High fuel prices and driving habits

Wour bellies closer to the ground, we live and breathe setsuden (energy saving as the Japanese call it) whenever fuel costs rise almost every week. There will always be the noisy minority demanding subsidies as their selfish entitlement, causing a cascade of other goods straining to rise along. For fear of appearing to look powerless against the law of supply and demand, the lawmakers of the House and the Senate have proceeded to respond with half-baked ideas and knee-jerk pronouncements that are best harmless and ineffective against the status quo.

Truth be told, a lot of fuel, money and time can be saved if only the majority of drivers change the way they drive. Looking at multi-lane urban high-

teeming buses keep to one solitary yellow lane and travel in a speed-limited convoy like a subway train. Buses should not be allowed to overtake each other

four buses cutting each other for the sake of taking case you didn’t notice, this was the concept behind

1989 and graduating into BRT -- Bus Rapid Transit as we know it today.

When the buses travel in a train-like convoy and do not overtake, a real bus schedule might actually work with precisely timed arrivals and departures. Just like the MRT, where a succeeding train stays a good distance away (dwell) from another that arrived a few minutes ahead at the station, buses can be forced to queue. With this setup, we can prevent buses from careening from one stop to

Everyday, these pedal-pumping hooligans accelerate very hard in departing from a bus stop, only to slam on the brakes at the next a mere 1.5 km away. Worse, the buses do this four abreast, leaving no lane left

accelerating, incessant pumping of the gas pedal and hard braking easily triples fuel consumption. These drivers don’t seem to care for so long as they plotted course simulates idling, stops and

- gos,

and highway cruising within a certain time gap. Both buses and trucks are laden with sandbags

also invites some truck fleet and bus companies

how to drive economically. One would think that bus drivers, ever conscious of their boundary and the fuel costs that they directly bear, would be the best motivated to drive economically. Truck drivers should also be used to being subject to their vigilant fleet managers. But the best results were posted by motoring journalists, many of whom have never driven a truck over three and a half tons. Their consumption averaged 30 to 50 percent better than the best of the experienced truck and bus drivers. This just goes to prove that years of so- called experience over several generations is founded on really bad and wasteful driv-

program participated by the public some years ago, proved that proper driving technique boosts fuel economy by at least 20 percent.

cruise, keep

their distance and stop ship overrides any concern

treating the

- to save money and

fuel price because the drivers just refuse to change their ways.

So how about the private motorist? First of all, drivers should watch the road far beyond their hood ornament. Seeing where you’re going should be basic. But most drivers don’t, and the evidence of their failure to keep proper distance is the sudden and hard braking they do when surprised by a slowdown of the car up front. Local drivers just drive too close to each other, jealous that someone might “steal” what should be a safe clearance gap between vehicles. The proper way is to maintain the safe distance between your front bumper and the car in front, regardless if a rude interloper cuts in. That way you can coast with minimal risk of bumper-to-bumper contact or worse.

High fuel prices are here to stay and there’s no better motive to start driving more economically so that we all can get more kilometers out of every

just takes one point and squirt lane- grabber of

and bring traffic to a standstill every time it stops to pick up a fare.

Globally, high fuel prices have prodded technology to extract oil from shale and explore for sources deep in the ocean. On a larger scale, alternative energy like wind farms, solar panels, wave capture and even nuclear power have been made economically feasible. High global fossil fuel prices have goaded world governments to accelerate on-the-road acceptance of plug-ins and hybrids plus the adoption of

but now, industries, the government and research is no shortage of fuel but fear of the future is what hands and feet to stretch every peso we spend on