Prices and Habits

Gas prices are rising in our country every day. I put gas in my car yesterday at around $4.17 a gallon for regular unleaded. I'm a working musician so I really feel the crunch. Luckily for me I drive a small car that gets close to forty miles per gallon. Here's the thing: We as Americans complain and complain and complain about gas prices going up and how hard it is to get to work and how our household budgets our tightening down because of these outrageous prices for gasoline. But in Europe, people there pay about 8-9 dollars per gallon for fuel.

I drive a lot for work, to and from gigs; sometimes great distances and so I see a lot of cars on the road. And I've started noticing a few things. For one, with all this complaining about prices, people don't seem to be changing their driving habits at all. I still see people screaming down the freeway as fast as they can, 20 plus miles over the limit. Some of the biggest cars drive the fastest. These gigantic SUV's that get 10 miles to the gallon are driving faster than almost anyone else on the road. But it's not just SUV's. Even more compact, fuel efficient cars are zooming by, too. Those cars lose their fuel efficiency when they're taken to speeds that fast. A person shouldn't be driving a car that fast down the freeway anyway. I see people do this all the time, even with kids in the back seats. I read an article where the author asked why people drive some of the bigger cars and usually the answer was that they felt safer and that they wanted their family to feel safe. Let's just hope nothing happens when they're barreling down the road at 85 mph.

So if you're going complain about gas prices, just be sure to start after you've done just about all you can to control your own fuel situation. If not, we can still keep making donations to the church of Chevrotexarco and watch 'em laugh themselves silly all the way to the bank. Or, if we can just hold out long enough, we'll be able to use ethanol to fuel our cars......and eat corn for every meal.