Driving ourselves to disaster

By Brian Kernan

This winter break, I made the unwise decision to drive home to the Seattle suburbs in the middle of one of the Northwest's worst blizzards on record. The drive from California to Washington is already long enough without the added excitement of snow, ice, low visibility and people waddling around the side of the road to put chains on their tires.

However, as I did not want to be stranded without a car over break, I decided to go against my parent's suggestions and embark on a drive that took three days and an unhealthy amount of caffeine to complete.

At one point north of Salem, Ore., a gas station attendant even gave me permission to pump my own gas. "Oh yeah, it's fine buddy," he said. You never pump your own gas in Oregon. In hindsight, I maybe should have flown, but as a friend of mine jokingly said, "With gas prices so low, you'd be stupid not to drive."

For the past five months, we've all experienced a downward slide in oil prices. For some, lower oil prices simply mean we're delaying the unavoidable need to find alternative fuels and modes of transportation.

Others simply see low prices as a relief and would label those predicting doomsday for the internal combustion engine as wet blankets. I feel most people are somewhere in the middle and realize that while the cheapest gas in the developed world is nice, there is a desperate need for transportation alternatives.

Plenty of people have made comparisons between the drop in oil prices over the last five months and the relief at the pumps Americans felt after Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries decided to lift its 1973 oil embargo on the United States. There are certainly parallels. In 1973, the big issue for OPEC was American support of the Israeli military during the Yom Kippur War. Today, oil prices are slowly beginning to rise again partly in response to the escalating conflict between Israel and Palestine. History tends to repeat itself.

Hopefully our country learned something from its most recent oil crisis. However, while part of the responsibility to change transportation habits falls on American consumers, a much larger part also falls on the sprawling auto-centric development policies that have defined America's cities for the past fifty plus years. As students, most of us can choose to walk, bike or ride some sort of wheeled board to class or work, but many Americans simply do not have the option to not drive.

While gas prices are still low, they are slowly rising again. It's important that we position ourselves now for the next big energy crisis. Driving head-on into a storm is never a good idea.

Brian Kernan is an economics and history double major and the opinion editor for The Santa Clara.