Highway Robbery
Sure, we have a car payment again, but we’d have had that anyway as I’d been waiting a couple years for a new car.
Still, it’s nice to drive a HYBRID these days. Can you say highway robbery? If not, you will shout it when you fuel up at the pump… sigh! Look at the attached graph — that’s one month, folks!
I just checked Mom’s old home town prices, the fuel price-bellwether known as San Francisco. Ouch! San Francisco gas prices are reported as a “low” of $2.90 to an epileptic-shock inducing $3.41 per gallon. At least gasoline has a long ways to go before it’s as expensive per gallon as Starbuck’s coffee. But most of us have learned we can live without Starbucks, which is more than we can say about fossil fuels.
There’s a reason Europe has a terrific mass transit system (rail, subway, buses, etc.), communities you can still get around on a bicycle, and no Hummers/land yachts on the roads — they’ve been paying exorbitant prices at the pump for a lot longer than we have. They’ve adjusted in ways Americans don’t seem willing or able to, and that largely includes our government (just look at our insane deficit!) We spent much of our Washington, D.C. vacation using the Metro to get around our nation’s capital and environs, and it was fast, easy and efficient, so I know we can pull off mass transit when we want to. Do we want to? Texas routinely kills all attempts at high speed rail… the latest hubub is over tollways and how that’s miraculously going to solve all our ills despite not increasing capacity one iota. 
