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Life, liberty and a driver's license Saturday, May 17, 2008 By Doug Thompson High fuel prices was the first thing I thought of when reading that Arkansas and West Virginia had the lowest percentage of people with college degrees.<br/><br/>You get some strange notions in my job.<br/><br/>This particular notion goes back to Lu Hardin. He served as head of the state Department of Higher Education a few years ago. I listened as he spoke to a bunch of high school students in a forum at the university.<br/><br/>His competition wasn't Harvard, Yale or any other colleges in any other states, Hardin said. His competition was Ford, GM, Toyota and Chrysler. The number-one reason people left Arkansas colleges and universities was to get full-time work to support their vehicles, he said.<br/><br/>Those vehicles cost a lot more to support these days, even if fuel is still relatively low compared to purchase price, financing and insurance.<br/><br/>My main point isn't about fuel prices, though. It's about the strength of the bond between people and their vehicles.<br/><br/>People leave college and give up thousands of dollars a year in earning power for the rest of their lives for the vehicle they want. As Hardin told the students, drive a clunker through college. Reward yourself with a Lexus after you graduate.<br/><br/>I don't see people getting less attached to cars as they age, either. <br/><br/>We could fill all of today's newspaper with ideas on why Americans in general and Arkansans in particular love vehicles so much. I'm just going to quote what Capt. Jack Sparrow said about ships: "It's not just a keel and hull and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is - what the Black Pearl really is - is freedom."<br/><br/>Our freedom is dearly bought. Sparrow's "freedom" landed him in Davy Jones' Locker even though his vehicle was wind-powered.<br/><br/>We talk a lot about transportation in Fayetteville. Some support a light rail system. Half the people who care think it's forward-looking. The other half thinks it's navel-gazing. The rest of us have something to watch when nothing else is on.<br/><br/>I admire the pluck of light rail advocates. Rail has its points from an engineering point of view. Engineering's not the problem, however. Love - or addiction, or whatever - of cars is the problem. Look at the prospects for breaking that addiction (or love or need or whatever) when considering mass transit, not engineering.<br/><br/>The efficiency at moving one pound of vehicle per gallon of fuel has doubled in the United States since the early 1970s. There should be no energy crisis. There is. That's because the weight of the average vehicle in America doubled too. Customers bought overpowered muscle cars in the early 1970s. Now we buy relatively underpowered, overweight but mechanically refined SUVs and pickups.<br/><br/>If we must choose between two evils, I vote for muscle cars. My dad once owned an Oldsmobile 442. I saw a Plymouth Roadrunner I've dreamed of for decades for sale in a front yard in Texas last weekend, but I digress. I got from North Little Rock to College Station on one tank of gas in my Toyota, anyway.<br/><br/>Fuel prices will force people to look for alternatives. I won't argue with that. The alternative of least resistance, however, is lighter cars. For instance, Ford Motor Company's overall sales are down 12 percent in April despite a 43 percent increase in sales of the economically low-weight Ford Focus. The trend is in.<br/><br/>The Chevrolet Volt is being road tested now and is "reliably" hitting 40-mile range targets on pure battery power, General Motors said this week. That doesn't sound like much, but that's a magic number. About 90 percent of the people who commute to work drive 40 miles a day or less. If you make their commute solely on an overnight power recharge, you almost eliminate their need for gasoline. The car's small gasoline engine recharges the battery during longer trips.<br/><br/>(There are other cars that do much the same thing now. However, most don't have the plug-in option yet. You can add it at a cost but they still won't go as far on pure electricity - assuming the Volt works. If the technology works, the Volt will be mechanically simpler and more reliable, too.)<br/><br/>The Volt's supposed to come out in 2010 at a cost of more than $40,000. Suppose it works. People can keep their cars, their preferred option. They will have to send automakers even more of their money to do it, however.<br/><br/>They'd have a hard time paying the big startup costs of a mass transportation option at the same time.<br/><br/>Suppose I'm wrong. Suppose people get fed up and go for mass transit.<br/><br/>The public transportation system of San Francisco rolled out a new bus last month. It's a diesel-electric hybrid where every seat has a computer screen and wireless Internet connection for hooking up laptops. Now there's something that might work. People are becoming more addicted to their gadgets than their cars.<br/><br/>That bus is a mass-transit option that can use existing roadways. Added facilities would be needed in Northwest Arkansas - terminals, connections and so forth - but they're spartan compared to what you'd have to build for rails.<br/><br/>You can argue that buses are self-defeating because they're road-bound, I suppose. Why take the same road in a bus that you can take in a car?<br/><br/>You may have a point. Here's mine: You can test-drive a bus for a lot less than $1 billion, which is what it would cost to try out light rail.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>---------<br/><br/>Doug Thompson is a Fayetteville-based reporter and columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau and the Morning News. His e-mail address is dthompson@arkansasnews.com.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/> |
