We Aren't Kidding about this Thing

Ryan and I had breakfast with another couple on Sunday at The Flying Biscuit. We weren't sure we should really waste our gasoline on a non-essential trip. But breakfast cravings won out.

We then stopped by a baby furniture store that I'd been wanting to visit, because it wasn't too far out of the way. It was closed. Needing to feel like we're doing SOMETHING to prepare for this child's arrival, we set off for Babies R Us, which was admittedly a little far away. Before long, we got stuck in yet another traffic jam caused by long lines at a gas station.

We changed our minds about the shopping therapy and headed home. Wondering when this will ease up. Public transportation in Atlanta, in a word, sucks. Our local Kroger is 2.5 miles away. By car this takes us under ten minutes. According to Google's new-ish public transportation directions, the same one-way trip, on a roundabout route, would take about half an hour on Marta, including nearly a mile of walking. This would do in a pinch, but this gas shortage has certainly underlined for me what was formerly just a nagging guilt about all the damn driving we do around here.

This morning, USA Today published an update; one particular quote was pretty interesting to me:

The Southeast, the only region of the nation that has no oil refining or major gasoline storage capacity, pumps all of its gasoline in by pipeline, [Kenneth Medlock, energy fellow at the Baker Institute, a non-partisan public policy think tank at Rice University in Houston] said.

How could the only section of the nation with no oil refining or major gasoline storage capacity ... also evolve into a section of the nation with the least adequate public transportation?