Abbey Normal

"The independent trucker doesn't have anybody on their side to help them recover costs," says Larry Daniel, president of America's Independent Truckers' Association, which is also advocating a mandated fuel surcharge. "As much as I hate government intervention under normal conditions, these are not normal conditions." A quote from an article I read this morning.

These aren't normal conditions? What would normal be? $3.95?

I very clearly remember biking to work in the winter of '04. Elk Grove had been approving the building of 5,000+ homes a year (the peak rate in May of '04 was 553 issued permits). And every one of them came with two wage earners to afford it and 1.8 commuters to other regions to work. I was on Franklin Blvd. (this blog should be called the Franklin Monologues), and traffic was at a stall, and in this one section of road I passed 20 SUVs in succession. Twenty. I remember very clearly the faces of the people in this jam -- my age (30-ish), single drivers, not terribly frustrated by the traffic but looking around, looking at me...kinda like this blog, just sorta wandering. And gas was cheap. I don't remember what it was, but it was as cheap as it had been since 2000, and it was as cheap as it has ever been since.

That was normal.

And everyone stacked at that traffic light burned it at twice the rate we were burning it two decades earlier. Right then, I knew this was not going to continue for much longer. I was really surprised the party lasted another two and a half years. I peg my own peak realization somewhere in 2003. If we had stopped the madness back then, I suppose we'd be in far better shape now.

We had gone to war 8 months earlier ostensibly to establish a police presence in the largest oil region of the world. Not one person made the connection between our behavior overseas and our behavior at home.

And we still aren't!

The quote above suggests normalcy should be $2.50 diesel, and that we now need to further subsidize it and further externalize the costs to keep independent truckers driving.

Fuck that, and fuck them. Another quote in that same article: "The reason it's such a big issue isn't that the price is $3.50 or $4, but that it went up so quickly," says Peter Swan, a professor of logistics and operations management at Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg.

So the problem is not $4, it's the fast increase! Americans are insanely stupid. Now this is normal.