Running on Empty
Kip Ward
Posted: 04.30.2008 / 8:37 PM PDT
I stopped by one of our three local pawnshops today. We didn’t used to have pawnshops in Lincoln City but then we didn’t used to have a casino either. The casino wrote in a newspaper article that business was down. The reason they wrote the editorial was because the city wants to raise the Transient Room Tax (AKA hotel bed tax) by one percent. I don’t care either way; ten percent is easier to figure than nine percent. Plus I’m not trying to make a living off of this old hotel. I feel sorry for some of the smaller hotels though, living hand to mouth and watching every dime. It’s tough to be told that you have to cough up even more money by people who have never run a business; people who have never had to make a payroll in their lives. It’s a Republican maker if there ever was one.
Anyway, back to the pawnshop. I asked the pawnshop owner if there had been anyone in lately pawning items to get money to buy gas. “Any?” she replied. “The last three people who were in here were pawning stuff just to get enough gas to get to work.” She went on to say that people were coming in all the time to get gas money. Business was good.
My initial reaction was dismay. I’m a liberal after all. These poor people have to cannibalize the last of their possessions to simply get to work. And what will happen when all of their possessions are gone? Well, lets work our way down the food chain and speculate what happens when we have four dollar a gallon gas prices.
For people of financial means the price of gas is not likely to affect their lifestyle. More likely, it’s just fodder for conversation at the cocktail hour. They will still leave the car running while they dart in to run a quick errand.
How about the middle class folks? Well that’s a bit different because they are going to have to make trade offs. For those who have the mind set that their automobile use is indispensable, they may have to get more fuel efficient cars, or drive less. Or if they don’t want to change their driving habits at all, they are going to have to give up other things in their lives so they can afford gas. Their standard of living will fall.
It gets worse for the lower middle class. Nobody wants to give up their cars, but right now these folks are financially pinched. They have little or no savings, and with the housing market in the ditch, they have no equity in their homes. Loan qualifications are about as tight as a hangman’s noose. Leaving them only the last remaining bit on their credit cards to hopefully get them by until an “answer” is found. And the clock is ticking.
And the answer. Who has it? Well, Hillary and John say they do, and an easy one it is. They call it a gas tax holiday. You’ve heard of it. It will drop the price of gasoline a whopping eighteen cents for three months, and cost the treasury billions. Easy fixes. We demand and our politicians never fail to supply the easy fix. Something tells me that this falls into the “easy fix” category.
So what about the lower class? We live in a capitalistic society and it is an unfortunate truth that the burden of rising gas prices falls disproportionately upon the poor. And the simple truth is that over the next few years there will be no easy fixes. The market is going to determine who gets the gas and who doesn’t. The poor will cannibalize their possessions until they finally have to let go of their cars. The lower middle class may have to follow suit to some degree. And the middle class family may loose a car or two as well.
Is that all bad? I don’t believe so. It is an inconvenience at worse. Lots of cars will be gone, some of the worse polluters off the roads. Demand for gas will fall and the environment may get a leg up. Driving isn’t the only way to get to work. In fact with all of the car related expenses gone one’s standard of living just might increase. We will have to join the rest of the world in getting rid of vehicles that we don’t need, driving mini cars, riding scooters, and bikes.
It will take years to solve our dependence on fossil fuels. And as we struggle, the free market will accomplish what our politicians are afraid to do. How bad will it be? Well let’s see, we will have fewer cars on the road, use less gas, and have less pollution. Some people’s standard of living may actually increase, and people will still get from here to there. Maybe this has a happy ending after all.
May 3rd, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Kip, while I agree with you about the gas-tax as political stunt, I’ve got to take issue with your idea that the working poor (and especially service workers, and most especially service workers outside major cities) will be better off without their cars.
I think I know a little of what I speak, having in my younger days having lived in Seattle for two-years without a car. At the time, Seattle had a pretty good transit system and relatively safe streets (hey, I only got mugged once). I had a retail job, often closing my neighborhood store at 9PM, cleaning up or doing books, and heading home no earlier than 10PM or so. I thought of myself as a “starving artist,” but I certainly qualified as working poor.
The reality is that, even when there is an available and usable transit system (something that’s nearly impossible in small towns and rural areas) it best serves middle and upper-class workers who have 9-5 jobs near urban centers, live in suburbs, and who have an automobile as an alternative.
Service people who work nights, shifts, and odd hours, and who are more likely to work in industrial or outlying areas or on business-strips of hotels or restaurants, they often aren’t served at all. Buses run infrequently or not at all off-peak hours. Most bus routes stay clear of the busy roads full of service businesses. Likewise with industrial areas, and we won’t even talk about the low-income/high-crime areas where the working poor often live. If a night-bus can be had, it may mean a long walk and waiting hours exposed to the weather and criminals (and perhaps another long wait at a transit hub to get a bus home or to the job).
Yes, not having a car is a savings, but lack of access to one has many hidden costs in money and time (and if you think time isn’t important to service workers, many of whom juggle 2-3 part-time jobs to make ends meet, you’re wrong).
Everything takes longer. A medical appointment or a meeting with your child’s teacher will cost a day’s work, not a few hours. Even if there are shopping or errand stops conveniently located between work and home (and things are open when you pass buy) any stop probably adds at least an hour of walking and waiting to your transit time.
Everything costs more. You end up buying bread and milk for your kids at the local convenience store, not the discount supermarket just a few miles up the road. You shop how you can when you can. Sales are for people with more time and flexibility than you. Want to buy anything bigger than you can carry under your arm or on your back? You have a problem.
Transit isn’t free either. I was in the habit of buying 90-day transit passes, but it really hurt when it was time to buy a new one, and it cost just the same no matter how much or little I used it. If was another fixed, periodic bill when I already had too many fixed and periodic bills.
With a car, if money is too tight to fill the tank this week, at least you have the option of putting in a few gallons to get to work, or parking the car and finding another way to work until the next pay-check arrives. There’s still insurance (assuming you have insurance) but…
And these things were hard enough when I was a young, strong, single person who didn’t blink at walking ten miles a day. Try being older, or suffering chronic health problems, or dealing with small children. Having a family without a car is far, far more difficult, and often the children suffer the most.
Yes, there are other alternatives. Bikes have their time and place. Car pools. But almost everything you can name works better with a personal car to back it up, and service workers most need the flexibility that an automobile offers.
And there is one other thing an automobile can do for the working poor, and it’s a damned shame that it too often comes to this. If things get bad enough, you can live in it.
May 4th, 2008 at 7:06 am
I get so tired of people demanding that we drive less.
WE ARE DRIVING LESS!!! Not only because of gas prices but because of the constant yammering about “global warming” we are virtual prisoners in our homes. We all might as well live on some tiny island for all the going we get to do. One of my fondest memories is, as a child, the “Sunday drive.” No more. We now have the “Sunday housecleaning” or the “Sunday Netflix.”
And Steve is right about the extreme shortcomings of “public transit.” We try to steer a course between good schools and proximity to work when choosing a house. We are now nine miles from the job, but even when we lived in a metropolis, and our apartment was three miles from the job, and we very much wanted to use public transport, we could not because it would have added nearly three hours to an already long work day. It was also more expensive than the cost of owning and operating a car. Now some wag will say we need to improve public transport. Phooey. If you can think of an uglier, less useful way to waste tax dollars I’d like to hear it.
May 14th, 2008 at 3:10 am
My comments shouldn’t be taken as an attack on public transit. I think it’s an important thing to have, and a vital tool in reducing our oil addiction and carbon footprint.
My point is that mass-transit works only for a large but limited number of people currently traveling by automobile. It works best for people who live in dense urban areas. It works best for people who work in urban cores or for large industrial employers (big enough to justify their own scheduled bus routes). It works best for people who work 9-5 jobs.
It doesn’t work well for service workers. It doesn’t work well for shift workers (at least the ones working for smaller employees). It doesn’t work well for people in smaller towns. It doesn’t work well for the working poor (though in some cases they have no choice but to try and make it work).
I agree, the blanket mantra that Americans all need to give up their cars and take transit is foolish. Transit works best when it can skim commuters out of high-density routes and times. Lower the densities and the efficiencies quickly vanish.
There many other are other tools. We’ve got subsidized taxis, van-pools, car-pools, bus lanes, bike lanes, carpool lanes, tax incentives to buy more fuel-efficient (moving towards zero-emission)cars, just to name a few. It’s going to take creative use of all these and more to solve our interlinked oil and global warming problems.
But the people who are best qualified to leave their SUVs in the garage and take the train or bus to work are white-collar office workers and professionals. Solutions that put the burden of the solution on the backs service workers and the working poor are misguided in my opinion.
May 24th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
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