A silver lining

Saturday, June 21, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

The Wall Street Journal this week called Americans’ cutbacks on driving the “filling point of no return.”

Other economists are calling it “the tipping point,” adopting a phrase made popular by a 2000 book of the same title that analyzed why and how trends take hold.

Whatever people choose to call it, hard numbers suggest the same conclusion: As the average price for a gallon of gasoline tops $4, Americans are driving smaller cars, and they are driving fewer miles.

Federal Highway Administration figures for March, the most recent available, show drivers logged 11 billion fewer miles that month than they did in March 2007. That 4.3 percent drop is the biggest-ever annual plunge in the number of miles driven, the Journal reports.

And as the Las Vegas Sun reported Monday, Clark County motorists spent far more on the gasoline they bought from January through March this year than they did for the same period in 2007 — $616 million compared with $513.8 million — but they bought less gas. Drivers purchased 195.8 million gallons during the first quarter of this year compared with 197.6 million last year, the Sun’s Steve Kanigher reported.

Also, bus ridership in Clark County is up almost 8 percent since 2006, with 3 percent of that increase occurring in the first three months of this year.

Geoffrey Heal, a Columbia Business School economist, told the Journal the lingering fuel price increases have created a shift in people’s perception of who uses public transportation. “If enough people like you ride the bus, you’ll be more willing to ride the bus,” he said.

Another trend is that people are simply trading their larger, gas-hungry vehicles for smaller, more efficient cars and hybrids.

Although we would never say that $4-a-gallon gas is a good thing, perhaps it’s not such a completely bad thing, if it helps Americans change their transportation choices to more sustainable ones.