My green machine days were supposed to be over at age 12.
Not too many kids volunteer to scrap their sacred Big Wheel, but by the time I was in fourth grade I was over the whole side-brake option and backseat compartment, which never was the same after I let Cheetos melt into soup one hot summer day. It was time to hit the showroom floor at Toys R Us, and I had this moment circled in my mom’s toy catalog for months.
The Green Machine painted sidewalks with black, burning plastic. This spinning spectacle had two joysticks to steer with, and as soon as there was enough speed all you had to do was thrust them in opposite directions to induce a doughnut dizzy spell. The 360° thrills were addictive.
It was junked before I became a full-fledged junkie. With junior high around the corner, a 10-speed bike with a blue-denim seat was how I rolled.
Green machines are back, with no assembly required. With big oil gargling in history-making profits, many Americans like myself are swallowing history-making gas prices. Last month, General Motors announced its plans to start selling the Volt, an electrical car that comes with a small gas engine responsible for recharging the batteries. Saturn also is wired into the idea, hinting that it, too, will have a model in 2010. Toyota and Honda are working on hybrid technology.
During the life span of SAFETEA-LU, there have been maybe a handful of fuel-efficient car offerings. During this next reauthorization, there will most likely be one in every driveway.
With the economic landscape turning green, the fumblers in Congress are now squirming over what to do with the gas tax. Raise it, they say. But how much? And how can we rest our hopes on an action that has failed to pass numerous times before? I mean, when was the last time Congress announced a major tax increase on anything? They also can index it to adjust with the rise of inflation. It sounds pretty, but again failure to stamp this idea into law over the years has left an ugly scar. I doubt they will pair up both remedies, which is what is needed—an immediate boost and one with some legs—because twice as many people could be sitting in electric or hybrid vehicles, twice as many could be carpooling and twice as many could be using transit in the coming years. The math is threatening.
Solutions run as thick as the grass on the White House lawn, but those who have their thumb on the vote button up on Capitol Hill just do not get it, and it is making me twitch heading into perhaps the most important funding package of our lives. Take the Highway Trust Fund fix as an example. Both the House and Senate knocked it down when it was attached to an FAA funding extension in July. We are talking about $8 billion that was originally in the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) and was set aside to guarantee firewalls. Moving it back required little shuffling of the budget. However, the ones who threw a wrench into the fix claimed it would affect the federal deficit. Well, for all these years the HTF has been used to offset the deficit, and now when it is dying of starvation the fat cats are just sitting there, eating in front of it.
At press time the fix was in. Both the House and Senate finally approved the measure, but it was under a veto threat from the White House. Insiders believed there was enough push for an overturn, but this is just another tattered sign of things to come.
Green machines are smart and efficient, two advantages people of the political machine lack. Spinouts are their specialty.
