brace yourself

Yep, it's an awful situation, inflationary pressure in general is strong right now. The Fed is more concerned with bailing out Wall Street than addressing the inflation problems, which are exacerbated by the abysmally weak dollar. Which of course means higher prices for oil and gas.

Oh well, I guess we'd revolt if we weren't drinking water laced with all kinds of pharmaceuticals!

Just charge your gasoline to those credit cards...and in a few months, that $600 rebate check from the government will come in handy.

Gas here in Toronto is one of the lower prices in the country, and as of this morning, is $1.09 per litre. That translates to $4.14 per US gallon.

And it's going to go even higher.

But here's my dilema. I drive a big assedSUV. Yes, I should replace it with a small car, but the cost of a cheap second had car is at least $10k, and my truck is paid for. That $10k will buy a hell of a lot of gas.

$4.14 a gallon, eh? That's just a few pennies higher than it is here in San Francisco where we pay the highest gas prices in the country.

Aren't the highest prices on EVERYTHING in San Fran? Ouch. I love that city as a tourist attraction, but it gives me a panic attack to think about paying for a life there.

This article puts the current gas prices into a better perspective. I can't even imagining paying $8-10 / gallon. Yikes!

...But then again that's probably why they have smaller/less gas-guzzling cars in Europe. For the sake of the environment, perhaps it is a wake up call to this country to follow in Europe's footsteps. When it concerns helping out Gaia I'm all for it!

That is true...compared to Europe we've been getting away with relatively low gas prices for a long time. But over there they adapt. They have great mass transit, many people live close to their jobs, walk, have the little scooters and cars. They adapted which is what we'll have to do.

Very true, mdterp01, but we have a big problem Europe doesn't have -- urban sprawl.

We've been very stupid about how we build. Square miles upon square miles of single-family houses with yards around them don't have enough density of population to make public transit economically viable in most parts of this country. High-density cities (New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco) have great public transit systems in the core cities, but once you get out in the burbs public transit if it exists at all is designed to get commuters into the central city for work, and not to take mom to do her shopping, or to get the kids to school and soccer practice. Shopping centers with acres of free parking are unknown in Europe. Stores over there are much smaller, and walkable.

Pushkin, excellent point about urban sprawl. There are some US cities though that were planned so they would NOT become urban sprawl blight. Closest to me, Portland, Ore. comes to mind. Excellent mass transit system. My city, Spokane, is working on a comprehensive bicycle friendly plan, which is a big step. We are also having a bike to work day....

It thrills me nothing more than to pull into a gas station on my motorbike- particularly when there is some monstrous SUV across from me at the pumps. I fill my tank with about 2 1/2 gallons of 93 octane, pay the eight or nine bucks at the pump with my gas card and and roar off, often cackling! I get about 40-50 mpg with almost all in town riding and a heavy right hand. As an added bonus, I really like riding in to work- something about being one with the machine for the ride gets me in a terrific mood for the day.

Heard something briefly on the national news this morning where $5.00 a gallon, is predicted soon. Motorcyles are flying out the doors at dealerships.

So with you on this one. I was amazed when I was in Germany about 15 years ago to see all the open space. As we rode the train, the pattern was clear, densely packed urban area, some suburbs and farmland, then open space until the next town. I don't know if it is still like that, but clearly that type of development makes public transport both cheap and easy.

The problem, of course, is that our entire country cannot be re-developed to reduce urban sprawl - at least not easily. I am afraid we are stuck with high gas usage for the foreseeable future. I have read reports that people are turning in their SUVs and trucks for smaller cars, but only so many people can do that.

I traded in a VW for a Hyundai last year. You'd think the VW would have good gas mileage, but it was the GTI version, so not so much. I am getting anywhere from 33% to 50% better mileage with the new car, which is great. Living in DC the car is a total luxury, and in one year I've driven less than 14,000 miles. When you subtract my 7,500 mile cross-country vacation, three trips to New England and one to Chicago, I've driven about 2,000 miles in the city. That's pretty typical for me. I walk, take the bus or the train as much as possible, especially with gas at $3.71 here in the District.

One thing that really pisses me off is realizing how poorly the car companies, even Toyota, have done in improving gas mileage. If you look at old car ads from the 70s and early 80s, they were advertising cars with 30 - 35 miles per gallon on the highway, just about where we are now. Certainly the cars are larger now, so the MPG/pound is better, but are we really saying that with the technological improvements of the last 30 years we cannot improve gas mileage on a standard combustion engine?

I think if gas prices continue to stay high, and they probably will, we'll see a shift in this country in the housing marketplace. People will want to live closer to work, shopping, and schools, and will look for housing that effects that. Single-family suburban houses will be abandoned in favor of row houses and townhouses like one finds in the central cities. People of an even more urban bent will gravitate toward high rises.

We're seeing this some here in the Bay Area not because of high gas prices (yet), but because babyboomers' kids have all grown and left the nest, and boomers no longer need 3-4 bedroom houses. They're moving into smaller dwellings, some of them back to the inner cities. In the last couple of years there has been a ton of new high-rise condos and apartment buildings built in San Francisco, and there are tons more on the drawing board.

That said, I think the forces of fuel prices, social and legislative pressure to reduce carbon footprints, and the lessening market for single-family, suburban houses will naturally cause urban sprawl in the US to shrink on its own.

I think a big part of this involves safety equipment added to vehicles since the 70s and early 80s. All that adds considerable weight to a car, which obviously decreases MPG. We require steel construction, air bags, etc. Add in power seats, power windows, whatever...it can add hundreds of pounds to a car. Now, the last thing I'm doing is apologizing for or excusing automakers; however, it's easy to see that a 30+ mpg car right now might get 40+ if all that safety equipment went away. Of course, who wants to purchase a vehicle that might completely come apart in a collision? Not me...

All I have to say about gas prices is one of my Grandpa's favorite sayings:

"God da*n mother f**king sh*t on a bi**h t*t"

The technology has been around for awhile, it is simply that very few have been interested in buying it. For the past 15 years, consumers insisted on buying huge trucks and SUV's with huge engines. The car companies were thrilled because it costs them practically nothing to make a SUV with a 6+ liter V8, and people were stupid enough to pay 40-50 grand (or more) for what is essentially a pickup truck with leather seats. And today's work trucks are absurd. When I worked construction in the 1980's, the full sized trucks back then had plenty of room to do your job, now an '89 F250 looks like a shopping cart. Cars too, have become bloated. Look at a modern Civic compared to the original, or today's VW models with an old Rabbit. It was (and is) no problem to put a 4 cylinder engine in a small car and have it get 30+ mpg. As the price of fuel continues to rise, you will see better engine techology, but with people still buying brand new gas guzzlers, it is going to take some time.

In my grandfather's day 1/3 of the world's population (China and India) wasn't going through an economic boom. Those countries are getting tens of thousands of additional cars on the roads every month. And, guess what. They are competing for the same oil to run them we are.

I'm afraid this rise in the cost of crude oil and downstream gas prices is truly more supply & demand than oil company greed.