Learning to make do with exorbitant gas costs - Charles in Charge

Two years ago, when gas prices in the Midwest spiked to two dollars a gallon, I shrugged. The cost of a ride on the subway was still $1.50. When the network news magazine shows were running segments on the dangers that sport utility vehicles posed to drivers of compact cars, I changed the channel. I treated my lack of a car as a badge of honor, a brave decision to choose frugality over buying into the wasteful consumer culture. In high school, I felt smarter then the motorized masses when I strode right up to the front doors instead of being ten minutes late for class because I couldn't find a place to park.

Even though it wasn't my choice and I would have driven a car if I had one, I used my car-free status as a political statement. I attempted to prove, even in Baltimore, that public transit was a viable way to get around town, perhaps more so if we increased funding to the levels of most other industrialized countries.

In May, I got a car.

It wasn't exactly a hot rod - my 1987 Toyota Camry station wagon delivers 115 horsepower of pure adrenaline. It's gray and has rounded corners, so it looks like a can of Coors Light on its side. Still, it went from point A to point B faster and with less effort then my two feet could manage. The day after the "Chuck Wagon" arrived, I took it out for a ride. I went up Interstate 83, down Interstate 83, around 395, 695, 795, 895 and just plain old 95. I sped down local streets from Reisterstown to Canton and enjoyed my first trip through a drive-thru at the Kentucky Fried Chicken on North Ave. Passing my road test on the fifth try finally paid off.

Things had changed.

The next week, I went down to Washington, DC. Out of gas, I pulled into an Amocco station on M Street, where I filled up on 87 octane for $1.91 a gallon. "What a rip off," I thought. Maybe we should drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, after all. Damn the caribou, I don't want half of my paycheck going to fund my joy-riding.

And busses - "the chariots of the people," as Lisa Simpson calls them - they got in the way and stopped every third block, which is simply unacceptable if you're stuck behind one.

In the space of a week, I turned from an urbane, liberal, environment-friendly mass transit advocate and rider to a quasi-suburban, congestion-causing, transit-avoiding road hog.

It was at that point that I had a crisis of confidence. Was my "good liberal" behavior just a way to justify my lack of wheels? I wondered what would happen if I got some real money and had it invested in the stock market. Would I write my Member of Congress to demand a cut in the capital gains tax, Social Security be damned? The thought of it made me shudder.

Since then, I have reached a happy medium. I have progressed from youthful idealism to selfishness to self-punishing liberalism in the course of a summer. When I drop $12 at the pump, I suck it up and tell myself that if I were in Europe, I would be paying three or four times as much. When I get stuck behind a bus, I still fume, but I realize that without public transit, the other lanes would be just as slow. My thoughts on transportation issues have settled back into a happy medium.

Hypocrisy is such an easy out.