One of the sites I’ve been reading awhile, and that got me interested in writing myself, is Five Cent Nickel. He recently posted an article commenting that gas prices could hit $4 per gallon in the near future. I thought he made an excellent point with this paragraph:

The real problem here (in my opinion) is that we’ve created a society in which driving isn’t optional. And unfortunately, fuel economy standards in the U.S. have lagged behind the rest of the world, meaning that we’re driving an inefficient fleet of gas hogs. The end result is that, no matter how high prices go, people will be forced to simply suck it up and pay them unless we make some major changes.

There’s three important notes mentioned here. First of all, American is largely reliant on their cars. Part of this is our love for the suburbs, and part is that our mass transit system pales in comparison to a lot of other countries, both in its design and its use (though the latter is most likely due to the former). I drive to work, but it is only a 8 minute drive as I live about two miles away (which would make for a nice walk in the summer, but would turn a 15 minute round-trip commute into a hour and a half). My wife takes the train into Boston, which takes her nearly two hours of walking to the commuter train, taking it in, transferring to the subway, taking that subway, transferring to another subway, taking that, and then walking. It’s not exactly what I would call efficient, even though Boston has one of the better mass transit systems.

Secondly, Americans don’t seem to care about paying much for gas. I drive a 2003 Honda Civic, which gets about 32 miles per gallon. A fair amount of SUV’s get about 10 miles per gallon. My car costs about $5000 less than the average SUV and yet gets three times the gas mileage! One of my favorite things to do is pull into a gas station behind a Hummer, who’s filling up their tank, get out, fill my tank, and leave all while they’re still filling their tank (sure their tank is bigger, but I will end up driving longer on 1/3rd the gas).

Lastly, we are pretty much forced to pay whatever those big bold numbers on the gas station signs tell us to pay. I believe this instills a feeling of apathy in people, that briefly departs when they see a triple digit figure for filling up their SUV, and then swiftly returns a few minutes later. I know I feel the same way. Part of it is because I simply don’t drive that much. Another part is that I treat gas like I treat utilities or taxes: They’re set to a price and I can’t do much about it. I have never once not driven somewhere because of high gas prices, though I would have to think twice about any cross-country drives.

Yet some people will actually drive miles out of the way to save five cents a gallon! My tank holds 13 gallons, meaning I would save a whopping $0.65 by doing something like that. The funny thing is that it’s usually the gas guzzling SUV’s I see waiting in a ten car line for gas that’s five cents cheaper.

I do hope that within the next decade, we will begin to discover more efficient ways to use alternative energy as fuel, whether it’s better hybrid cars or figuring out how exactly a stalk of corn makes my car accelerate.

Note: Besides being an excellent source for personal finance information, check out the contest Five Cent Nickel is running right now!