JFUser. Personally I believe that things are adjusting just fine - the natural(more or less) increases in fuel costs will end up doing the same things. The only thing I'd want is to help ensure that the switchover is as gradual and well planned as possible. I'm only advocating that, if action must be taken, that it be taken in as simplistic fashion as possible. Sure, open up all the areas we haven't been tapping. Build plants to extract oil out of oil shales & sands. Build coal liquification plants. Bypassing the unrealistic greenies isn't a bad idea.
Manedwolf, You know, your situation sounds amazingly similar to mine? I have a 30mpg car, commute to work on a route that's 90+% highway, etc...
My car is MORE efficient than a flawed hybrid at highway speeds. There is no advantage to that glorified golfcart in anything but city driving. Which there is not any of there. Plus, I don't fill the landfills with thousands of pounds of toxic lithium waste when the batteries need changing out.
Hmmm... Both the Civic Hybrid and Prius are rated at 45mpg highway. Second is that current hybrid batteries are rated for the life of the car; even if they do need replacing those batteries are going to a recycling center, not the landfill. Third is that the batteries aren't LiIon(yet), they're overwhelmingly NiMH with a few lead-acid exemptions.
Carpooling? Nobody who lives near me works near me! That's how it is for most people! Plus I leave late sometimes, early others, go to meetings offsite...that makes no sense.
I figured that. The idea is that the tax would, eventually, on average, get people to carpool where it makes the most sense first.
Public transporation? It's freaking NEW HAMPSHIRE. There are a lot of these things called "trees" and "fields" and "whole forests" between the areas of houses. You want a bus to stop at every house that's ten miles apart? Sure, it'd only take you six hours to make it to work every day.
Subtract the 'trees' and 'forests' and you have where I live. I can see work from where I live, I'd just need to get up on the roof with a telescope. Secondly, have you looked at my proposal for PRT in the cities? Under my idea the extra charge on gasoline levels off once the wanted reduction occurs, or even drops. Meanwhile we aren't distorting the vehicle market with artificial designations between 'truck' and 'car' as with CAFE.
I live where I live because it's safe. I don't want to live "closer to work" because "work" is in an industrial district. For most people here who work in Boston or the like, they can't AFFORD to live closer to work, because closer is $3000 per month for a tiny broomcloset in a bad area. So I could get a crappy job (housing areas only have service industry around them) and not afford where I live, or live closer to work in a crappy area. Please wake up to reality for how it is for most people. Because you're in an ivory-tower fog.
New ideas for a new age, maybe? If you're working in an industrial district I can see why you wouldn't have housing there, but for many downtown areas I wonder what it would be like if they adjusted the tax codes such that building places to be 50% housing and 50% commercial was a good idea. Build a 10 story building, 5 stories of business on the bottom and 5 stories of apartments/condos on top.
By raising taxes. Which does nothing but raise taxes. You want to price people out of their private vehicles and into public cattlecars by raising taxes. You're a statist.
Ok, fine, I'm a statist. Who advocates opening up our own sources, that might actually decrease prices even with increased taxes. And I'm NOT trying to get people into cattle cars. PRT isn't 'traditional' public transportation.
What's your non-statist solution?
And let's see, I could drive in my car, comfortable and safe, or ride in a public pod that possibly smells like vomit and urine because someone was drunk in it, with an inexplicably wet seat and whatever virus someone sneezed all over it. Or would you raise taxes to keep them clean, too? I went to college in Miami. They had driverless buses called Metromovers. Care to guess what those smelled like?
Reject the pod* and take the next one, the drunk gets charged, regular cleaning is paid through fare charges. I took public transportation quite a bit when I was younger, didn't have any problems with it. Just use easy cleaning materials. Keep the system up properly and you shouldn't have too much trouble. Keep the transportation fast and convienent and you should have few problems.
*Automatically goes to the servicing depot.