A crowd of motorists waiting for their gas rations in Portland in 1973/Wikimedia Commons

At least gas is still available

Fifty-two years after Americans should have learned the danger of letting machines dictate the design of their cities and the way they live, people across the country are whining about “pain at the pump” as prices keep rising for the petrochemicals needed to feed those machines.

They should be happy. At least they can get gasoline and diesel fuel without waiting in line for hours, as in 1973, hoping to arrive at a pump that still had petrol despite its skyrocketing cost. Gas prices at that time climbed by 62 percent in two years on their way to more than tripling by 1980.

Gasoline hit the 2026 equivalent of $4.91 per gallon in Los Angeles in 1980, about 75 cents a gallon above the U.S. average price at this time, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration numbers.

California prices these days are even higher thanks to the state’s 61-cent-a-gallon gas tax and greenhouse-gas reduction rules for California refineries that are estimated to have caused an increase of about 50-cent-per-gallon, according to Cal Matters.

This $1.11 in added costs has helped push the current, average California price to $5.89 per gallon, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), and has left-leaning Cal Matters reporting that “at least two Democratic contenders for California governor are…push(ing) for policies they say would give drivers a break.”

Be thankful that you’re living in Alaska, where the normally high price of gas is now more than a dollar per gallon cheaper than in California. AAA is reporting an Alaska, statewide average of $4.66 per gallon, which – as unsettling as it might seem – is only about 50 cents above the $4.13 national average as posted by AAA.

If you’re someone who has relocated close to your place of work, this increase might be little more than a minor irritation. If you’re one of the many Anchorage-employed who split the city for life in “The Valley,” as most everyone refers to the Matanuska-Susitna Valley surrounding the bedroom communities of Palmer and Wasilla, it is, unfortunately, a sadly different story.

If the daily agony of commuting amongst all those drivers who fail to drive like you think they should isn’t bad enough, you’re now looking at spending a whole lot more money on the should-be, 45-minute drive to town that can stretch to an hour or hours if some fool causes an accident that shuts down the whole Glenn Highway.

A ‘good’ bad thing

Those who fear global warming should, however, be celebrating this increase in the cost of fuel. Expensive gasoline and diesel are two of the few things that have been known to reduce the mileage Americans drive, and thus reduce the volume of greenhouse gases their vehicles release into the atmosphere.

But most of the global-warming crowd can’t celebrate because the jump in gas prices is all due to President Donald Trump declaring war on Iran.

When you are politically invested, and especially if you are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), it’s impossible to accept that bad people can sometimes do what you believe to be good things, even if by accident, just as it is sometimes impossible to accept that good people can do some really bad things.

And yes, Trump is a “bad” man in that his too-often crude behavior sets a horrible example for the nation – imagine having a neighbor always lobbing F-bombs over the fence – as does his regularly dishonesty, although he’s not alone among American politicians in this regard.

Honesty seems to be growing anathema to American pols right and left.

But this doesn’t alter real-world facts, and one of those facts is that the best way to reduce the use of hydrocarbon fuels and associated greenhouse gases is to increase the cost of fuel.

When Gallup polled Americans about rising gas prices at the end of the 2010s, it found that a majority – 51 percent – would start shopping for a more fuel-efficient vehicle (32 percent) or hop aboard mass transit (19 percent) at fuel prices between $5 per gallon and $6 a gallon.

Those looking to shift to high-mileage vehicles only increased as Gallop pushed the theoretical price of fuel higher. Above $10 per gallon, only about a third of Americans were of the opinion that money is no object, though even at that price, 52 percent said no way to mass transit.

About a quarter also expressed a desire to move closer to where they drove most often as fuel prices increased.

The polling was done when gas prices were rising rapidly, as they are now, and Gallup reported, as one might expect, that those less financially well off were more likely to change their behavior than the well-to-do

“…Forty-four percent of those who say recent increases in gas prices are causing them ‘severe’ financial hardship would replace their vehicle at prices up to the $5 range, while 25 percent of those experiencing no financial hardship would do so,” Gallup reported.

But, of course, as events played out, fuel prices stopped going up and then started going down and by 2025, two fuel-inefficient trucks – the Ford F-Series and the Chevrolet Silverado – were the best-selling vehicles in the U.S., with three more trucks and three sport-utility vehicles comprising eight of the top 10.

The only high-mileage vehicles in that group were the all-electric Tesla Model Y and the Toyota Camry, a hybrid credited with 47 miles per gallon (MPG) and 45 MPG on the highway.

Among the trucks in Ford’s F-series, the PowerBoost Hybrid was reported to lead “the pack with an outstanding 26 (MPG) combined rating. The efficient 2.7L EcoBoost delivers 25 combined, while the robust 3.5L EcoBoost achieves 20 combined. Even the classic 5.0L V8 provides a respectable 18 combined rating.”

That 18 mpg obviously looked better at the year-ago, average $3.63 per gallon that AAA reports, versus the $4.66 of today. But, hey, things could be worse. The 27 to 30 MPG F-series diesel looked the way to go a year ago with diesel fuel prices averaging even lower than those for gas at $3.58 per gallon.

Diesel, however, has since gone through the roof. AAA reported an increase approaching $2.50 per gallon with Alaska’s diesel fuel average now at $5.95. Fuel for that diesel still pencils out cheaper than for a 5.0L V8, but the 2.7L Ecoboost beats it hands down on fuel cost per mile.

Pump pain

Whatever the fuel, the price hike is impossible to miss when filling up at the gas station, although it doesn’t seem to have done much to alter the way Anchorage motorists drive. Many in Midtown Anchorage still floor it when a stoplight turns green, so they can rush to the next stoplight to catch the red, forcing them to stop.

Apparently, they don’t understand that the lights are synchronized with road speed limits. And with physics seemingly no longer taught in U.S. schools, no one can expect younger drivers to learn that it takes a lot more energy to start wheels rolling than to keep wheels rolling.

But then again, we wouldn’t be where we are today if people had been thinking rather than letting motor vehicles dictate how they live. Thanks to decades of cities designed for motor vehicles more than for people, many now believe they can’t live without a car or truck.

In many cases, this is a well-founded belief. Take it from the progressive New York Times, which has for years now been all over the global-warming issue but seems to have missed the connection between traffic volumes and greenhouse gases.

“America is a car country,” the Times informed its readers just days ago. “For decades, millions of families relied on inexpensive cars to get from home to work and school.”

Where the Times got the idea that cars were ever “inexpensive” is unclear, but it’s probably at least partly right about the travel to work and school. This has been on the increase for decades.

The trend is especially obvious among children, a near majority of whom were still walking or biking to school in 1969. The National Center for Safe Routes to School reports 48 percent of those in grades K through 8th were getting to school under their own power in ’69, but by 2017 that percentage had fallen to 11 percent. 

The number of kids being driven to school is now so great that parents have begun to worry about their children getting run down by other drivers in the traffic jams that form around school entrances.

“…Congestion stems largely from families relying on cars rather than walking or biking – a challenge many communities face, but one that’s magnified here because the school sits on narrow neighborhood streets with no room to absorb the morning rush,” The Press Democrat reported in December after a parent was hit in a crosswalk near a school in Calistoga, Calif.

But the situation around the Calistoga school is by no means unique. A quick Google search reveals a long list of stories about parents across the country complaining about traffic around schools.

‘You have to pay attention’: Lancaster police urge traffic safety after child hit by vehicle,” 10TV News in Columbus, OH headlined two weeks ago. “The crash comes about a week after another child on a scooter was hit by a car near Scioto Darby Elementary School.”

The story below cautioned motorists to “stay off cell phones, (and) pay attention to the roadway,” but focused more on how parents need to do a better job of teaching their kids to watch out for motor vehicles.

This is the sort of thinking “car brain” has brought to the U.S. This is now a country where children are expected to show better judgment than adults. This sort of thinking might help explain why some parents are now so worried about the safety of their children walking or biking to school that they drive them instead, which only adds to the increasingly dangerous congestion problem around schools.

And that is only one of the many problems associated with the Times’ “car country,” where approximately six children die every day as part of an annual motor vehicle kill of 35,000 to 40,000 people.

This constitutes a body count about two and a half times the number of people killed in firearm homicides. But who’s counting?

Besides, traffic deaths might be the least of the mortality problems linked to the way motor vehicles have shaped, or misshaped, an increasingly unhealthy U.S. society both physically and mentally.

Nationwide Insurance in March reported that 40 percent of drivers now end up stressed from driving “and more than two-thirds frequently witness road rage,” the worst manifestation of that stress, and something that Dwight Hennessy, a professor of psychology at Buffalo State University who studies road rage, has found on the increase among female drivers.

“…When you look at different versions of aggression just in general, you’ll find that there are some areas where women are more aggressive than men,” he told the American Physcological Association’s “Speaking of Psychology” podcast. “Relational aggression, for example, or (they are) as aggressive as men in say verbal types of things. And something similar emerges in the traffic environment as well. It depends on a lot of different factors, but there are times where there are women who are just as if not more aggressive than men.”

Road rage ends up with people dying in the here and now, while the general stress level causes all sorts of health problems over the long run.

“…Stress-related disorders may lead to dysregulation of immune responses and chronic inflammation, which, in return, may cause elevated risks of several chronic and fatal diseases, such as (cardiovascular disease) CVD, life-threatening infection, and autoimmune disease,” a global team of researchers reported in The Lancet, Regional Health Europe, a peer-reviewed medical journal.

They also noted that stress can lead to “negative behavioral changes…such as misuse of alcohol or illicit drugs,(that) may compromise executive function and capacity of decision making, putting the patients in dangerous situations or leading to impaired capacity to identify and react appropriately to potential threats, which may consequently increase the risk of mortality due to unnatural causes.”

This is one factor, among others, that might have led to the finding that people under stress have higher rates of all-cause mortality, something many previous studies of stress have also found. And stress, along with a lack of physical activity, helps explain why the U.S. led the Western world in deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Physical inactivity is linked directly and indirectly to “car country.” The direct part involves people spending hours per day commuting only to arrive home so physically and emotionally exhausted that all they want to do is sit in front of a TV and chill.

The indirect parts is tied to a society so overrun with motor vehicles that some are afraid to go for a walk or ride a bike for fear of being run down, or believe they must use a motor vehicle to go anywhere due to the design of subdivisions that focus on motor vehicle access and ignore travel by foot or bicycle. 

This has led to a steady decline in physical activity in this country, and about all you really need to know about the consequences of that decline was covered by 26 words in a vastly overlooked Covid-19 study published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Preventive Medicine three years ago:

“…Those who were consistently inactive were 191 percent more likely to be hospitalized and 391 percent more likely to die than those who were consistently active,” the authors of that study concluded.

The researchers did not report what percentage of Americans put themselves at a nearly four-times greater risk of dying from Covid-19 because they drove everywhere and walked nowhere, but if you spend any time observing American behaviors, you have to believe the percentage is high.

Why? Because Americans have become so conditioned to living in “car country” that they appear destined to cling to their steering wheels like pacifiers until someone pries off their cold, dead fingers.