I am still reeling from this morning’s story in the New York Times about the devastating effects of rising gas prices on the South working poor:
Josephine Cage, who fillets fish, said her 30-mile commute from Tchula to Isola in her 1998 Ford Escort four days a week is costing her $200 a month, or nearly 20 percent of her pay. “I make it by the grace of God,” she said, and also by replacing meat at supper with soups and green beans and broccoli. She fills her car a little bit every day, because “I can’t afford to fill it up. Whatever money I have, I put it in.”
Sure, people are adapting, and that’s very good. Abandoning their gas guzzling old trucks, eating less meat, going out less, carpooling, cutting down on purchases, cutting down work days, moving to jobs closer to home. What infuriates me is the indifference from the powers in charge, who are doing nothing to minimize their citizens’ pain. Mostly, I want to see bus routes set in place, so that life does not become so hard on Josephine and her family. Is that too much to ask?
La Marguerite 
Absolutely, lamarguerite! I live in a rural area in Central Appalachia. There is no genuine public transportation in my county. Young and middle aged healthy, employed people must have a car/truck or have reliable friends, family or neighbors willing to transport them. The elderly, infirm and very poor can call upon a non-profit organization that operates a small fleet of passenger vans for a lift to the doctor, hospital, pharmacy, or school. But this is not available for shopping trips, etc. There is a dire need for public transportation in this region.
One immediate possibility might be to press school buses into double duty for at least some of the day time hours. But the costs of fuel would have to be heavily subsidized. I think the long term solution will have to be in the form of some kind of electricity based transit, such as trolley buses (electric rubber tired vehicles).
The school bus idea is great. Would you have the time, energy, desire to push it a bit with your county? Maybe using the influence of your local newspaper’s editor? It would make such a difference in the people lives there!
Feel free to use this blog as a resource if you do.
In some quarters, there is a push to rebuild at least some of the trolley rails that General Motors bought up and dismantled in the 20th century; I wonder if that will happen in the Obama administration. I have high hopes for a 21st century Green WPA under Obama.
The vast divide between rich and poor was (unwittingly) laid out yesterday afternoon on NPR. They opened the news with a story about folks choosing between food or gas, and 40 minutes later ran a story about a Napa Valley fundraiser. Oprah was there, natch. Entry price for attending the event was $3,000.00. Some schmo from Hong Kong paid a half-million dollars for 7 magnums of wine- think they said it came out to $7,000.00 a glass. It was disgusting.
The New York Times does not need to look to the rural South for examples of this phenomenon. I’m sure some of the reporters who work there have nannies with long commutes. Remember I posted a comment here a few weeks ago about that very issue?
Often The New York Times sounds like it is reporting on a foreign land when it sends its reporters out beyond Manhattan… The condescension rankles me. They should look harder at the lives of the working class people working beside them, right there in NYC.
A friend of mine has two part time jobs near LA, but they are about 30 miles apart in different directions. She has very little money and the commuting cost in her old pickup (there is no way she can afford something that gets better mileage and fits her frame). So lots of things are being dropped. None of the public transit overlaps with her travel needs.
Buses are surprisingly expensive to operate and impractical unless you can operate them on high density route. None of the commuter bus lines in my state break even and all require serious government funding. They are probably the most practical short term solution for commutes of any distance.
Buses are much cheaper than building light rail though, and much more flexible. They are probably the best hope for moving the poor, but we need to concentrate on moving the poor from poverty.
It took Denmark and the Netherlands about 30 years of focused work to get to the point where a serious percentage of citizens could use bikes. The public transit has taken a similar length of time to evolve. Things are going to be very rough for the poor and I’m afraid the percentage of citizens who are poor will grow.
Huge and serious problems. The spiking cost of energy, given our fixed infrastructure and comparative lack of compassion as a country for our own, is not a positive driver.
I should add a link with comparisons of light rail systems. Calgary’s is heavily used and cost effective. These are not cheap and there are many cities where they don’t work, but understanding what Calgary did right is important
Click to access Calgary_CTrain_Effective_Capital_Utilization.pdf
Ilex, I share the same hopes. Regarding fundraiser, I must admit I am one of those people who go to these kinds of fundraiser. In defense of those ‘schmos’, the money raised in those things is often times used for very good causes, as in getting right senators, congress people, and presidential candidates elected! Being rich is not necessarily a sin. It all depends what you do with the money.
Lynn, I hear you, and I also think you are being a bit too harsh with the NY Times. The story here does not negate the plight of poorer people all over. It just focused on a part of the country where pretty much everybody is impacted, resulting in a more dramatic story.
Steve, thanks for the link. In France where I come from, we also have a great public transit infrastructure, although it is not what it used to be. As a child, when not everybody in my grandparents’ village had a car, the bus would run twice a day and pick up people from all the villages on the way to the nearest city and back. I believe we need to go back to that model in parts of the country where no current infrastructure exists. The community can also step in with some kind of organized carpooling.
what gets me the most is someone is making money, gas prices increasing is lining someone’s pockets
taking my daughter to summer camp this year will cost us three times as much – she got a beautiful scholarship to attend, how could I not take her?
the josephines are eeking pennies from their penny jar to manage basic driving – i am lucky in that I work from home, but to take that big of a cut in pay to commute ? Money that feeds a family?
I have it pretty well down to one tank a month. I car pool and walk, I also say no to doing things that involve getting in the car – I am frustrated, my social life is hindered, asking at first is hard but now I don’t hesitate to say hey can I get a lift ?
yes, I was harsh…but that comment was built up over reading many articles with a certain “tone” from the NYT.
Anyway, there were many compassionate responses to this post. It is very sad and scary too.
I heard recently on NPR about a new type of rail system in Japan. It is actually a bus which has wheels that retract so that it can travel on rail as well, which is considerably cheaper. . It seems this type of system could be very useful in the US. Let’s hope it does well in its testing in Japan.
Mother Earth, you are showing us the way. The situation is further compounded by our loss of sense of community. As you so justly write, ‘asking at first is hard’. We need to learn to ask more and more often. Carpooling is a great example.
Lynn, this bus on rail idea seems like a winner!
They are making money, Mother Earth, but they’re spending it as well, and not just on CEO salaries.
Used to be they could just whack a drill in the earth somewhere and oil would bubble up under its own pressure. Nowadays they have to pump seawater in to squeeze it out.
You heard about Canada’s tar sands? That’s like getting crude oil from a bitumen road – they pump steam at over a thousand degrees through the sand, the oil comes out, then they have to filter it, and it’s heavy stuff, so they have to mix it with regular crude oil for it to be useful. And often the heat dissipates, so now their new idea is to freeze the sand around the area they’re heating. All that takes a lot of energy and… money.
You may have heard about Brazil’s recent oil field discovery – well, this is 2 miles down in the water, then another mile through rock, then another 2 miles through a salt layer, and another mile of rock – no-one’s ever extracted oil from that deep, it’s a big engineering problem how to do it, and developing it will cost a fortune.
So while there’s a bit of a ripoff happening, basically it’s costing more and more money to get a barrel of oil from the ground.
And if you think about what the fuel is actually doing, it’s quite cheap. If you get a very ordinary 25 mpg that means that 5 fluid ounces take you a mile. That is, half a glass of fuel can move you and a tonne of steel a mile. Try moving you and a tonne of steel on half a glass of orange juice, or persuading some labourers to drag you and a tonne of steel a mile for half a glass of beer.
Steve – see above comment – just sent me picture of T-shirt he just saw in Princeton. Here is what it says:
Using a 4000 pound vehicle to move a 150 pound person is just stupid
Someone should invent something that weighs 30 pounds . . .
(with pic of bike)
A growing number of people are “working poor”. That means they work full time but live in relative poverty because of low pay and high costs of living. If someone like this is victimized by an IRS wage levy the effects can be devastating. Unfortunately the IRS won’t go away. Fortunately there is reasonably priced help available. Get your hands on a copy of the DVD by Attorney Darrin Mish, “How to Get a Release From an IRS Wage Levy.”