Gas prices don’t stop drivers from cruising city streets
Gas prices don’t keep drivers from their weekend fun
For many in Fort Collins, Colo., driving 100 miles up and down streets is a weekend tradition.
FORT COLLINS, Colo. — With his fiancée seated beside him, Jake Gelwicks plans to drive 100 miles tonight. He’s not leaving town, and he won’t go much above 30 mph.
It’s a Friday night, and Gelwicks’ 2006 Dodge Ram diesel rumbles as they head south from the city’s heart, past big-box stores and chain restaurants before turning around in a Taco Bell lot and cruising north to the historic Old Town area, then making yet another U-turn.
It’s what they do Friday and Saturday nights, making the same 17mile loop their parents did.
Each weekend, dozens of cars and trucks packed with young people still cruise up and down the city’s main street, College Avenue, in a scene playing out in many cities around the country. The skyrocketing price of gas — the AAA national average is $3.90 per gallon for regular — doesn’t seem to matter.
In Fort Collins, passengers hang out the windows at stoplights, race down the block and check out what everyone else is driving. They taunt each other by text message, and downshift to blow clouds of exhaust. Young men wolf-whistle girls at stoplights.
Several trucks fly Confederate flags, and one flies the Jolly Roger. Dangling from the hitch of one pickup is a full-size replica of a pair of bull testicles.
While commuters across the country are carpooling, taking mass transit or working from home as a pocketbook defense against high gas prices, Gelwicks, 22, and his friends aren’t worrying about the costs of cruising. They say the price of fuel is simply the cost to play. “It’s better than getting drunk and doing drugs,” says Gelwicks, a machinist.
Keeping an eye on cruisers
Cruising in Fort Collins has a long history, says parking garage attendant Jim Davis, who used to make the same loop on College Avenue back in the 1970s. From his seat in the garage, Davis watches the cruisers pull U-turns around a traffic island and remembers when gas was 29 cents a gallon.
“Four bucks a gallon and they’re still doing it,” he says. “It’s just ... kids blowing off steam.”
Fort Collins police Sgt. Joel Tower says back in the 1990s, cruisers were often bumper-to-bumper down the city’s main street, so police temporarily barricaded it. He says cruising today is less popular, but it can still pose a problem in this bike- and pedestrian-friendly city. He says officers focus on drivers who are racing or squealing tires.
“You get the cruisers who are paying more attention to other cars and their friends,” he says.
Cities around the country have tried to crack down on cruising by deploying extra officers on weekend nights or by passing ordinances. The results are mixed. In Shreveport, La., for instance, the cruising season — typically from spring break through the summer — is off to a brisk start. So far, gas prices aren’t curbing youthful enthusiasm for the pastime, especially out on Greenwood Road and Jewella Avenue, mostly on Sunday evenings.
Shreveport police vow that cops, not gas prices, will keep cruising in check. “Enhanced enforcement efforts have been the main catalyst for reducing the problems we used to commonly experience,” said police Sgt. Bill Goodin.
In Racine, Wis., Alderman Robert Mozol is planning to try again to get an anti-cruising ordinance in place to contend with late-night showoffs in pimped-out cars who wheel around bars at closing time. “People do it because they want their friends to see them,” Mozol says, and gas prices don’t make a difference.
A weekend tradition
In Fort Collins, the drivetrain of Sara Langston’s 2005 Ford Mustang GT rattles store windows. Along with her brother Adam, Langston, a college student from the small town of Nunn 25 miles away, cruises Fort Collins’ streets most weekend nights. Like Gelwicks, Sara Langston says she puts on about 100 miles each night she cruises the strip.
“If I don’t have money, I don’t come out,” she says. “But if I do, I fill up and go until 1 or 2 (a.m.).”
Langston, 22, who is studying graphic design, says Nunn has nothing going on at night, so she comes into the city on weekends to watch people and their cars. Windows rolled down, she and her brother and his girlfriend, Aimee Summerlin, 18, rumble around the loop in the black-purple Mustang, stopping at the Taco Bell to catch up with friends and admire what everyone is driving.
“It’s all about the trucks,” Summerlin says.
Brandon Stull, 28, spent three years rebuilding the engine in his 1964 Ford F-100 pickup. He’s proud that you can hear the exhaust from the dual-carbureted engine blocks away. Stull, a satellite TV installer who lives in nearby Wellington, says he used to cruise in Fort Collins as a high schooler, trying to pick up girls. Today, he cruises with his wife, Andrea, 28, and their son, Toby, 2.
Andrea Stull says she’s not a big fan of cruising, but rides along because it’s important to her husband.
“This is his passion,” she says, nodding toward the hoodless, lowriding truck. “And if I’m lucky enough to be with a guy who has passion, I want to support that.”
Back in his Dodge Ram, Gelwicks chats with his fiancée, Erika Jackson, 21, and two women riding in the back of the king cab. Two young men ride in the truck’s bed, scoping out girls in passing cars. Gelwicks and Jackson met in a Taco Bell parking lot about three years ago while cruising with their friends. Tonight, they’re cruising with another friend who’s driving a 1984 Toyota pickup with a Corvette engine stuffed under the hood.
Gelwicks and the Toyota’s driver, Kacey Coffee, 21, trade barbs about whose vehicle is faster and squeal tires around corners. Coffee, an oilfield roughneck, says he once lost his license for racing. Gelwicks says he has lost his license twice since he started cruising College Avenue at 16 years old. He waited out each one-year suspension, he says, and learned from his mistakes.
“Now I drive like a grandpa,” Gelwicks says.