Story originally printed in the Tomah Journal or online at www.tomahjournal.com
Published - Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Column: Blame for high gas prices? Count the stoplights
In 1977, when my family arrived in Baraboo, the community (including West Baraboo) had three stoplights.
In 1978, it added a fourth, and it stayed at four for roughly the next dozen years.
Today, Baraboo and West Baraboo have 10 stoplights. That doesn’t include the three stoplights on Highway 12 between Baraboo and Lake Delton, none of which existed 20 years ago.
All those new stoplights might explain the high price of gasoline.
Today, a gallon of gasoline costs more in both absolute and inflation-adjusted terms than ever before. Most of us seem perplexed by this, as though $1 per gallon is the natural price of gas and anything above that can only be explained by collusion and manipulation.
Sorry, but the real explanation is simple: accelerated consumption of a finite resource. Until very recently, Americans were putting more miles on their automobiles than ever before, and we were doing it with bigger vehicles than ever before (you just weren’t a real man unless you drove a big honkin’ pickup truck or SUV). In Wisconsin, for example, “vehicle miles traveled” have risen five times faster than population growth over the past three decades.
Just so readers don’t think I’m cherry picking stoplight data (Baraboo lies on the fringe of a tourist area), consider Tomah. In 1978, when I made my first trip to Tomah as a member of the Baraboo High School tennis squad, Tomah had two stoplights. When I began working for the Tomah Journal in 1987, it had four. The city now has seven, including the one at the I-94 bridge.
Or how about Necedah? Here’s a community of 880 people that recently installed stoplights at its main downtown intersection because mere stop signs could no longer effectively regulate traffic.
These aren’t communities experiencing explosive growth like Miami, Austin, Phoenix or Las Vegas -- these are central Wisconsin communities that are losing population relative to the rest of the country but still must contend with a substantial increase in traffic flow. Even slow-growth areas are clogged by more cars.
It’s hard to be optimistic about gas prices falling any time soon. The rest of the world has long envied America’s hyper-mobility and wants to consume petroleum just like we do. Even worse, nearly all the easy-to-get oil has either been discovered or extracted. While there may be as much as two centuries of oil left in the ground, much of it lies deep under the ocean, under frozen wastelands or locked inside of rocks. To paraphrase Greg Easterbrook from eight years ago, the era of oil isn’t over, but the era of cheap oil has come to an end.
It almost certainly means less consumption, but is that such a horrible thing? Would it be so terrible if we just turned the clock back to, say, 1988 in terms of vehicle miles driven? Has all this time we’ve spent in our vehicles made us any richer or any happier, or has it increased congestion and scarred once beautiful landscapes with the blight of exurban sprawl?
We don’t need a revival of the horse-and-buggy era to maintain a reasonable lifestyle that allows for a modest level of mobility. How about the days when four stoplights were sufficient to get traffic through Baraboo and Tomah? That’s not austerity; that’s sanity.
Steve Rundio is the Perspective Page Editor of Tomah Newspapers.
All stories copyright 2006 Tomah Journal and other attributed sources.