The problem with the price of gas is that it changes everything. It always has. 

A couple of things need to be said about gasoline prices, and I guess it falls under that old expression – “I have some good news and some bad news. Which do you want to hear first?’’  Well, the good news is, and you may not like this a whole lot but gasoline, all things being relative, is still a bit of a bargain.

There are aspects of the current price of gas that as horrible as they have remained a bit illusionary. First of all, the cheapest I remember gasoline ever being was, when I was 20 years of age and then it was, under 50 cents a gallon. That is a gallon now and not a litre.  You could still get “no name “gas in Toronto for even less.  It wasn’t Esso or Shell or Texaco or anything you ever heard of. It was just plain old gasoline from budget pumps, and it came from God knows where. This was about 1962. Now at 4.4 litres to the gallon that makes the litre price in those days roughly 12 cents! 

To put that in context you have to look at salaries. My dad was a clerk on Water Street at Parkers. He never made more than $48 per week and that was up into the early 1960s So, who could best afford gasoline? Was it the clerk of 1963 (pronounced clark in the English way) or the clerk of 2026. The answer is the modern clerk. The price of gas is gone up more than 10 times from what it was in the early ’60s, but my dad was spending more of his weekly salary on gas than people with similar jobs today are spending.   

I know that is no consolation, but I just thought I’d drop the numbers on you. Another thing to think about from those heady days of the 1960s is that I had a friend with a big old eight-cylinder car. It was an Oldsmobile 88 actually and he got roughly 12 miles to the gallon. Think about that for fuel efficiency. The four cylinder car in North America hadn’t even been invented. Also, in Europe gasoline prices have been high for decades which is why there were Hillmans and Vauxhalls and VW bugs. When I worked in England in 1966 you hardly ever saw a Chev or a Ford. Nobody could afford to drive a six or eight-cylinder car.

 Gasoline prices were also part of the reason public transit systems work so well in Europe. They were cheap because people were forced to use them and when a system gets a lot of use it makes money and the system gets better. You know what is ironic by on the matter of public transportation? I was on assignment on a special train here in Newfoundland that the government of Brian Peckford put on for a press trip while there were still tracks to run trains on.  The train took the press out to Avondale and back. There was an onboard press conference to announce the “revitalization” of the Newfoundland Railway. Part of Brian Peckford’s dream that he outlined was to one day have a train that came in from Carbonear-Harbour Grace on a daily basis that would carry workers into St. John’s. Workers would park their cars out there and arrive in the capital for work by train just like they do in Europe.

That was a nice dream, but cheap gas means it wasn’t going to happen. The economics for the dream are better now but, unfortunately, we are one railway short. There are some good signs because you an increase now in carpooling. You see places out of town where cars are parked and the drivers pool with other people coming into Sin Johns.  

Anyway, here is bad news. Gasoline prices are about to change our lives significantly and you had better get used to it. It used to cost me roughly $5 a few years ago for a round trip from Topsail into work. That was a big old roomy six-cylinder car that I drove. It had a good stereo, but it drank gas. Today, that same trip would be way higher than that. My VW camper bus (circa) 1977 took more  than  $10 to get me into “town” and back home to Topsail. I also had a big eight-cylinder truck at one time, but I just couldn’t afford to drive it to St. John’s. I could run down to the store in Topsail. The upshot of it all that is that I didn’t drive into St. John’s on weekends like I used to. I sold the truck. Now we have two cars in the family – both are four cylinders. I drive a Korean car that is really tiny, but it just sips gas.

You can also see the change in living patterns. My life has changed. No truck and no van and I don’t drive as much as I used to. The world is different, but I am cheered by a line from my youth when someone asked me how many miles my big six cylinder car with the great stereo got to the gallon. My reply was; “I don’t know because I’ve never had a whole gallon.”    

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca