High Fuel Prices Low Cruising

The summer after I graduated high school (and before I started college) my parents bought me my first car. It was a fairly decent 1991 Ford Escort that had four doors, a sun roof, a moon roof and for me, my brother and my friends, it was our ticket to a summer of fun. I think every teen considers it a right of passage and a sign of freedom that comes with getting older. A few weeks ago I was flipping channels and I happened across one of my favorite movies, "American Graffiti" and even though I didn't live during the time period depicted in the film, I could relate to the cruise culture of the car drivers in the film. I related it to the time after I had my license and my car and how my friends and I would go anywhere we chose.

That time fuel prices were just reaching a dollar per gallon for regular unleaded and when it hit a $1.09 per gallon I remember thinking that I would be spending lots more money to enjoy the freedom I had just acquired. I had a summer job with very decent pay for a high school grad and so I was never short of money to take care of it, yet fuel was never something I thought of. Flash forward about fifteen years and now I feel the pinch every time I fill up and I can only imagine what some of the younger kids out there must be feeling. There was an article in the Washington Post this morning about how rising fuel costs have a lot of kids reconsidering their cruising lifestyle. Perhaps stauch environmentalists will applaud the downturn in teen driving which means less pollution in the environment but I think it's a loss of a valuable part of growing up.

Sure there are lots of reasons to be against teen driving given the number of accidents and incidents new drivers seem to get into but is it enough to applaud the hard realities that they face now? When fuel was cheap and I could fill up my tank on ten dollars, that meant one less CD (or audio cassette....which were still around at the time) that I could purchase. Now when I look at how much I'm filling up I realize that it's about the equivalent of several CDs, a few books and some groceries; all things vital to my survival. When I was younger with not much financial burden on my hands, it was good to go out and cruise around just for fun. We would often go to the mall, the movies, or anywhere else we felt like going and we didn't have to worry about anything other than getting caught for speeding.

Now with limited income or less fuel efficient first cars, many teens are curbing back on those tendancies and are sitting at home rather than partaking in this rite of passage into adulthood. I think it's sad in a way given that many of us growing up learned how to budget given that we were shelling out for fuel now in addition to getting our own things. Sure, some of us may have had parents who paid for a lot of our expenses but still, saving for fueling up every week or every other week was a way to start figuring out how much to save and how much to spend. Now lots of kids are only learning how to save simply because it costs an arm and a leg to even drive to the mall and back more than once a week. Perhaps a decrease in the reliance on oil will lead to more fuel efficient cars but until that time, I think we're going to see a change in the way many teens look at driving for a while.