minor adjustments for the price of gas
I keep track of my bike miles on a little web app i wrote a few years ago, and one of the things i like to track is the amount of gas saved by biking places rather than driving. I flag commute rides, so only the bike rides that arguably replace what could have been a car trip count; so weekend rides just for fun add miles, but don’t count toward the gas total.
I last updated the file that contains the variable for gas prices back in December, and i don’t remember if i changed the going rate for gas then or not. It has been at $2.80 for a while, so it’s probably been longer than that. Today i bumped it up to (a somewhat conservative) $3.50/gallon to generally keep pace with current prices. My gas savings for the year to date magically went from $37.16 to $46.45. That’s two extra Chipotle burritos!
That’s for a little over 13 gallons of gas, or about what my car would need for a fill up if i were running on vapors. I haven’t been filling up the tank very often at all since spring riding season kicked into full swing, but i have noticed the stickers on pumps instructing drivers on the $50 limit some (at least Visa and Discover) credit cards apply to pay-at-the-pump purchases. They’re told to put in $50 worth, then start again like they’re visiting twice (or even more, i suppose, for some vehicles). I’m going to go back to my high school habit of putting in $10-15 worth of gas in at a time as needed to avoid the $50 hit. I should need another $10 in a month or so.
A lot of people weekly drive the 300+ miles that i’ve commuted by bike for the year so far. For long-distance commuters, it’s an unavoidable expense in the short term because of living and/or working where bike routes and mass transit are non-existant. I wonder how long this added expense will go on being quietly absorbed before we start to see either a cultural move back to cities or a big suburban push for alternative transportation infrastructure. The bus lines will most likely win over bike lanes, but maybe we’ll finally start looking at commuter trains more seriously. Maybe we’ll finally get a really family-friendly bike route from downtown out to the MN Landscape Arboretum or something.
How far could ever-increasing gasoline costs push society? Will we make visits to friends across town overnighters, to avoid having to bike the kids home 20 miles late at night? Will a series of Inns catering to cyclists pop up along the Munger trail, giving lodging to weary travelers heading for the north shore? Will my neighbors begin lobbying to keep horses in their garages next to the chicken coops? Will the Amish finally take over the country, driving their wagons around the abandoned carcasses of rotting Escalades with spinner hubcaps faintly creaking in the breeze? We can only hope, my friend, we can only hope. In the meantime, i’m working on my beard and nail-free carpentry skills.