High Gas Prices Are Just One Symptom of a Much Greater Problem

(Source: Flickr.)

It’s much ado about gas prices in the American media, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and President Biden’s subsequent announcement that the U.S. will ban Russian oil and gas imports. Market analysts estimate that this could drive the average gasoline price at the pump over $5 per gallon for the first time ever. In states like California, gas prices are topping $6.

As we’ve seen countless times in the past, the news cycle fixates on this number because it’s one of the most visible, easy indicators of how the economy is affecting everyday Americans’ lives.

When the price of some other staple product spikes, it doesn’t get the same attention. For example, millions of Americans eat eggs. Eggs are a $100-billion industry in the United States. But when the price of eggs spikes, no one thinks it’s a national crisis, and a big reason for that is that the people who like eggs always have the option of simply buying fewer eggs, and substituting other foods.

Gas prices are seen by Americans as uniquely indicative of the everyman’s economic fortunes because, for most of us, there is no substitute. Most of us live in car-dependent places, we live car-dependent lives, and we cannot readily choose to buy a whole lot less gas and ride our bikes or take the bus more.

Of course, some of us can and do, to varying degrees. Amid the oil price hikes and shortages of the 1970s, bicycling boomed and the federal government encouraged carpooling 

Just in the past two weeks, I’ve made a point of using my bike for some errands I would normally have done by car. That’s of course anecdotal, but there is data, too: we already have evidence that transit ridership is growing right now on systems like South Florida’s TriRail.

So people do respond to price signals. This is supply-and-demand 101. But we can only do that when we have alternatives. Or, in economists’ terms, when the price elasticity of demand for gasoline is high. Research has generally found that demand for gasoline in the U.S. is not only inelastic, but that it has become more inelastic over recent decades.

Think of “elastic” as meaning “stretchable” or “flexible.” What this means in plain English is that we are less able to adjust our gasoline consumption to save money than we used to be. Including in the 1970s. Why? Because our world has become ever more car dependent, and other options have been squeezed out. Compared to only a few decades ago, American cities have less neighborhood-scale retail and services, longer travel distances to jobs and shopping, and more people living in places where walking is simply not a reasonable option.

Through the way we design and build our places, we’ve turned cars and trucks from, as Jeff Speck puts it, “an optional instrument of freedom” into “a prosthetic device.”

The Self-Imposed Fragility of our Development Pattern

The core issue we, as a nation, should be fixating on here is car dependency. A lack of alternatives to driving (and to motorized transport of goods) introduces fragility into our lives at every level, from personal finances to foreign policy and national security. The fact that the Putin regime can mess with our lives in this way is a self-inflicted malady.

A gas price panic, however, predictably prompts a number of unhelpful policy and rhetorical responses. On the policy front, elected officials predictably trot out the tired proposal of a gas tax holiday. Such a proposal is already on the table in Connecticut. However, this is and always was a terrible idea: Most of the savings would almost certainly be captured by oil companies and gas stations, which could simply raise the pre-tax price to compensate. Furthermore, relative to the status quo, a gas tax cut incentivizes more driving, which—you guessed it—drives gas prices back up. And it puts government at all levels even deeper in the hole for road maintenance needs that the gas tax was already not coming close to funding.

As always, a spike in the misery associated with driving has given diehard advocates for non-car transportation the opportunity to be a bit self-satisfied and smug. I’m seeing memes circulate like these:

Me when gas prices are low vs Me when gas prices are high pic.twitter.com/bFwCft4e89

— Darrell Owens (@IDoTheThinking) March 7, 2022

These memes are well-intended, but their message nonetheless falls flat with those who feel that their situation does not allow them the same choice.

The truth is, we won’t get very far in understanding or improving our predicament as long as we treat one’s means of transportation as solely a question of individual choice and (implicitly or explicitly) individual virtue. Our goal shouldn’t be to inflame a culture war between drivers and non-drivers.

The phrase “get people out of their cars” is popular in transportation circles, but the lowest-hanging fruit is not converting people from drivers to non-drivers, in terms of a binary choice. Few will make that switch. In reality, there is huge variation even within America (and far more internationally) in how much the average person drives. Residents of the New York City metro area do an average of 16.6 miles of driving per person per day; in Dallas, it’s 34.5 miles. Metro Atlanta residents drive more than twice as much (45.4 miles) as metro Chicago residents (21.0 miles).

We don’t need to convince every person who likes their car, SUV, or truck that it would be more virtuous or sensible or rational to get around some other way. We need to obsess over bringing those numbers steadily down through many, many incremental changes: to transit, to bike and walk safety, to land use patterns. It’s not “ban cars,” it’s give people the choice to use their cars a whole lot less.

My colleague Chuck Marohn uses the analogy of a watershed for how to think about alleviating the need to drive so much. The way you prevent flooding downstream is by capturing rainfall upstream: mitigating erosion and keeping intact wetlands that can absorb the water on site. The analogy to transportation is that the way you prevent flooding (large amounts of regional traffic) is by capturing trips close to home, giving people the option to meet their needs in or near their neighborhood.

This means local stores; it means neighborhood schools; it means 15-minute communities and the policy reforms that enable them. And yes, it also means investing in mass transit and regional bicycling infrastructure. But simply throwing money at those things in the form of big construction projects is unlikely to move us toward driving fewer miles, and less often, at the rate we need to make that shift. We’ll run out of money or political will first.

The shift away from car dependency is one that every community can undertake, from whatever its starting point is right now. The goal isn’t to “get people out of their cars” if that feels too ambitious, or too politically provocative in a place where residents are feeling real pain from $5 gas. The goal is to make it possible for them to choose to drive less. And there are a thousand things you can do right now to advance that shift that (bonus!) will generate wealth in your community, instead of bleeding that wealth dry at the gas pump.

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