O O Ø O O O O
The Sky is Falling
Chicken Little is in the house. The nation is up in arms. “Gas prices are out of control!” they scream. “Our worlds are ending!”
You know what nation? Get over it. If you don’t like the price of gas, buy a smaller car. Drive less. Change your priorities. Take a bus. Walk somewhere. Live near your job. Shop near your home. It’s not that hard.
I know. Trying to change a nation’s habit can be difficult. Look at smoking. For years, we have known that it kills the smokers and those around them. Yet it wasn’t until recently that anybody actually considered banning smoking in public places. (Note to Europe: Yes. You can ban smoking in public places. Call me when you’ve gotten around to it. I’m still coughing up black goo.)
Let’s take this to the extreme. Let’s say your average North American gas station doubles its prices overnight. Will it be the end of civilization as we know it?
Hell no. Especially not in Calgary, where a significant portion of the city works downtown—an area ridiculously well serviced by Light Rail Transit. At worst, a number of people will decide that they can no longer afford to drive their oversized car to their $300 a month parking spot every day. These people will have little choice but to car pool, or take the train downtown, resulting in:
- Fewer cars on the road, and
- Less commute-related stress.
Sure, the C-Train can sport some fairly colourful characters after hours, but during rush hour, it’s the working crowd. And since it’s on rails, and runs every 5 minutes, there’s little urgency as to which train you catch, and little uncertainty as to when it will get there. Once you’re on the train, you either read, listen to music, people-watch, or just plain doze. It’s not exactly a stressful ride. Contrast this with your average drive in rush-hour traffic. There, there’s swearing, there’s honking. There’s what-the-hell-is-holding-us-up-this-time angst. And, thanks to our Mayor’s commitment to improving the roads to combat traffic delays, there’s construction-related traffic delays. All this adds up to extreme variability in transit time, and a big ball in your stomach by the time you finally fight your way to the downtown core.
So, higher gas prices = fewer people driving = less stress and fewer traffic fatalities.
The sky is falling indeed.
Kjell Wooding
September 27, 2005
OOØOOOODCCXXIII
September 28th, 2005 at 7:29 pm
When I started driving, gas was 50 cents a litre, and beer was $18.50 for a 2-4. Beer’s more than doubled in price, and so have a lot of other things sinvce then. It’s always surprised me that gas has stayed as cheap as it has for so long. Yay public transport, and sorry for all you folks who bought an SUV. I guess you’ll just have to deal, but this has been a looooong time coming.
September 29th, 2005 at 2:43 pm
Wow. I guess you’ve never ridden the number 16a bus during rush hour through downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. Never mind the slush, snow, sleet, freezing rain, missng in action busses, and dirt so thick you can scratch you name in it. It was the weekly fist fights and the disturbing ratio of smelly/homeless/mentally ill that finally drove me back to a car.
Maybe its a U.S.A. thing, or maybe its a Minneapolis thing, I don’t know. All I know is that the next time I ride a bus through Minneapolis at any time of day, gas will cost a lot more than it does now.
September 29th, 2005 at 8:18 pm
And that’s one of the major problems in the US (heck, North America, but the transit up here is somewhat better than down there - especially California). There is no concept of public transport in most of the country, primarily because the population densities and/or economics have never forced it. The big problem is that the infrastructure that’s required will take years to put in place anywhere, and with the type of electoral cycles that are in place, I doubt anything will ever come of it.
One of the things that completely blew my mind when I lived in MN was the complete lack of sidewalks and bike paths anywhere, and the complete lack of any kind of decent system. In order to get around the city you’re forced to take the 394 or 494, which are still (in my mind) the worst designed highways I’ve ever come across.
It’s piss-poor planning. If the public transport is good, people use it. When I lived in NYC, I didn’t own a car because I didn’t need to. Unfortunately, that kind of system doesn’t exist in too many places outside of Europe and parts of Asia, because it hasn’t really been required or desired. Slate had a decent commentary that fits right in.
Personally, I don’t think the gas prices are what’s going to drive the point home. I think it’ll be the cost of heating a home in our climate, which is expected to be 40-100% more than last year. When the home heating bills come in is when folks are really gonna hurt.
October 3rd, 2005 at 9:20 am
All right. I’ll give you that one. Buses are sub-optimal (too infrequent, subject to the whims of traffic. Never any seats). Transit should be on rails. Trains are predictable, usually frequent enough that you don’t need to know the schedule, and independent of the car-fueled gridlock that grips the rest of the city.
But in a city like this one (Calgary), we have a good train system. Yet people still insist on driving.
You want rapid change in a city? Pass a bylaw forcing all city councillors to take transit to work. THEN you’ll start seeing some change.
October 3rd, 2005 at 1:37 pm
He’s talking funny talk.
October 5th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
“But in a city like this one (Calgary), we have a good train system. Yet people still insist on driving.”
Then I hope I never see a less than good system. Don’t get me wrong the train has gotten better over the 10+ years I have lived here. Maybe it just seems better because I work downtown and take rush hour trains rather then staying-late-at-school trains.
Bus routes on the other hand have gone down hill for me. I used to be able to catch a bus within a couple blocks of my home every 15 minutes, even on weekends. Since the new train stations were added I can catch 2 buses that run every 30 minutes and they run 5 minutes apart. To top it off one of them stops running before 6pm so I hate working late.
I finally bought a car this year. It happens to be awful on gas but I don’t have to wait for fscking the bus. (I won’t pay $15/ day to park downtown so I do drive to the train station.)