4 Good Things About $4 Per Gallon Gas

By Eric Peters, Automotive Columnist

There’s a bright side to almost everything, right? Even $4 per gallon fuel.

If that seems like a stretch as you fork over another $80 to fill up your car, consider the bright side:

1) There’s less traffic out there
If you can still afford to drive, the drive’s less aggravating than it was when gas cost under $2 per gallon because there are fewer cars on the road. Traffic has decreased across the board, nationwide, on both highways and secondary roads as people throttle back on their day-tripping, carpool — or just stay home. In a way, this is a welcome pause in what had been a relentless annual uptick in the total number of cars on the roads as well as the annual mileage racked up by these cars (more than 12,000 per year per car, according to most estimates).

Driving almost anywhere when gas was $2 per or less was becoming a real hassle; at $4 per gallon we may be driving less — but we can actually drive again when we do — instead of staring at the bumper of a minivan with soccer ball stickers all over it as we bump and grind along at 25 mph.

2) The argument for telecommuting has become stronger
There are many jobs that do not require the worker’s physical presence at a traditional office. However, most employers have been reluctant to allow workers who could work from home to actually work from home. Part of this is just the inertia of tradition — “people have always come to an office” — and part of it is the control freak condescension of employers who suspect that workers won’t work if they aren’t stuck in a cubicle and being watched all day long.

However, studies of telecommuting find that productivity actually increases when workers don’t have to waste an hour or two stuck in traffic just getting to work. Eliminating the commute can also be a huge financial incentive for both employer and employee. It amounts to a large “raise” (in the form of savings on gas as well as vehicle wear and tear) that goes right into the employee’s pocket but doesn’t cost the employer a cent. Every boss has gotta love that!

3) It’s a great excuse to ride a motorcycle
If you have a bike — and a wife — odds are your wife doesn’t much like the bike. But now you can point out to the wife how much money you’re saving by riding instead of driving.

Even the biggest cruiser bike (or fastest crotch rocket) can usually deliver at least 35 mpg — as good or better fuel economy than almost any subcompact economy car. Smaller bikes routinely deliver 60 mpg or more — which easily outperforms any hybrid car.

Just switching from a car that gets 20 mpg on average to a bike that gets double that reduces your monthly fuel bill by half. It’s hard to argue with that!

4) European-spec high performance/high efficiency diesels are coming
Due to the stupidity of our government and its bureaucratic rigmarole — along with inferior quality diesel fuel — the US consumer has been denied 40 mpg high-performance diesel sedans from BMW and Mercedes — as well as 70 mpg small cars from VW and others that handily beat the at-the-pump performance of the best hybrid cars, without costly and complex hybrid vehicle technology. That is changing — finally.

The US now has low-sulfur diesel fuel — and the legal/regulatory situation (emissions control issues, mostly) has been addressed by dint of the fuel issue having been taken care of. So American consumers should soon be able to buy the kinds of cars the Europeans have been able to buy for years.

Thank $4 per gallon fuel for putting the pressure on!

Comments?
www.ericpetersautos.com

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Police Officer Gives Himself $21,000 Raise Using Stop Sign Tickets

A recent article by John Stossel examined a Michigan police officer’s penchant for giving out stop sign tickets as a means of increasing his income.

Day after day in Warren, Mich., people wait in a long line to pay traffic fines. Many are there because police say they didn’t come to a full stop at a stop sign. Often the policeman saying that is Officer David Kanapsky.

On last week’s “20/20,” you heard a motorist in court insist that she did come to a complete stop. The judge replied, as judges there often do: “I find Officer Kanapsky’s testimony to be credible. He is an unbiased witness.”

But the officer is not really unbiased. The more tickets he writes, the more overtime he gets. Last year, Kanapsky spent so much time in court he increased his pay by $21,000. Rolling through a stop sign in Michigan puts two points on your driving record. That hikes your car insurance premium. Fighting the ticket could cost even more. So to avoid the points and legal fees, most people plead guilty to a lesser offense: impeding traffic. The court sounds like an assembly line, ” … no points … $135 … “

Last year, the town made half a million dollars from such fines. Some drivers told us it “seems like a moneymaking scam.”

The city denies it, but Stossel is skeptical:

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The Old Man In The Buick — And The Return Of Drive 55?

By Eric Peters, Automotive Columnist

GOP Senator John Warner probably doesn’t drive himself anywhere; he is flown, or chauffeured — at state expense and top speed. Which may explain why he is peddling reduced speed limits to “save fuel” for the rest of us.

Just prior to the 4th of July weekend, Virginia’s senior senator (and very senior citizen) said, “Given the significant increase in the number of vehicles on America’s highway system from 1974 to 2008, one could assume that the amount of fuel that could be conserved is far greater” than under the old 55 mph National Maximum Speed Limit — which Congress repealed back in 1995.

Warner may be right about fuel saved — more on that in a moment — but he went on to repeat the totally discredited agit-prop mantra that lower speed limits “save lives.”

During the NMSL era, advocates claimed that 55 was responsible for reducing annual highway fatalities by 4,000 deaths per year. This claim was used to morph what had been a fuel-conservation measure enacted in 1974, during a previous era of high gas prices, into a “safety” issue — with consequences that went far beyond conservation.

If driving faster than 55 was not merely less energy efficient — but unsafe — then tickets could be issued, DMV “points” assigned and insurance premiums jacked up. Which of course is exactly what did happen — with the result being a nationwide fleecing program gussied up as a public safety measure.

Overnight — literally — speeds that had been considered both legal and safe became illegal and unsafe. People who had never received a ticket in their lives were now receiving them regularly. People who had never had an accident in their lives were being hit up with insurance premium “surcharges” — on the basis of their now “unsafe” driving habits.

But saving fuel and driving safely are not necessarily the same things.

Sometimes, in fact, they are mutually exclusive.

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How Do Gasoline Prices Affect Driving Behavior?

In January 2008, the Congressional Budget Office put out a study examining the effects of gasoline prices on driving behavior.  While the CBO’s analysis is somewhat dated — it’s based on four years of data collected from metropolitan freeways in California between 2003 and 2006 — the findings likely extend to current gas prices as well.

We’ve excerpted some sections of the report below and encourage you to read the full report if you have the time and inclination.

Selected Excerpts:

• “Recent empirical research suggests that total driving, or vehicle miles traveled (VMT), is not currently very responsive to the price of gasoline. A 10 percent increase in gasoline prices is estimated to reduce VMT by as little as 0.2 percent to 0.3 percent in the short run and by 1.1 percent to 1.5 percent eventually.¹“
• “[B]ecause recent research indicates that VMT is relatively insensitive to gasoline prices, the higher prices of the past several years should not be expected to cause large changes in freeway traffic volume.”
• “On average, over all locations, the price of gasoline in a given week had a negligible effect on the volume of weekend traffic, but on weekdays, higher gasoline prices had a small but statistically significant effect (see Table 1-1).”
• “The value of the potential fuel savings from slowing down is rather small compared with reasonable measures of many motorists’ value of time, so the likely effect of gasoline prices on highway speeds also should be rather small.”
• “The development of freeway congestion-pricing projects—which charge tolls that rise with the amount of traffic congestion—has enabled researchers to estimate motorists’ value of time during congested commuting hours. Estimates for California’s high-occupancy toll lanes along State Route 91, west of Riverside, and Interstate 15, north of San Diego, indicate, on the basis of tolls and travel time savings in toll lanes versus free lanes, that motorists value their time between $20 and $45 per hour of reduced travel time.⁹“
• “If the speeds at which motorists drive are positively correlated with how much they value their time, then a disproportionate number of slower-driving motorists would have lower-than-average values of time and faster-driving motorists would have higher values. If that is the case, then the findings of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) about the effects of the price of gasoline on highway speeds are consistent with the prediction that motorists with lower values of time will be more responsive to an increase in gasoline prices than will drivers with higher values of time.”
• “Higher gasoline prices from 2003 through the end of 2006 caused many motorists to drive a little more slowly on uncongested highways. Median speeds in free-flow conditions declined slightly as gasoline prices increased. The slowdown was more pronounced for vehicles moving at the somewhat lower 5th percentile speeds; there was no discernible effect on 95th percentile speeds. The median effect is consistent with recent estimates of gasoline price elasticity, which indicate that short-run demand declines by around 0.6 percent when the price rises by 10 percent, all else being equal.¹⁹“

There is a substantial amount of additional material in the full report including the effect that gas prices have on the vehicle market. Check it out when you get a chance.

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