Slowing down can speed up savings on gas

As this is written, gas in Tupelo is up to $3.80 a gallon for regular.Who knows what it will be by the time you read this, slap in the middle of the travel-heavy Memorial Day weekend.

We've seen several overnight spikes of as much as 10 cents a gallon in recent weeks. Where it will end, nobody knows.

Short-term prospects aren't good for any relief at the pump, and last week the Paris-based International Energy Agency, the world's most-watched energy monitor, issued a bleak long-term report that world oil supplies would be outpaced by demand in coming years. That means the price spiral is likely to continue.

The United States alone can't drive down demand enough to dramatically affect prices, given the insatiable demand of rapidly developing economies like China and India. But conservation has clearly become a matter of national as well as personal necessity.

While we've all been complaining about prices, few of us apparently have yet made any dramatic changes in where, when and how much we drive. Holiday travel this weekend was expected to be only slightly below last year, when gas was 60 cents cheaper.

But if prices keep rising, most of us will be pressed to make at least some modest alterations in our driving habits.

There's one change that could make a big difference in our personal pocketbooks and our national conservation efforts: Driving slower. Not slow, just slower.

Of course the definition of "slow" is wide open to interpretation. But if you're middle age or beyond, you have memories of what today we think of as creep-along speed - 55 miles per hour - being the limit on interstate highways. That came in the 1970s in response to the fuel shortage created by the Arab oil embargo and general turmoil in the Middle East.

The U.S. government considered the need to conserve oil as such a high priority that it was willing to make a dramatic change by tying federal highway dollars to a much lower speed limit. Not that everybody automatically slowed down to 55 mph on roads where the posted limit had been 70, but the average speed went down as motorists, if nothing else, sought to escape being ticketed by not being too far over the limit.

It wasn't until the mid- and late 1980s, when long lines at the pump were a distant memory and cheap and plentiful gasoline once again seemed our eternal birthright, that speed limits were relaxed and eventually climbed back to 65 and 70 - and in some places even higher.

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