right next to the report for Shell Oil's 26% profit increase last quarter). When will people learn? Hopefully before the water boils.

 

That is interesting, because in my city, a group of high school students from my alma mater did a research project regarding the local transit and came to the conclusion that the large busses were costing too much to run and maintain, that they were never ever filled to capacity during the research period and that if the transit system were to survive that it would have to move down to the smaller shuttle busses. The transit system wasn't making enough money to cover their expenses and were being subsidized with monies that were needed in real infrastructure, specifically paving projects. The system did, with the blessing of the sitting city council at that time, move over to Ford based shuttle busses. That was about 5 years ago.

In the meantime, a new transit director was hired from the west side of the state, who doesn't have a clue about how the east side of the state works, the city council changed and it is politically impotent, and the bus drivers union said they were tired of driving glorified Ford vans (who cares what the union thinks, at least they have jobs, there could be another alternate situation here). Any they have sold off all of the Ford shuttle busses, purchase a combination of used and new Gillig Phantoms (huge busses to drive around 4 people in circles all day long, one of which is the driver) and have basically thrown away all the good research they kids did.

On top of that, they have made Wednesdays and Saturdays free days and have extended service out to outlying neighbor cities. And what is the outcomes of this change. We're back to expensive, large busses to haul around a limited number of people. Ridership is way up on Wednesdays and Saturdays, however it drops to normal lows on the rest of the operating days, and ridership numbers from the outlying areas are highly disappointing. Most of the time it is an empty bus hitting the highway to one of these small cities to go pick up no one.

Don't you just love it when government tries to be entrepreneurial. Just think of all the money we would have to pave our roads if we eliminated an unused transit system.