High Gas Prices = Good news for me.

I like to think of myself as the atypical American. I don't watch TV (unless it's the Yanks, Jets, UCONN or the Devils are in the playoffs), I don't have a lot of unessential "stuff", I hate Budweiser, chain restaurants and fast food, and I don't get caught up in hype surrounding current events (rotten tomatoes).

However, where I do struggle is with public transportation. I hate it. I should clarify this. I love to drive. I love my car, I love going places on my schedule, at my pace (which is usually much faster than everyone else) and in the company of friends and family. I will not give up driving my car, even if gas gets to be $10 a gallon. I can't. It's a cost benefit thing for me. My car is my sanctuary. It's where I collect my thoughts, sing along to Guns and Roses, and decompress.

I travel to Northern Virginia every week for work. I used to live in the area back in the late 1990's during the days of the dot com boom, $1.19 gas and cars the size of school buses. In those days you couldn't go anywhere in suburban DC between the hours of 6:00 am and 9:00 pm. You would sit in gridlock on the beltway, 66, 95, 7 or the Fairfax County Parkway. Everyone drove everywhere, and I hated it.

Now it's 2008, gas prices in NOVA (the cute little acronym the locals use) are near $4.75 a gallon, and a lot has changed. I went into DC last night to visit friends, and I drove (of course). I left around 5:00 for my expected 90 minute journey of approximately 25 miles. I did my due dilligence and swung through a Metro station on the way, becuase I did want a few cocktails while in the city. To my surprise, there was nowhere to park. Huge SUV's that were once common on roadways throughout DC were parallel parked between trees and on traffic islands. Has the life of the SUV has come full circle? Parking on an embankment at a Metro station certainly is off road.

So I continued on to DC, conceding that I would have to limit my cocktail intake for the sake of not having to find a place to dock my rental Dodge Grand Caravan (rental car agencies basically give away anything that gets less than 20mpg's). To my surprise, there was no traffic at all on my way into DC. I made it in 20 minutes.

So selfishly I'm thinking "hey-this is great! Bring on $10 a gallon. I'll be the only one out here."

FYI- I'm not too much of a carbon-consuming jerk. My everyday car gets 30mpg's. My wife's - about 28.