Daily Score Classic: Car-less Vacation, Five Lessons
Editor's note: In honor of our "Escape to Vancouver" Sweepstakes, we're "recycling" one of our most popular posts. Sign up for Sightline Daily emails between now and October 29 and you, too, could experience a car-less vacation to Vancouver, BC!
Our car-less family vacation in Vancouver, BC, was a big success. Here’s a full report, for those of you who shared your own car-less vacation stories and are interested in such things. For the rest of you, you might want to skim the travelogue to find the five lessons I draw.
The only nail-biter (if you can call it that) was the very first leg of the trip, which resembled the old brain teaser about the fox, the goose, and the bag of beans.
We had two parents, two kids (our eldest is currently in Alaska), and four bikes to get to the train station by 6:45 a.m. A bus connects our neighborhood to the train station, and King County Metro buses all have bike racks. Unfortunately, they carry only two bikes each. Furthermore, there’s no way of knowing in advance whether any given bus will have one space, two spaces, or no spaces free on its rack. Because the kids needed help getting their bikes (loaded with panniers) both on and off the racks and because they didn’t know where to get off the bus, they needed either to be accompanied by a parent or to have one parent at each end of the route to assist.
We left the house before 6:00. The first bus that arrived already had one bike loaded. We let it pass. Fortunately, the next two buses that arrived had no bikes aboard yet, so we all arrived at the train station without having to send kids on buses unaccompanied.
OK, this story wasn’t very interesting. Why bother to tell it?
Time In the Tank
[Update, 1/28/09: Go read this post instead. The charts below are outdated now and have been updated to include final energy price data for 2008. Read all about it here.]
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Americans are falling behind -- most of us anyway. We're working longer than ever before to maintain a standard of living that once we took for granted. With respect to gas prices, average Americans are much worse off than they were in 1970.
The working poor, in particular, are getting absolutely crushed. Their economic standing has deteriorated even faster than the middle class. A full day's work at the federal minimum wage won't even pay for a single tank of gas. In a car-dependent nation, that means that even basic transportation is quickly getting out of reach for low-income families.
Interestingly, the pain is being felt way up the income ladder. In fact, you'd see the same kind of trends for virtually every income strata if I had plotted their purchasing power here (though the effect is less pronounced the higher you go). But there is one big exception to the falling behind story: the super-rich. Nowadays, I suppose they should probably be known as the super-ultra-uber-rich. But whatever you call them, they're doing great!
So that's a relief.
The kind of figures that are kicked around in the income stratosphere are so mind-boggling that they're almost beyond the comprehension of us ordinary schmoes. Forty years ago a CEO might make 60 times the minimum wage -- a huge gulf that's comparable to the spread in other wealthy nations -- but nowadays a CEO might pull down 800 or 1,000 times the minimum wage. So despite skyrocketing prices for fuel and other basic commodities, the very rich are increasingly insulated from the real economy.
But what can we do about it? First, we need to understand the cause.
