Indianapolis is My Home

13
Dec

Gasoline Per Gallon Price Tag of Pain

Author: Jason Bean, Category: Areas, Business, Education, Government, Politics, Shopping

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At one point the image above seemed funny. Now I’d just about give my arm and a leg for a gallon of regular gas to only be $1.72.

I had an interesting discussion with my boss over lunch the other day. It centered around the following question:

“How much would gas have to cost for purchasing it to be painful enough to change your behavior?”

Right now gas is averaging about $3/gallon in Indianapolis.

• Have you changed your driving behavior?
• Has it even crossed your mind?

What if gas were $5/gallon?

• Would you start driving less?
• Would you stay home more?
• Would you put a for sale sign on your SUV and start looking at alternative fuel vehicles?
• Would you start asking friends about car-pooling?
• Would you start demanding public transportation options to be made available to you?

My boss suggested that we immediately at a tax to every gallon of gas that would bring the price to a painful threshold for the average person. The money collected from the additional tax would be used to start funding the building of mass public transportation and to research and further develop alternative fuel vehicles.

He said it’s got to be an immediate change-over and not a gradual increase so that we immediately feel the pain and start looking for solutions. Think about lifestyle. If you’re currently spending $150 a month on gas for your car, would spending $300 force you to do something different? Would the change you make just involve cutting out other expenses so you really wouldn’t have to change your driving habits?

What if this change encouraged the widespread change in our community that would push the development of commercially connected neighborhoods again? If you could actual walk to your grocery store, bank, drug store and hardware store. Would you stop driving? I would.

What if we built smaller schools and they were more widespread so that 70% of the students were walking to school and reduced the fleet of gas guzzling buses to just a few.

What would it take for you to change?