Elmer Smith: So, who cut those gas prices? Thank yourself

TWO WEEKS AGO, I was convinced that the era of pump prices under $4 a gallon was something we codgers would tell our grandchildren about someday.

It would be like the tales our parents told about how they could take $10 and buy enough groceries to feed a family for a week and still have enough left over for dad's cigarettes.

Two weeks ago, the busiest guy at the gas station was that one with the pole who kept changing the last number on the price sign. It was the most secure job in the petroleum industry.

That was the news from Lake Wobegon when I left the country two weeks ago.

So, imagine my surprise when I was driving home from the airport Sunday and passed a dozen gas stations with signs heralding prices under $4 a gallon. I didn't know what to think or whom to thank.

I remember that people in high places had been proposing everything from drilling for oil in wildlife preserves to squeezing a few billion barrels out of shale. It wouldn't be long before some genius proposed making convicts run on treadmills to generate power. Congress was considering bills to curb speculation in the commodities markets or to tack on a windfall-profits tax, as if that wouldn't eventually be passed on to us.

Meanwhile, as the great thinkers were all cogitating and ruminating, Jane and Joe Snuffy came up with their own solution. They just drove less.

In the arcane argot of the economists, the Snuffys "exerted downward pressure" on the price of petroleum. In just the two weeks since I left, the average price of gas dropped like a boulder, from a national average of $4.17 a gallon to $3.97.

July is the eighth month in a row that gas usage has declined, the first summer month since the '80s.

It sent shivers through the salons of power, where oil sheiks in flowing caftans and Texans in ostrich boots meet to divide the spoils.

Sylvana Hoyos, a spokesman for SEPTA, told me that the transit agency has seen a 12 percent increase in its commuter-rail ridership over this point last July.

So many suburbanites are parking their SUVs to take the train that the parking lots at commuter stations look like the mothball fleet at the Navy Yard.

"Frankly," she speculated, "it has to be due to the price of gasoline."

Even in SEPTA's city division, where the bus and trolley ridership is less prone to spikes, ridership is up 4 percent over last year, she said.

But if you thought that your conservation measures would earn you a slap on the back, think again. Politicians and economists love to talk about breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, but not so fast.

Sales of pickup trucks and SUVs are declining, and automakers are bleeding revenues at record paces. The United Auto Workers' rolls show as many laid-off and permanently furloughed workers as active employees.

The Federal Highway Commission, which collects an 18.4-cent- a-gallon tax for the Federal Highway Trust Fund, is whining that it may not have enough money to fix potholes in the federal highways.

My advice to all of the above is: Get used to it. Adjust to the new reality the same way the average Joe and Jane have had to. We've hit the tipping point. There is no coming back from this. Even if the guys in Texas and Saudi Arabia roll back their prices, we may never drive as many miles again.

In Florence and Rome, I saw motor scooters that get 50 miles a gallon parked two and three deep along the curbs. I heard tour guides in Barcelona bragging about that ancient city's 100 miles of new bike lanes. Europeans are driving cars small enough to bounce off if they hit you. We can live like that.

Twenty years from now we may be regaling our grandchildren with tales of cars that were big enough to sleep six and had gas tanks as big as bathtubs. *