They’re figuring out now, that gallons-per-miles gives folks a better way to compare fuel efficiency and savings among cars then their miles per gallon figure.  I’d intuited this for years, probably because I love taking big cross-country road trips.  Take a few of those and pretty soon come to view your car’s gas mileage in terms of how much the total distance you went cost you rather then how many miles you get for the price of one gallon.  The first thing I did when I seriously started thinking about replacing the Honda Accord with the Mercedes was try to figure out how much more it would cost me to drive the Mercedes from Baltimore to California.

Turns out…not so much.  The Mercedes is actually very fuel efficient for a six banger.  It takes the more expensive premium gas, but it uses it almost as well as the Accord did, and the Accord was a four banger mated to a five speed manual transmission.  The Mercedes has a seven speed (yes…seven) automatic.  If I let the cruse control decide how to maintain speed on the highway I actually get anywhere from 29 to 31 or 32 mpg.  One trip back from southern Virgina I got 33 mpg out of it.  That was at Virginia’s feeble 65 mph speed limit, which I didn’t want to break because the highway cops are thick on that stretch of I-83.  So I had the cruse control on the whole time.  But the car is no fun to drive like that.

This gallons-per-mile calculator tells me that the Mercedes, using only the EPA figures and not my own better highway figures, only needs an extra 38 gallons of gas to go from Baltimore to California and back again, over the Accord.  That’s only a little over two tankfulls…not really all that much.  But it is more expensive gas to start with.  Even so, the extra works out to about 85 bucks more at $2.25 a gallon, about $120 bucks at $3.00 a gallon, and $150 bucks extra at $4.00 a gallon.  On the other hand, at $4.00 a gallon the total trip costs me nearly a thousand dollars just in gas.  That’s the problem.  I could make up the difference in cost between the Mercedes and the Accord easily by just not buying so much turquoise every time I drive through the southwest.  The difference between $2.25 a gallon gas and $4.00 a gallon not so much.

Buying the Mercedes really didn’t really make the big road trips much more expensive.  It’s the rising price of gas that really hurts. And where that hurts the most is in your day-to-day use.  That’s a line item in the household budget you can’t easily get rid of.  But what the Gallons-Per-Miles calculator reveals is that trading in a car that gets 33 mpg for one that gets 50 actually doesn’t save you as much as trading in a car that gets 14 for one that gets 20.  That hybrid you are looking at may not save you as much as you think.

Better to just not drive if you don’t have to.  This is a hobby horse of mine, but I’ll say it again: if the nation wants to really do something to make a dent in oil usage, encourage walkablity in cities and suburbs.  Mix housing and shopping with offices…even factories where feasible.  Make city life attractive.  Plan communities around pedestrian traffic.  Try to make driving the exception rather then the rule…not something you do to get the basic necessities, but something you do to get the odds and ends you can’t get locally…or just to pleasure drive.  I live within walking distance of work and two good grocery stores.  My car sits in front of the house most of the time.  That saves me tons of money.  More people do that and there’s less oil being consumed and less damage to the environment.

Walt Disney had a dream for the city of the future.  It was EPCOT (as opposed to Epcot – lower case spelling – the theme park his dream became after he died).  In EPCOT he said, no one would ever need to use a car, except to go for weekend pleasure drives.  The entire city was planned around the pedestrian, with the Disney monorails acting as transportation between the city, the Magic Kingdom theme park to the north, and the industrial center and airport to the south.  Within the city Wedway People Movers would serve as transportation between the city center and the outlaying housing areas.  There were lots of green spaces and pedestrian and bike paths, all cleverly isolated from the roads.  A pedestrian would never have to navigate a street crossing in EPCOT.

Sniff all you want at the 1950-ish world-o-tomorrow dreamland, but had Walt Disney’s vision come to pass that Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow would be perfectly positioned to weather the oil price shocks now and to come.  The whole transportation system ran on electricity and you could generate that with any number of alternative sources.  It didn’t have to be oil.  And with residents not needing to use their cars for anything other then pleasure driving, they needn’t be so dramatically impacted by the rising cost of gas.  Yes, goods and services would still cost them more.  And probably the taxes to support the transportation infrastructure.  But how many household budgets were absolutely crushed by the monthly cost of gasoline for commuting back and forth to work every day?  How much of that contributed to the current economic collapse?  People can’t spend money they don’t have, because the gasoline bill ate it all.

I love to drive.  I love the automobile.  I have been entranced by them since I was a kid.  I make no bones about it.  The fact that some folks seem to just loath automobiles completely mystifies me.  I cannot imagine a time when I would not own one.  And I would have loved to have lived in Walt Disney’s city of tomorrow.  Because as a matter of fact, I love to walk too.  And I hate commuting.  And I absolutely despise traffic jams.  A city built from the ground up around the pedestrian would have suited me just fine.