Rise and Fall

I like that Sarah Palin is chanting the drill! drill! drill! mantra. However, yesterday having heard an interview, she's just another politician who erroneously believes that the U.S. will somehow gain energy independence through drilling. Especially when we hear such asinine statements as "No, ANWR won't be our panacea, but every little bit helps. Every drop of domestic production gets us a little bit closer to energy independence."

Bullshit. We are no closer now to oil independence than the day we became a net oil importing country in the late 1940s. Oil independence will never happen. If we consumed just what we domestically produced, this NASCAR nation would implode.

My Franklin Blvd. observation/chronology: As gas prices rose in the early spring, I saw many more bikes on Franklin Blvd., but no decrease in vehicular traffic. As gas rose above $3.60, I saw many new faces on public transit, and a noticeable decline in traffic. As gas moved beyond $4.00 this early summer, that's when there was a significant drop. The boulevard was a ghost town on Friday afternoons. But now, late summer, as prices fall back to $3.60, I'm clearly noticing an uptick in traffic and there aren't anywhere near as many bicyclists as there were in the spring.

The dynamics are interesting. The direction of pricing, its movements, are what compels people to either drive more or less. As it now falls to $3.60, people see this as a bargain and drive more, even though as it was rising through $3.60 they saw it as a scalping and they drove less.

Franklin Blvd. is a great indicator of national patterns of fuel consumption. But I-80 is not. I regularly queried co-workers who commute from Benicia and Fairfield, and they reported not a hint of declining or increasing traffic at any time...because everyone on the freeways have no options available to them to reduce their commuting consumption. On Franklin Blvd., many more trips are recreational and it was the drop in recreational oil that led to declining demand and the falling prices.

The first wave of employment casualties have been those dependent on recreational oil users, like the master baiter, RV dealership salesmen, videogame parlors, restaurant owners, car audio installers, Starbucks, Hummer salesmen, and balloon shop proprietors. Not surprisingly, these are the only jobs available in Elk Grove, retail and sprawl servicing. Hundreds of strip retail units lay vacant. These regional job losses combined with the thousands of Elk Grovian foreclosures also contributed to decreased use of the Franklin corridor.