Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me…
Strong and content I travel the open road.
Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road is the philosophy of Memorial Day weekend. Between Thursday and Monday, a record 45 million Americans are forecast to travel 50 or more miles from home.
“Memorial Day weekend getaways don’t have to be extravagant and costly,” noted the American Automobile Association, founded in 1902 for road enthusiasts.
While some travelers embark on dream vacations and fly hundreds of miles across the country, many families just pack up the car and drive to the beach or take a road trip to visit friends. Long holiday weekends are ideal for travel because many people have an extra day off work and students are off from school.
The large majority will travel by car, but 3.6 million will fly with another 2 million taking trains, boats, and other transport. The most popular destinations are Orlando, Seattle, New York City, Las Vegas, Miami, San Franciso, Anchorage, Chicago, Denver, and Boston. Internationally, Rome, Vancouver, Paris, and London are the most popular.
Add the countless spots in between, and Whitman’s song seems apt.
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
Good Vibrations
Motorists will be encountering gas prices averaging $3.20 per gallon. “Gas prices haven’t been this low over Memorial Day since 2021 when the national average was $3.04,” reports the AAA Newsroom. This good news is despite the “Green New Deal” state of California, where the average gasoline price is $4.87 per gallon, a 50 percent premium.
The increasing sustainability of petroleum is worth emphasizing. When is the last time you or anyone else had a bad tank of gasoline? (What is that, most will ask.) Air emissions from vehicle exhaust have trended down for many decades with more improvement to come.
Affordability and reliability are not in question despite prior federal policies under the Biden-Harris administration. In fact, President Trump is working to reverse the hindrance against domestic oil and gas production by the day.
Thus pay no attention to the siren songs about an unsustainable future for the internal combustion engine or the need for government policy to subsidize politically correct technologies. “Driving is ruining our lives, and triggering environmental disasters,” wrote George Monbiot some years ago. “Only drastic action will kick our dependency.” He added:
Let’s abandon this disastrous experiment, recognize that this 19th-century technology is now doing more harm than good, and plan our way out of it. Let’s set a target to cut the use of cars by 90% over the next decade…. It is time to drive the car out of our lives.
Fear not. Get your kicks on Route 66 or wherever the open road takes you. This is the natural state of affairs, as noted by Daniel Yergin in The Prize several decades ago:
Hydrocarbon Man shows little inclination to give up his cars, his suburban home, and what he takes to be not only the conveniences but the essentials of his way of life. The peoples of the developing world give no indication that they want to deny themselves the benefits of an oil-powered economy, whatever the environmental questions. Any notion of scaling back the world’s consumption of oil will be influenced by the extraordinary population growth ahead.
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute.
Note: Most of the four million electric vehicles (out of 292 million, a 1.4%, market share) will stay in the garage. Not so for electric golf carts, a $1.7 billion industry, both on the links and on properties, which rev up with the holiday weekend.
