Orphan Road

I like this new gas pedal idea from Nissan. It increases resistance when you've gone beyond optimal fuel consumption. You also get feedback in the dashboard. It could increase fuel consumption by 5-10%.

Aside from simply building smaller, lighter cars, there are a whole host of things we can be doing to improve fuel efficiency, given sufficient motivation. But helping people adjust their driving habits is a big part of it.

This is particularly true for hybrids. I know hybrid owners accelerate like hell and run the car with the A/C cranked all the time. Then they wonder why they're not getting 50mpg. If you really want to make the best use of a hybrid, you have to learn how to keep the gas engine from engaging, which means driving slower, starting up slowly, and braking more gradually.

New Volkswagen to get 282 235mpg. Available in 2010 in a limited production run.

No kidding.

Gas prices, South Sound edition:

Thurston Regional Planning Council senior planner Pete Swensson said home-buying decisions can change when consumers are faced with higher fuel prices.

A likely result is that the county's urban housing market could strengthen while the rural housing market softens, Swensson said.

Home Hunters Realty of Olympia broker Helen Wilkins agrees. She said that if gasoline prices continue to rise, it could result in a huge influx of people wanting to live closer to town.

"It's all about the cost of getting to work," Wilkins said. "We used to measure everything in miles and time, but now it's five gallons to the office."

Paul Krugman recently wrote, " some major public transit systems are excited about ridership gains of 5 or 10 percent. But fewer than 5 percent of Americans take public transit to work, so this surge of riders takes only a relative handful of drivers off the road."

But sometimes I wonder if the coming growth in transit use in America will be exponential, not linear. As more people move closer in, it will have a multiplier effect: more goods and services closer in, which attracts more people, etc., etc. It only took 10 or 15 years for the American middle class to abandon the cities. It could easily take less than that for a healthy majority to move back.

Update: More on the coming deluge:

In a survey of its agents by real estate brokerage Coldwell Banker, 81 percent said they are seeing more interest from prospective buyers in urban living because of high gasoline prices. Fifty-four percent said access to public transportation is more important to their clients now.

Only a 1% drop, but still, it's something.

There are a lot of interesting nuggets in this BusinessWeek article on gas stations.

The context is that gas stations are in a bind. They have to keep prices low or people will just drive across the street, keeping margins very low. But since credit card fees are based on the total cost of sale, the fees are now exceeding the margins. So, stations lose money on every gallon sold. Like movie theaters, they make their money on the extras, except instead of popcorn, it's cigarettes and auto services. Gas itself is often a loss leader (and most filling stations are not owned by the company whose logo graces their pumps, they're franchises).

So, the result is predictable. Stations are going out of business:

Plenty of filling stations have already gone under. Last year, 3,184 of the nation's 164,292 gasoline stations closed their doors and went out of business, the biggest drop in five years, according to National Petroleum News. In the mid-1990s, there were more than 200,000 stations in the U.S. Experts think there are more closures to come.

...

[One] station, which sells almost 2 million gallons of gasoline a year, picked up 500,000 gallons' worth of business last year when the other stations disappeared. If filling stations keep closing or selling out, "I could end up with a near monopoly here," he says.

The immense network of filling stations has been one of the gas-powered auto's key advantages over other alternatives. Could that be going away, too?

I think the P-I may have buried the lede in this piece on new bus riders. Check out the eye-popping chart on the right:

We're getting by with almost half the gasoline as we were consuming just a year ago.

As much as it pains me to say, I agree with Charles Krauthammer: at $4/gallon, everybody gets rational.

Michael O'Hare has an interesting article about us and the cars, and one of his tags is "drug policy". The difference between how we treat the drug "addict" and the automobile is indeed instructive.

The "drug user" (and we are all assumed to be drug users until we prove otherwise) must prove their innocence. Thirty years of error-free performance on the job can be cancelled by a hair-analysis that proves you were in a room where someone was smoking marijuana sometime in the past 30 days.

However, if you proposed putting traffic-cams on a road where children were routinely killed by speeders, the public would revolt. Laws are for the other guy. This is the strength of the automobile addiction.

And don't think traffic jams will break this habit. In Psych 105 at the U of W, they spent a week or two on reinforcers, leading up to the overwhelming conclusion- the strongest reinforcer of behavior is a reward of a variable size provided on an irregular schedule. If you don't like high-toned schoolin', check out your local casino.

Believe it, there will be a meltdown of the public psyche when some event, probably not too far off, reveals the eminent demise of the car. When that happens, will you be part of the solution......or part of the problem?