Gas @ $6: Fewer, smaller cars, less driving

This is my second installment post on “$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better” (here) by Christopher Steiner. These quotes are from his “Chapter $6: Society Change and the Dead SUV.” I think all these changes are plausible, if not likely, as the price of gas goes up.

Burying the SUV:

Six-dollar gas, though its specter may sound implausible, isn’t too far away, says Jeffrey Rubin, a respected economist and chief strategist and managing director of CIBC world market. Rubin says gasoline will likely cost $7 a gallon by 2010. As a result, he says, “Over the next four years, we are likely to witness the greatest mass exodus of vehicles off America’s highway in history. By 2012, there should be some 100 million fewer vehicles on American roadways than there are today – a decline that dwarfs all previous adjustments including those during the two OPEC oil shocks.”

No realm of our lives will be affected faster, and no corner of big business will be rocked harder, than that of the vehicles we drive. Of those 10 million vehicles that Rubin predicts will come off U.S. roads, many will be SUVs. In fact, if you examine things with an eye toward a kind of natural selection of automobiles in a world of $6 gas, it’s pragmatic and reasonable to expect that most of the vehicles coming off the road will be the guzzlers, the SUVs, the nonessential pickup trucks, the low-end sports cars. Those are the cars people won’t want.

Embracing diesel:

Diesel engines, long ignored and often maligned in North America will begin to settle in at the American table when gas goes to $6. Ford has a car for sale in Europe right now that gets 65 miles per gallon.

Less auto accident deaths:

Harvard and the University of Alabama determined that for every 10% gas price increase, there’s a resulting 2.3% in the number of driving deaths nationwide. This means a shift from $4 gas to $6 gas would save 4,000 lives. That’s a third more people than America lost in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center

A physically skinnier America:

A $1 rise in gas means 11,000 fewer lives lost to obesity-related causes and $11 billion per year saved on health costs.

 Cleaner air:

More important than the improved sharpness of our mountain views, however, will be the multiple thousands of lives saved by fewer particles invading our air.

Era of widespread tolling:

Schofer believes that the likelier solution will be some kind of usage tax on our major roads, similar to a toll, but widespread and sliding, so that rush-hour drivers get dinged for more.

 Less school busing:

It could be that, for at least a time – until technology brings us cheaper-running busses, and it will – many school districts across the country will abandon busing except in the most rural of cases.

Less youth sports traveling:

States will implement changes that will mean more than merely few multiday tournaments and trips to play elite teams from other states. The changes will alter how states conduct playoff tournaments and, in some cases, will even skew competition, sectionals, and playoffs unfairly.

 Return of police foot patrol:

Americans may be seeing fewer police cars, but they’re not seeing less police protection. Police have taken to the sidewalks one again, much like they did a century ago on America’s tight and dense city avenues.