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"I'd have to get a Volkswagen to save my job," he says. "I'd stay out longer on each trip instead of coming home at night. And we'd have to give up some luxuries, like the kids' dance lessons."
No Drive, No Eat. Like many a suburban mother, Sue Fisher, who lives near Miami, pushes her Ford LTD station wagon about 400 miles a week—delivering her three children to school, picking them up again, visiting a bank, post office, supermarket and the home of her ailing mother. That's on weekdays; on Saturdays she chauffeurs her two sons to an art class at the University of Miami, takes one to a weekly orthodontist appointment and drives her daughter to dancing lessons. "I'm trying to conserve energy by saving trips," says Mrs. Fisher, "but the fuel shortage is going to affect us drastically." Ellen Jackson, an Oakton, Va., housewife, sees no alternative to the car. "It's two miles to the nearest store," she says, "and there is no public transportation of any kind. If I don't drive, my family doesn't eat."
Whole communities are utterly dependent on the auto. Wall, S. Dak., a town of 800, boasts four ultramodern motels, three new gas stations, a bevy of postcard stands, a famous drugstore that does more than $1,000,000 worth of business annually and the highest per capita ownership of backyard swimming pools in the state—all because it happens to be handy to the interstate highway that vacationers travel to the Badlands, the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore. Now a local construction firm has postponed building a $300,000, 46-unit motel, and Herb Pantke, 63-year-old attendant at one of the gas stations, has become the first person in town to lose his job because of the energy crisis; the station had to close up this month because it could find no gas to sell. Wall residents are beginning to worry and wonder whether their community will go the way of nearby Quinn, which was a twin hamlet in the 1950s but has turned into a virtual ghost town because it is well removed from the highway.
Not all Americans will be driving less. In the Los Angeles area, where cars outnumber people two-to-one, there is virtually no alternative to the private auto, and any rationing scheme should take that dependence into account. Millions of Americans will gladly pay top dollar for gasoline, as long as they can still get it. Western Europe has proved that even $1-a-gal. gasoline need not curtail car sales so long as the cars are small and economical enough. The number of cars owned by each 1,000 Italians multiplied from 18 in 1955 to 188 in 1970. In the U.S., once the initial shock of the gasoline shortage is over and Detroit has completed its conversion to smaller cars (there will always be a limited market for larger cars), motorists may well drive as many miles as the one trillion they logged in 1972, while still significantly reducing total gasoline consumption.
But Americans will obviously have to make much greater changes in their car buying and using habits. The gasoline-short future is