6.9.2K8: "Check engine"

Rising oil and gas prices may finally be exerting some real influence on Americans. In the past few months, the American public has actually begun to curtail their driving habits in overt and subtle ways. More people are turning to mass transportation to get to work. For the first time in almost twenty years, SUV sales are on the decline, and more SUVs are being traded in for smaller vehicles than ever before. This past holiday, more Americans stayed put instead of driving or flying to distant vacation spots.

Are Americans finally, honestly, trying to change their habits?

I'd have to say yes... but only under duress. Americans don't want to change, they consider that they are being forced to change over economic concerns. All of the change we've seen so far has only been a reflection of high prices... if gas prices dropped even a few cents to a few dimes, Americans would jump back in their SUVs and roar off into the sunset.

Now, the President and Congress are trying to find a "quick fix" for high gas prices... essentially, a way to placate the American public into believing our leaders are doing their job, and to avoid panic as the economy worsens. So they can jump back into those SUVs.

Unfortunately, there never was, nor will there ever be, a "quick fix" to the gas crisis. In fact, we're in the state we're in specifically because we wanted a quick fix, and refused to do anything without the quick fix, thirty years ago. In the seventies, we were faced with a gas shortage, and numerous ways around it were sought. But the majority of Americans didn't like the answers—using mass transportation, driving smaller cars, driving less, living closer to work, etc—because they weren't easy enough... they weren't the "quick fix" that would allow them to not change their habits, and still save money. So they changed nothing, and now we're up against the inevitable wall you reach when you know you have to change something, but you don't.

Think of our situation to be like a driver who knows his car needs fresh, clean oil, or it will soon seize up. But it's too much trouble to pull over, drain the tank, buy oil and pour it in... he wants a fairy godmother to just wave a wand at the next toll plaza, and replenish his oil without the loss of a second. So, instead of taking care of the problem when he knows he should, and when it would virtually guarantee no troubles on the road in the future, he keeps going, in the hope that he'll see a fairy godmother any second now. And despite the fact that he sees no godmothers along the side of the road, and has no real reason to expect one, he keeps driving... knowing every mile is a mile too many.

Presently, the engine starts overheating and running badly. He really needs to stop... but he really, really wants to see that fairy godmother on the side of the road, so he grits his teeth and keeps going. Smoke starts to pour out of the hood, but he prays for godmothers, and keeps going. Then the engine finally seizes up. The driver pulls off of the road, and can only stare at his now-dead car, stranding him in the middle of nowhere, and no oil or fairy godmothers in sight. And he knows that, compared to the few dollars he could have spent miles back to get his oil changed, now he'll be spending much, much more to replace his engine. He's well and truly screwed himself.

We are presently at the "check engine" light moment of this analogy. We should have taken action a long time ago, and now it's a shade before "too late." At this point, anything we do, or don't do, will be jarring and expensive... but the longer we wait, we know the more jarring and expensive it will be.

6.14.2K8: Washington getting its lumps

Washington, D.C. may not be getting hit by floods and tornadoes... but it's feeling the pain of the rest of the country in other ways. On Friday the 13th, its aging infrastructure shot the city in the foot.

It started when a power substation in Chinatown lost a single switch, which was overloaded when one of its three partners was taken offline due to a suspected pump problem. When the switch blew, it took out power to 30 downtoan blocks, including the White House. Without traffic lights, the streets became gridlocked bedlam, some described it as anarchy.

The power outage, in the meantime, caused old metal studs in the Metro subway to overheat, causing two track fires on the busiest line of the Metro, in the middle of morning rush hour. Trains were stranded for as much as 30 minutes, then ran slowly afterward as they moved through areas without power, depositing hot and tired commuters in front of buildings with no power.

Suffice to say, Friday the 13th lived up to its name for many D.C. workers.

Although the exact cause of Pepco's power problems won't be known for weeks, Metro's problems are very clear: A 30-year-old system, much of which is original and ill-maintained equipment, due to the fact that the system does not have a dedicated funding source. Every time the Metro needs money, they have to go hat-in-hand to the Federal government, D.C., Maryland and Virginia to ask for funds... and those four jurisdictions have done nothing but fight over who owes what proportional share of maintenance money, since before the Metro was ever built.

What amazes me is that the Federal government has even allowed this to happen... considering that it is the single largest employer in the District of Columbia, and the loss of the Metro would do more to damage our government's own ability to operate than any other single thing, including any terrorist attack. You'd think even Congress, full of people who have probebly never ridden the Metro in their lives, would appreciate how badly that system needs to be run at peak at all times, to support the system they purport to run. And the money needed to solve most of Metro's problems would be covered by less than half a billion... that's a few days of Mid-East warring, at most.

The last two weeks has been a wake-up call to Washington locals: Almost daily problems on the Metro, related to power, heat, adverse weather, and a high-gas-cost-related increase in ridership, have resulted in shut-down lines, incredible delays, and a lot of customer anger... at a time when we all need more people to use mass transport, Washington residents don't have a reliable system to use. Sooner or later, the Fed is going to feel that pain, when good workers decide not to come to the city to work any more, and the government's potential employment and knowledge base is pulled out from underneath its feet. And the rest of the country could follow suit, making Washington a possible harbinger of things to come.

Will the Fed intervene, and provide money to repair Metro's aging infrastructure then? Maybe, if Obama becomes president, with his already-established emnity towards the D.C. government, we'll see some money spent locally, and soon. But between now and Inauguration Day... be prepared for more outages, more delays, and more anger. Friday the 13th will seem like it'll last all year long.