Re: Gas prices knock bicycle sales, repairs into higher gear

"Dane Buson" <dane@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:ovbmf5-734.ln1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In rec.bicycles.misc Ted <nobody@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > "Four-dollar-a-gallon gas is good for business ? if you run a
> > bike shop. Commuters around the country are dusting off their
> > old two-wheelers ? or buying new ones ? to cope with rising fuel
> > prices, bicycle dealers say..."
> >
> > Associated Press article: http://xrl.us/BikeShops
>
> It reminds an awful lot of the articles we've seen at the beginning of
> summer the last two years.  Bog knows I've seen an increase in bike
> commuters the last two summers [1].  I expect lots more this year,
> especially as we get closer to STP time [2].
>
> It does make me wonder, if a small bump in price to $4 is enough to
> cause changes, how much would a real price spike change?  What would
> people do at $6?  At $8 a gallon?
>

It won't ever happen in the US.

As oil prices continue to rise, the cost of doing stuff like pulling 'ye
olde oil
furnace' in the basement out and replacing it with Natural Gas becomes
cheaper than continuing to buy oil, as a result more people do that and
oil consumption drops.  It now becomes economical to extract oil from
tar sands and such and people start doing that so supply rises.  It will
be
much more expensive oil, but it won't be double today's prices in
todays dollars, and it will mainly be fueling freight trains and delivery
trucks
where the fuel costs are spread out over a lot of people.

And in another 2 years the Toyota Prius will be plug-in (according to
Toyota) and you will see increasingly people powering their Priuses by
wall electricity.  In the US, the percentage of electric power generated
by burning oil has been dropping like a rock, the percentage of electric
power generated by burning coal is rising, and by burning natural gas, and
by wind.  And the US has a lot more stocks of natural gas than of oil,
and our coal reserves dwarf both of those.

In another 5 years, all the major automakers will have plug in hybrids.
All current presidential candiates have strongly endorsed tax credits
for plug in hybrids.

Cost per mile of an electric car is about a quarter of that of gasoline,
see:

http://www.team-fate.net/wordpress/?page_id=11

And last but probably most im****tantly, the Arab countries in the Mid-East
frankly don't like the US.  They have had 50 years of European and US
interference, everything from the British colonization efforts to the UN
carving Israel out of Palestine, and the US mid-east interference.  They
simply want Europe and the US to go away and find some other place
to get fuel from.  The Mid East Arabs are jumping for joy at the prospect
of selling all their oil to China because unlike the Western countries
which
have this annoying hangup about Human Rights issues, China couldn't give
a damn if every Arab has 50 wives all wrapped in burkas.

By the end of your lifetime you will see the United States pretty
independent
of foreign oil.  It will be very painful to get "over the hump" in the
transition
from gasoline to more expensive gasoline and electricity, but it
will happen.  It is, actually, much more a problem of retraining people
in how they use their cars, and remembering that every second their car is
sitting in their driveway or their garage, it needs to be plugged into an
electrical outlet,. recharging.  And it is also one of dealing with city
laws.

For example in my city, a large number of homes have no garages or
driveways.  People park their cars on the street in front of their homes.
Now, imagine what would happen if all those cars were plug in hybrids.
If allowed, people would be running extension cords from their homes
across their lawns, across the sidewalks, to their cars.  I am quite sure
the city would get rather pissed off about this, and would likely pass
an ordinance prohibiting it.  That would require those people to run
conduit under the sidewalk, which makes it a permanent electrical
installation -all the sudden, you now have a requirement for permitting
and you suddenly have added a $500 bill for an electrician to put in
a remote electrical outlet just to charge your car's battery.

Ted