Unfortunately, nuttiness like this is no new thing, and its reach is longer than you might think. It has its roots in an antiquated and peculiarly American belief system that is standing in the way of improved urban livability.

Let’s start with gas prices. In recent weeks, Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and House Speaker John Boehner have all played to the notion that gas prices have doubled since President Obama took office. The price of gas is notoriously volatile; the national average price has actually fallen in 45 of the past 100 months (Excel spreadsheet). So a fair accounting would employ the U.S. average over an entire presidency, as in this chart, for the three most recent:

The chart makes clear that it was former oilman George W. Bush, not Obama, who came closest to presiding over a doubling of gas prices.

At one level, Gingrich and company are merely shilling for the Keystone XL pipeline. But of course excavating Canadian tar sands oil and piping it to Houston is so costly and energy-intensive that without high gas prices, the venture would collapse.

That aside, consider what Gingrich is really saying when he derides New Yorkers as elitists because each uptick in the price of gas doesn’t make us itchy to start a new war. In one way, he has a point. Unlike our countrymen trapped in punishing commutes and paying off two-car garages, we big city dwellers are fairly well insulated from fluctuating gas prices. And unlike big-box suburbs and the Sunbelt, which were built on the inefficiency of cars, highways, supersized houses and office parks, New York is built on the efficiency of dense neighborhoods and public transportation.

To anyone with common sense, that difference makes the ‘burbs brittle and cities resilient. To Newt, it makes city dwellers suspect.

Similarly suspect, in the eyes of Tea Party activists, are “all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy,” as the Times reported on Saturday. “Government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space [is seen] as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.” Ditto, bike lanes. And, you better believe, congestion pricing or any form of traffic pricing.

What’s at work here, according to the writer (and New Yorker) Dan Lazare, is the “Jeffersonian ideology that assumed that individual actions were autonomous unless proven otherwise. Whether a motorist chose to drive or not to drive,” Lazare wrote in his 2000 classic, America’s Undeclared War: What’s Killing Our Cities and How You Can Stop It, “was nobody’s business but his own; any suggestion to the contrary was positively un-American.”

The standard counterweight to the agrarian Jeffersonian model is the Hamiltonian sovereign nation-state drawing strength from cities built on manufacturing and trade. Lazare plumbed this duality in America’s Undeclared War, but he also broke new ground by contrasting Jeffersonianism to the “theory of externalities” that emerged in the early 20^th Century, which emphasized “the public dimension of individual acts” that consumed resources or otherwise damaged the commons:

Rather than regarding individual acts as private unless proven otherwise, the growing volume of external costs suggested that they had to be regarded as public acts — unless, that is, affirmative action was taken to mitigate the social consequences. To drive or not to drive, in other words, was no longer an individual decision but a social question because so many people were affected besides the motorist himself.

A great many people are affected by an individual’s decision to drive in NYC. I have shown elsewhere that a single car round-trip into the Manhattan Central Business District generates external costs on the order of a hundred dollars, just in terms of other road users’ lost time. Although the Bloomberg administration didn’t use this meme in its 2007-2008 push for congestion pricing, it is the essential motivating idea behind tolling vehicles entering the CBD. As I wrote on Reuters last month, any New York-area driver “is cognizant of the time he will expend being slowed by other cars, but not of the far greater delays he will impose on them.” A congestion toll helps close that feedback loop.

Tea Partiers are having none of that, of course, and Dan Lazare helps us make sense of their antipathy to treating driving — not to mention land use, transit provision, and climate change — as a social question rather than the sole province of individuals. To paraphrase America’s Undeclared War, “Where the externalities analysis highlights the tyranny that a mass of atomized individuals imposes on society, adherents of Jefferson worry about the tyranny imposed by society on the individual.”

In short, congestion pricing’s benefits be damned, you’ll still have to pry the car keys out of my cold dead hand.

In total, Darren’s commute costs him half of his monthly income. He must work seven days a week to make ends meet.

Then there’s Ro, a 23-year-old recent college graduate who lives with her parents in Vallejo, California. To reach her job in San Francisco, she must commute 20 miles in her 1994 Nissan Pathfinder to a BART station.

Gas costs her $20 to $30 dollars per day. Sometimes in order to make ends meet, she skips lunch.

There are thousands — millions — of Americans with stories just like theirs. A Georgia mother who commutes two hours daily. A college student who uses student loans to pay for gas. A contractor whose unpredictable gas expenses force him to reduce staff.

These people and others are sharing their stories on a blog called The Energy Trap. The premise of the project, run by the New America Foundation’s Lisa Margonelli, is that because many Americans have so few choices outside of automobile travel, they are effectively “trapped” in a vicious cycle where they must own a car to hold a job, but the cost of their commute consumes much of their income. For an average American household with an annual income of $50,000, car ownership costs about $8,000 a year — more than they will pay in taxes or spend on healthcare.

All told, Americans spend $489 billion annually on gasoline. Every 25-cent increase in the price of gas costs households $90 million per day. That’s hitting a lot of Americans very hard, especially right now as real wages stagnate and unemployment levels remain high.

The problem isn’t that gas prices are too high per se — in fact, many say they’re not high enough — but that commuters don’t have adequate transportation options for getting to work affordably.

“There are many ways to spring the Energy Trap; first we need to recognize how much it’s cramping both family budgets and the economy at large,” the project website states. “Figuring out new ways to get people to work will leave more money in their pockets and reduce traffic jams, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while allowing Americans to choose how much we spend for gas.”

Hurricane Irene certainly had an impact on transportation, but don't expect a lasting change in gas prices from it. Photo: NY Daily News

From Lexington, Kentucky to Palm Springs, California, consumers have seen some jump in gas prices over the past week. Some say it may have had to do with the fact that one of the 10 East Coast oil refineries shut down temporarily due to the storm.

But don’t blame Irene for all of it. Some of the jump was just market jitters after Fed Chair Ben Bernanke’s speech last week. And a predictable spike in demand during the upcoming Labor Day weekend could push prices higher, according to Stephen Schork, publisher of the industry newsletter the Schork Report, quoted by CNNMoney.

Indeed, writes Eric Jaffe in Infrastructurist, Irene likely won’t have much impact at all:

After Hurricane Ike, in 2008, fuel costs crept toward $5 a gallon in places. But Ike hit the Gulf Coast, where fuel production is several times greater than it is among East Coast refineries. In addition, the supplies that do exist will go further than normal after Irene, since demand plummeted this weekend in the typically high-traffic Northeast.

CNN even speculates that lagging demand could send fuel prices downward.

Meanwhile, Streetsblog readers have commented that a few days with fewer cars (at least in some places) has been a nice change of pace, and Noah hopes that the event will remind people that it’s important to have multiple transportation options. If Irene serves to do that, her impact on transportation would be a heck of a lot more significant than a momentary blip in the price of regular.

(Photo: Pop and Politics)

The EIA also projected that total emissions from Americans' fossil-fuel use would start to rise after falling by 6.6 percent last year, with a 2.1 percent increase predicted in 2010 and a 1.1 percent increase in 2011. U.S. emissions first began falling in 2008 as the global financial crisis took hold; conversely, the EIA said a future return to rising emissions would be driven by "economic growth."

But what future growth won't do, according to the federal government's energy crystal ball, is power a sizable new uptick in summer gasoline use. From the EIA report:

During this summer season, projected motor gasoline consumption increases by 0.5 percent over last summer, substantially lower than the 0.8 percent growth rate recorded last summer. Gasoline consumption last summer was stimulated by both the beginning of economic recovery and a $1.37 per gallon decline in gasoline prices from the previous year.

Another reason for the increase in fuel consumption last summer, per the EIA, was the downturn in transit ridership -- suggesting that local service cuts or fare hikes may have helped push travelers into their cars.

If the EIA's prediction holds true, Democrats may not be able to make as much political hay of high fuel prices as they attempt to pass a climate change bill during the summer. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters last month that "my guess is there will be a clamoring for an energy bill when gas prices go up, as they normally do, as we get closer to more driving as we get closer to the summer.”

I had a webcast of this hearing streaming in the background, and my ears perked up when I heard this exchange about gas prices between Chu and Florida Republican Cliff Stearns (starts at the 32:30 mark):

Stearns to Chu: Last September you made a statement that somehow we have to boost the price of gasoline to the levels of Europe, which at the time exceeded $8 per gallon. As Secretary of Energy would you speak for or against any measures to raise the price of gasoline?

Chu: The Secretary of Energy, especially now in today's economic climate, would be completely unwise to want to increase the price of gasoline. We're looking forward to reducing the cost of transportation in the American family. This is done by encouraging more fuel efficient cars. This is done by developing alternative forms of fuel like biofuels that can lead to a separate source, an independent source of transportation fuel.

Stearns: You can't honestly believe that you want the American people to pay for gasoline at the prices the level in Europe.

Chu: No we don't.

Stearns: Your statement that gas prices ought to rise to the level of Europe, doesn't that sound a little bit silly, in retrospect, for you to say that?

Chu: Yes.

Chu's tongue may be tied for political reasons, but holding gas prices -- and the gas tax -- steady is going to make any push for transit a whole lot tougher.

The National Republican Congressional Committee ran this ad against Democratic challenger Kathy Dahlkemper in the race for Pennsylvania's third congressional district. It hits a few Gingrichian notes on how to address the country's energy problems before the announcer tells us incredulously:

Dahlkemper's wacky solution? She said we should make personal sacrifices, such as walking places and riding bikes. Hmm... Why don't we use dog-sleds, too?

That passage heaps on the fear and loathing with scare quotes, shots of an impossibly crowded sidewalk, and a bike bell sound effect. But guess what? Seven-term incumbent Phil English is heading back to Erie, and Kathy Dahlkemper is going to Washington. The AP breaks down her victory:

Mrs. Dahlkemper's advantage was viewed as being in the more urban areas of the district -- the cities of Erie, Sharon, Meadville and Butler -- where she was expected to benefit from longtime union support and Sen. Barack Obama's presence at the top of the ticket. Her challenge was to sway voters in the suburban and rural regions.

Think Dahlkemper's competition will bank on the same anti-urban message in 2010?

Workplaces have decentralized. Commuting patterns are no longer radial, from suburban residences to central cities. Now they are complex weaves across broad megaregions. Yet the infrastructure system hasn't adapted.

The Times published five letters in response, including this one from Transportation for America's David Goldberg:

David Brooks is spot-on with his call for major investment in transportation infrastructure, both for near-term economic stimulus and for a sustainable recovery. His recommendations of what to build are outdated, however.

As he notes, a way to put people to work would be to repair and maintain our existing highways, bridges and transit systems. But building new highways was the project for an earlier era, the 1950s, when gas was cheap and President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Interstate System.

Today we urgently need to build the infrastructure for a clean-energy economy and reduced dependency on oil. Soaring gas prices made our vulnerability clear: Americans flocked to public transportation or took to their bicycles only to find the transit systems underfinanced and the roads dangerous and inhospitable. Half of our urban-dwelling citizens found they had no transit at all.

If we're going to go into debt to build for the future, we must do so to complete our transportation network with high-speed rail, modern public transit, streets that support safe biking and walking, and, yes, well-maintained highways.

Dave Alpert at Greater Greater Washington picked up the exchange, noting how cities such as Charleston, South Carolina are already moving beyond the default presumption that transportation investment equals road-building.

And BikePortland's Jonathan Maus, recalling an earlier Brooks column that dismissed cycling as transportation, offered this take on transportation spending priorities:

Should we invest billions into highway projects that cater to "mobility" of single-occupancy vehicles (like we did in the 1950s) and throw scraps to everything else (like we do now)? Or, will we look to create world-class biking cities where possible (because bikes offer the best return on transportation investment of any mode) and then invest in things like passenger rail, streetcars and bus-rapid transit?

NOW host David Brancaccio does an interview on the LA Metro. Click through for the full video.

The latest episode of NOW is surely the most effective takedown of car-dependent planning ever broadcast in news magazine format. Adhering to the familiar contours of pocketbook journalism, "Driven to Despair" starts with a sympathetic portrayal of the Schleighs, a family who moved to a southern California exurb seven years ago. With their adjustable rate mortgage about to reset and gas prices already busting the family budget, they need a way out.

What follows can be fairly described as a 25-minute ode to the time- and money-saving benefits of transit, complete with a brief history of the Los Angeles streetcar system and a rueful suggestion that the Presidential candidates should address transportation more forcefully.

Watching the Schleighs and their neighbors react to the idea of riding a train to work -- sneering, in one case -- it's all too apparent why someone running for national office would skirt the issue. But you also realize that if a national pol were to finally go out on that limb, he or she may find voters more receptive to the idea of better trains and buses than feared.

"Driven to Despair" will be broadcast on PBS affiliates tonight (check local listings). It's the first part in a NOW series on infrastructure called "Blueprint America."

Enjoy the weekend, Streetsbloggers. We'll be back on Tuesday.

With rising gas prices crippling school bus fleets across the U.S., Clarion-Ledger editorial cartoonist Marshall Ramsay offers an intriguing new school transportation idea. Click through to see it.

Today is the first day of class for New York City public school students, while other districts across the country have been in session for weeks. The Times reports that some are grappling with how to get kids to and from school in the face of $4-per-gallon gasoline.

Schools in many states have cut bus stops to save diesel. Districts in California and Ohio have gone further and eliminated bus service either completely or for high schools, leaving thousands of students to find their own way to school.

West Virginia officials issued a memorandum recently to local districts titled “Tips to Deal With the Skyrocketing Cost of Fuel.” Last week, David Pauley, the transportation supervisor for the Kanawha County school system, based in Charleston, met with drivers of the district’s 196 buses to outline those policies. Mr. Pauley told them to stay 5 miles per hour below the limit, to check the tire pressure every day and to avoid jackrabbit starts.

The Caldwell Parish School District, in northern Louisiana, took a more sweeping approach to saving fuel by eliminating Monday classes. The district joined about 100 systems nationwide, most of them rural, that in recent years have adopted a four-day schedule.

Simple fuel-saving measures that should be commonplace notwithstanding, the severe impact of gas prices on education has some wondering if schools ought to be in the transportation business in the first place. At the same time, though, the Federal Transit Administration is moving to curtail public transportation for students.

When all is said and done, might higher gas prices finally return us to such "innovative" solutions as walking, biking and car-pooling to school? It's happening already in some areas, with or without administrative support.

Photo: Brad Aaron

A recent poll conducted by AARP finds that Americans over the age of 50 are cutting down on car trips due to rising gas prices, but are finding public infrastructure, or lack thereof, to be an obstacle.

Almost one of every three people (29%) polled say they are now walking as a way to avoid high gas prices. But as those people set out to walk, almost 40% of the 50+ population say they do not have adequate sidewalks in their neighborhoods. Additionally, 44% say they do not have nearby public transportation that is accessible. Almost half (47%) of poll responders say they cannot cross the main roads safely – 4 in 10 pedestrian fatalities are over the age of 50.

Still, 40 percent of poll respondents say they have walked, biked, or taken public transit more frequently since gasoline prices began trending upward. More than half, 54 percent, say they would use alternate modes of transportation if conditions were improved.

As older New Yorkers can attest, impediments to car-free mobility are not exclusive to suburbs and exurbs. Washington, DC, for example, ranks ninth -- better than Arizona but worse than Florida -- in pedestrian fatalities among those over age 65, according to AARP. (New York state is third worst, behind Hawaii and Alaska.)

With some 35 million members, AARP is a formidable lobby. As a member of the National Complete Streets Coalition and backer of legislation that would steer federal funds toward making roadways accessible to all users, it promises to be a player in next year's big transportation appropriations bill.

Photo: Tuan Phan/Flickr

The problems that the bill addresses are not confined to two states. News of service cuts and fare hikes keeps pouring in from places as far-flung as San Diego, Corpus Christi, Cleveland, and Burlington. All are getting squeezed by fuel costs while handling ridership surges as great as 35 percent or higher. 

Keeping service running smoothly while new riders switch to transit is not solely the concern of one party, either. Republican Senator George Voinovich of Ohio just directed a $1.5 million earmark to Dayton's transit agency, saying "it is critical that we continue to make our public transportation systems more efficient and accessible."

Securing funds through national legislation rather than piecemeal earmarks will send a stronger message: Better transportation choices can provide relief for people hit hard by high gas prices. Discussion of this bill, say transit advocates, will help set the tone as debate ramps up about next year's national transportation funding package.

The Senate Banking Committee, which is considering the bill, needs to hear from people who support it, says Hanley. "We need 60 Senators ready by Labor Day to return to the Senate and insist on transit stimulus."

Photo of a bus boarding in Allentown, PA: Allentown Morning Call

He has hired new advisers, and with them he seems to have worked out a new approach. He is no longer telling the sorts of hard truths that people would prefer not to confront, or even half-truths that they might find vaguely discomfiting. Instead, he’s opted out of truth altogether.

So, what is the hard truth about America’s energy predicament? Kolbert goes on:

The Department of Energy estimates that there are eighteen billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in offshore areas of the continental United States that are now closed to drilling. This sounds like a lot, until you consider that oil is a globally traded commodity and that, at current rates of consumption, eighteen billion barrels would satisfy less than seven months of global demand. A D.O.E. report issued last year predicted that it would take two decades for drilling in restricted areas to have a noticeable effect on domestic production, and that, even then, "because oil prices are determined on the international market," the impact on fuel costs would be "insignificant."

If the hard truth is that the federal government can’t do much to lower gas prices, the really hard truth is that it shouldn’t try to.

With just five per cent of the world’s population, America accounts for twenty-five per cent of its oil use. This disproportionate consumption is one of the main reasons that the United States-until this year, when China overtook it-was the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. (Every barrel of oil burned adds roughly a thousand pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.) No matter how many warnings about the consequences were issued-by NASA, by the United Nations, by Al Gore, by the Pope-Americans seemed unfazed. Even as the Arctic ice cap visibly melted away, they bought bigger and bigger cars and drove them more and more miles.

The impact of rising fuel prices, by contrast, has been swift and appreciable. According to the latest figures from the Federal Highway Administration, during the first five months of this year Americans drove thirty billion fewer miles than they did during the same period last year.

Read on…

If the bill makes it through the Senate, the Oval Office figures to be a major hurdle. President Bush has signaled his reluctance to subsidize operating costs for transit, although that philosophy seems not to apply when it comes to subsidizing the habits of America's motorists.

Meanwhile, in places like Louisville and the Denver suburbs, the prospect of service cuts and fare hikes continues to loom at precisely the moment that more people are depending on transit to get around.

The key word in that title is "relief." The legislation recognizes that financially pinched Americans are turning to public transportation in record numbers, but in too many cities and small towns there's inadequate access to such transit. Even in places like Portland where transit is abundantly available, it still must be kept affordable.

In addition to provisions for struggling transit agencies, the bill includes measures to boost the supply of housing near transit stations, as well as incentives for transit riders, cyclists, telecommuters and carpoolers.

A story in the Hill today looks at the bill and the advocates lining up behind it:

A new coalition, Transportation for America, www.t4america.org, is starting to lobby to boost funding for transit programs like high-speed rail and federal help to communities that pass zoning laws that reduce the need for workers to commute long distances.

“We should be providing support to states and planning organizations to reduce fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Steven Winkelman, director of the Transportation and Adaptation Programs at the Center for Clean Air Policy.

Now, “with limited travel choices, Americans are left vulnerable to high fuel prices,” Winkelman told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week. The panel examined ways Congress could support the conservation of fuel in response to high fuel costs.

Streetsbloggers may be especially interested in the following provisions of the bill, listed on Blumenauer's website: 

• Equalize the transportation fringe benefit so that those who commute by public transportation get as much as those who commute by driving.
• Allow employees to cash-in their parking benefits to spend on other choices that better meet their needs.
• Extend the same transportation fringe benefits to bike commuters as provided for those who commute by car or transit.

Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling. Click through to view the comic in its entirety.

Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday.

The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases.

Meanwhile, America's historically underfunded transit systems are also struggling with rising fuel prices and record demand. No word yet on how taking money away from transit to pay for highways fits in to George W. Bush's plan to end America's oil addiction but maybe time for Americans to take a good, hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves what kind of nation do we want to be?

The Gas Tax Holiday may have petered out, but John McCain still has a lot of petroleum-based populism left in the tank. His latest campaign ad, "Pump," primes the audience with a little wishful thinking.

"Gas prices -- $4, $5, no end in sight," a voice intones, "because some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America. No to independence from foreign oil. Who can you thank for rising prices at the pump?" An image of Obama floats across the screen in response, as a crowd chants his name.

While it's easy to refute the "Drill Now!" argument, even on strictly economic terms, the There Will Be Blood contingent figures to be quite sizable this election season. Ersatz moderate David Brooks, for one, seems impressed by McCain's energy platform, which he praised in a column last week:

The high point of his campaign, so far, has been his energy policy, which is comprehensive and bold, but does not try to turn us into a nation of bicyclists. It does not view America’s energy-intense economy as a sign of sinfulness.

Sinfulness? Forget moral judgments. An honest policy assessment would recognize that a less "energy-intense" transportation infrastructure will go a long way toward reducing the economic pain of "rising prices at the pump."

What's happening here goes a lot deeper than the end of cheap oil. We are now passing through the early development of a wholly new geographic order – what geographers call “the spatial fix” – of which the move back toward the city is just one part.

Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age – the geographic expression of mass production. Low-cost mortgages, massive highway systems and suburban infrastructure projects fuelled the industrial engine of postwar capitalism, propelling demand for cars, appliances and all sorts of industrial goods.

The creative economy is giving rise to a new spatial fix and a very different geography – the contours of which are only now emerging. Rising fuel costs are one thing, but in today's idea-driven economy, it's time costs that really matter. With the constant pressure to be more efficient and to innovate, it makes little sense to waste countless collective hours commuting. So the most efficient and productive regions are the ones in which people are thinking and working – not sitting in traffic. And, according to detailed research by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, commuting is among the least enjoyable, if not the single least enjoyable, of all human activities.