After filling my Blazer last week, I marveled at the price on the pump – $62. That was nearly twice what I paid for one of my first cars – a 1953 Ford two-door sedan, complete with functioning radio and heater, purchased in 1967 for $35 from the back of a dealer lot in Greeley. It was hidden, I suspect, because its fenders were different colors, the upholstery needed a roll of duct tape and a back passenger window was cracked. But for a while, it fit the family definition of a good car: “It runs and it’s paid for.”
So now a tank of gas costs more than a whole car did, and that has a lot of people wringing their hands, concerned that high energy prices could damage our way of life.
But we need to look at the bright side here – if gas prices keep climbing, many current Colorado problems will be solved.
For instance, the Colorado Department of Transportation faces a major challenge with Interstate 70 between Denver and Glenwood Springs. Traffic volume has been growing by 2 percent a year. Busy weekends now offer something very close to gridlock, and in a decade or two, it’s supposed to be like that all the time.
Clearly it’s a candidate for expansion. But how? Adding lanes is expensive in the mountains, and a lot of people in Clear Creek County don’t want to add to their “sacrifice zone” status with an even bigger highway to further divide their towns, pollute their air and water, and pound their eardrums with round-the-clock traffic noise. They’ll fight highway expansion any way they can, and demand that the state consider mass transit or expanding alternative routes.
A long and expensive process looms – that is, as long as people keep driving more. But the higher the price of gasoline, the less people drive. The cars that remain on the road tend to carry more passengers. Traffic goes down.
And if the traffic on I-70 begins to decrease, rather than show a persistent increase, then there won’t be any reason to expand the highway. Billions of dollars will be saved, along with the communities of Clear Creek County.
Nor is that the only way Colorado can benefit from $3-a-gallon gas. At least once a week, I run across a story about how our public lands are threatened by off-road vehicle use. Some operators are sensible, but many cut new routes that lead to erosion while damaging wildlife habitat.
These machines have multiplied, from an estimated 19.4 million in 1983 to 35.9 million in 2000.
Expensive gasoline means that they’ll cost more to run. And ORV use is not an essential activity, like getting to work. It’s discretionary, and an easy thing to cut back on. So people will.
Not only will our public lands be quieter and prettier, but our highways will not be burdened with those immense pickups pulling trailers laden with ORVs. Two or three small cars should be able to fit in the space taken by an ORV rig, so we gain highway capacity without new construction.
A related factor that should improve matters is the immense increase in oil and gas drilling on public lands – who’s going to want to burn a lot of gasoline to get to an industrial zone?
These changes will help Colorado outside the metropolitan areas. But urban zones can benefit too. With gasoline costing so much, you’re less likely to drive 15 miles to that big-box store owned by some faceless multinational corporation, and more likely to walk down to the ma-and-pa store a few blocks away. And if there aren’t such stores now, they will emerge as demand grows.
Thus more healthy exercise (suburban sprawl, according to some authorities, is a leading contributor to obesity and heart disease) and more entrepreneurs. Development will get denser, thereby reducing the demand for water, and so there won’t be as much need for more water development.
In other words, the more that gasoline costs, the fewer problems for Colorado. Even so, it’s hard to count the blessings when a tank of gas costs more than your first car.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
